Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 6:43am

ObamaCare Crashes, And So Does Obama

One could not ask for a better symbol of ObamaCare than yesterday when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the woman purportedly in charge of this mess, was meeting with ObamaCare “navigators”, and I love the Orwellian implications of that title, and the ObamaCare website crashed.

The remarkable thing about this fiasco on stilts is that the Obama administration knew, or should have known, that the website was not going to work.  Obama could have simply announced that he was going to delay the individual mandate for a time period which would have given time to at least make the website operational.  Why didn’t they?

Overwhelming hubris I think.  Shielded by a sycophantic press from every other disaster that has hit the country under his misrule, I think Obama assumed that this would be the same.  Every problem encountered with the website or implementation of  ObamaCare could be blamed on those obstructionist Republicans.  Indeed, Obama is still trying to do this now, when it is obvious that such an absurd strategy is not working and cannot work.

Obama forgot the first rule of politics:  reality always wins in the end.  A website that does not work, mass cancellations of insurance policies, sky-rocketing premiums and deductibles, less choice regarding doctors and hospitals, these are the reality of the hilariously named Affordable Care Act.  No amount of speeches, no biased news coverage, no liberal true believers on blogs can alter it.

Obama has always been all about style and nothing about substance.  For die hard members of his cult, that will always be enough.  For most Americans, including many former Obama voters, the fact that this man is the most incompetent President in our history is beginning to sink in.  FDR gave us the New Deal, LBJ the Great Society and BHO the beginning of the collapse of the Welfare State.

 

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David Spaulding
David Spaulding
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 7:15am

I entirely agree: it is pride that kept him from seizing the branch with a deal to avoid the shut down by delaying the role out. The President just cannot imagine admitting he is wrong. This is curious to me since the mark of maturity is the acknowledgment that one is all too human and, therefore, flawed. It is interesting that you mention FDR in your piece. I read three biographies and was left with the same impression I have of President Obama now. “Hubris,” a pretty sounding little word for a self-defeating human trait.

Art Deco
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 7:38am

It is not fair to compare FDR to Obama. The former confronted a far more severe set of challenges than the latter and managed to meet them (with some bad decisions along the way and some other decisions that had unfortunate downstream consequences).

Megan McArdle, who has never been a political partisan, is someone to read on this question among those who write for general audiences. Her tentative conclusion surveying the landscape is that it looks as if BO & co have managed to ruin the market for household medical insurance policies. Megan McArdle has in the past worked for several start-up firms in the IT sector. She has been shaking her head in dismay at what she hears coming out of the Administration’s flacks and also at the original decision to have the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services manage the project.

It implicates the President quite directly. He fancied that the person to put in charge of policy in the realm of financing medical care was a woman named Nancy-Ann deParle. She is, of course, an attorney (and a graduate of Harvard Law School).

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 8:37am

As an agenda, liberalism is a fiasco. However, the oversupply of resentful, dull and illogical people keeps expanding. Ergo the push for “Common Core” brainwashing.

And, the failures that caused the US to not recover from the Great Depression until 1946 can be traced to FDR and his gang of statist quacks.

In addition to IRS apparatchniks quashing independent political speech in 2012, the regime lied about unemployment statistics.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 8:51am

D.S.,

The zero’s problems are a hustler’s hubris and the abject absence of arete.

Only in America: Aeschylus, Homer, Sophocles, et al would not include in their classics such a dud as Ofama.

WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 9:03am

This is great:

http://rsc.scalise.house.gov/solutions/rsc-betterway.htm

I just hope the backlash is strong enough to get a sufficient number of GOP Ken dolls off their polystyrene backsides and act, that there’s a big enouigh Republican capture in both House and Senate to either snowball the bill or, ideally, override any veto from Poobah Barry.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 9:16am

No, wait!

Homer included at least one obama-like character in The Iliad. See Book I, Thersites.

Art Deco
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 10:26am

the failures that caused the US to not recover from the Great Depression until 1946 can be traced to FDR and his gang of statist quacks.

