Daily Events | Powerful Conservative Voices
October 18, 2013
GOOD AFTERNOON TO EVERYONE!
Three weeks into the ObamaCare rollout, it's widely described as a disaster by even liberal commentators, who have largely given up pretending it's all just a few launch-day quirks. There are serious, deep, systemic, and avoidable flaws in the online infrastructure of the Affordable Care Act, to say nothing of the critical failures of the program itself, which isn't making care more affordable for very many people.
The infrastructure flaws were avoidable because the Obama Administration bungled every single aspect of the program's launch, to a debatably criminal degree - from no-bid contracts handed off to cronies, through a defiant refusal to concede any problems that might have given the President's opponents political ammunition.
The final insult was delaying so many crucial implementation steps until after the 2012 elections, which put ObamaCare on a brutally tight timetable. Only three months from launch to the beginning of the notorious individual mandate? The first month is nearly gone, with enrollment numbers so low that the Administration won't report them, and a nearly unusable Web infrastructure that cost hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars… and might have to be scrapped almost entirely. The last month is December, which brings a unique mixture of holiday slowdown and year-end panic.
The resulting catastrophe isn't just a government failure that can be papered over with deficit dollars and Obama speeches. The future of private insurance companies is at stake. The Administration is bullying nervous executives into silence, both to defuse political opposition, and to stave off a full-blown market panic.
Once upon a time, the shockingly inept Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, claimed the private insurance market was in a "death spiral." She and her boss are teaching us what a death spiral really looks like.
John Hayward
Senior Writer
On Twitter: Doc_0