Once more around the block. Real gross domestic product per capita had returned to its 1929 level by 1939. By 1941, this metric was 20% higher than it had been in 1929, which is what you would expect from long-term trends in the growth of real gdp. The labor market remained in troubled condition.

Robert
Robert
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 11:09am

The Prince. Written by Machivelli. Our current president is the closest I have seen to the spirit of that book. Just to appear to be like he cares is enough. And the sheeple buy it hook line and sinker. He can do what he wants and gets a free pass. How does this dibacle actually affect him? In all seriousness – it will not. Polls say one thing and if he ran for office tomorrow he would win again because of the blind sheeple out there that will vote themselves to the slaughter. My hope lies in Christ not in politics – thank you Lord.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 11:53am

Robert,

That’s largely a result of the five-year “tongue bath” (see Iowahawk) he’s gotten from the so-called media. He enjoys a 97% approval rate from his cheerleaders. The people have him at 37%.

Art:

I love you, man!

What was the unemployment rate in 1941?

Answer: 9.66%. The year prior – 1940 – it was 14.45%.

Beginning in 1933 when FDR took conrol the u/e rates were: 24.75%; 21.6%; 19.97%; 16.8%; 14.81%; 18.91%; and 17.05%. Plus, the people working often had lower wages, fewer hours.

Here’s the point. President Thersites and his band of central planners are putting the US through an unnecesary weaker “recovery.”

Average FDR real GDP growth (1934 to 1940) was 7.33%. Under Thersites it’s been, what (?): 2.1% – not adjusted for regime lies. Reagan’s recovery from a deeper recession averaged 5+% annual real GDP growth.

Some recovery!

Remember Einstein’s defintion of insanity.

Pinky
Pinky
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 11:56am

A month before the site went online, the Republican Congress had shut down government in an effort to delay the rollout. If the White House had known what to expect from the website, they should have jumped at the chance. Not looking like they were jumping for it, of course. Let the government shut down for a few days then put out word that they’d be willing to delay Obamacare for six months in exchange for a budget including, say, a 20% increase in Head Start and the removal of the Social Security cap. The President would be called a statesman and a hero and the rollout could have been saved.

So no, there’s no way they could have known that the system would fail so badly, or they would have acted differently.

Paul W Primavera
Paul W Primavera
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 12:42pm

I like T. Shaw’s reference to Thersites – how apt! We, however, need a modern-day Odysseus to give our Thersites a beating about the back and shoulders, and preferably in just as public a way as was done in those days of yore:

He is said to be bow-legged and lame and to have shoulders that cave inward. His head is covered in tufts of hair and comes to a point. Vulgar, obscene, somewhat dull-witted, he “got up in the assembly and attacked Agamemnon in the words of Achilles [calling him greedy and a coward] . . . Odysseus then stood up, delivered a sharp rebuke to Thersites, which he coupled with a threat to strip him naked, and then beat him on the back and shoulders with Agamemnon’s sceptre; Thersites doubled over, a warm tear fell from his eye, and a bloody welt formed on his back; he sat down in fear, and in pain gazed helplessly as he wiped away his tear; but the rest of the assembly was distressed and laughed . . . There must be a figuration of wickedness as self-evident as Thersites– the ugliest man who came to Troy– who says what everyone else is thinking”.

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Thersites.html

Jon
Jon
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 2:10pm

Progressivism arrived in the U. S. very early in the 20th century and has colored our politics ever since. I can imagine it will continue to do so for quite some time irrespective of any repercussions.

Art Deco
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 3:30pm

T. Shaw, the salient metrics are production metrics. By those metrics, the economy had recovered and recovered prior to the war. Also, the unemployment statistics of the time do not include those working for the Works Progress Administration and like agencies.

Roosevelt’s policies exacerbated trouble in the labor market extant when he took office, but even without that, it is a reasonable counter-factual that the labor market was going to take time to recover. Again, recall that Britain had a liberalizing ministry under Margaret Thatcher and yet elevated unemployment rates for nearly 20 years.

Art Deco
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 3:32pm

Pinky, I suspect that the hands-on technicians knew quite well the system was a mess, but the institutional culture of the Valerie Jarrett Administration is such that information does not travel up the hierarchy very readily, because bearers of bad news are ignored if not punished.

Tom Simon
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 5:47pm

From the post:
Obama forgot the first rule of politics: reality always wins in the end.

Ah, but sometimes you get to die in harness first and have the entire nation participate (by command, with bullets for the disobedient) in a gigantesque travesty of a hero’s funeral. So it was for Stalin; so it was for Mao. Is Obama less worthy than they?

From the combox:
“So no, there’s no way they could have known that the system would fail so badly, or they would have acted differently.”
Disagree Pinky. They had every reason to expect that the website was going to fail.

Actually, you’re both right. They had every reason to see the failure coming; but because reason is not a tool used by the modern Left, they had no way of knowing. That would have required them to be sane and sapient, two qualities in which they are eminently lacking.

philip
philip
Thursday, November 21, AD 2013 9:43pm

Mr. Simon. Thanks for passing the First Rule of Politics on to a grunt in the trenches. It fits BO.

Damage control to our beloved Free United States is going to take time, however we are one nation indivisible and Under Our Gracious God.

We will have leadership that is truly worthy of the blood poured out by our patriots of long ago. We will because the tide will turn. So help us God.

Jeanne Rohl
Jeanne Rohl
Friday, November 22, AD 2013 1:34pm

As I reread Dante’s Inferno I think BO. BO, BO and all the rest of the ilk that wants us dead and limited in numbers and under the rule of socialism/fascism(fine lines there) I never slept a wink the night of the first election of this scoundrel, nor the second, and with the same fervor hounded heaven for guidance. Ah yes, Dante.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Friday, November 22, AD 2013 4:43pm

For decades, the Democrats craved control of the health care system – all of it. A perfect disaster, brought about by mortgages handed out to people who could never afford to pay them – instigated by Democrats – caused the perfect disaster. then they took full advantage of it.

The Democrat Party is the single worst organization of people ever to take root in the Western Hemisphere – organized crime and political suppression rolled up in one – and yet there are mindless lemmings who still vote for them.

FDR was a crook. He used the IRS to attack his political adversaries. He left the Army decimated before WWII. He ordered the concentration camps of American citizens. He blatantly lied about Katyn and bent over backwards to help Stalin – a useful idiot if Lenin ever described one.

The day he died he was in the company of his mistress.

Obumbler is nothing but an empty chair as Clint Eastwood so aptly portrayed him. He is a puppet for people like Soros and Jarrett and Reid and Pelosi and he doesn’t even know it. His wife is the ultimate mooch.

If Texas ever became independent I would be there the next day.

Mary De Voe
Friday, November 22, AD 2013 9:02pm

Evidently, Obama believes his own lies, but does he have Obamacare health insurance?
About Katyn: Stalin blamed the Katyn massacre on Hitler and it was believed that Hitler was responsible (and Hitler was capable). About internment camps of the Japanese. They were more protective custody under martial law than anything else in times of war. I was born in 1940 and the animosity was ferocious. There was a picture in the newspaper with a Chinese man wearing a sign that read: “CHINESE”. In addition, there was the possibility of spying, after all, Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack. Nobody, but nobody smart a$$ wisecracked in those days. The churches were full morning, day and evenings.

philip
philip
Friday, November 22, AD 2013 9:03pm

Charlie has it…”Complete Denial..”
Referring to this sloppy mess obamacare.

The dem’s built it sold it and now cower under a “seat” that supports the largest buttocks that is ready to evacuate the vilest waist material known to man…obamafece’s.

As they wallow in their new form of mud bath’s, claiming that the scent is Wicca friendly, we believer’s of free enterprise and smaller govt. can only pray that the rainwater will sweep the stench away….far far away…..say Kenya.

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