Guest Author
It was a milestone: My two-and-a-half year old wanted ice cream, and my nearly four-year-old told her, “Sorry, it is all gone.”
This was the first recognition from her that Brett and I, as parents, don’t possess magical powers to make things materialize on demand.
But my relief was short-lived.
“Mommy, can you go to the store? That’s where the ice cream is,” she said.
I could have gone… but I didn’t. It wasn’t time for ice cream.
But what if I had gone and returned with apples or, God-forbid, broccoli? That would have been wholly disappointing. It would have meant something.
You guessed it. I’m talking about the botched rollout of Obamacare.
In Tuesday’s National Review Online, columnist Rich Lowry mulled on the “glitches, kinks, snags, bugs, and hiccups” in the health law’s implementation.
He wrote: “The Medicare and Medicaid agency running the healthcare.gov project took upon itself the overall tech management of it rather than handing that task off to a contractor. Managing a tech project of this size is not a core competency of government, but then again, neither is taking over the individual insurance market.”
Obviously, ice cream and health care are the opposite ends of a very wide spectrum in importance.
But the point is, especially if one likes the idea of compulsory health coverage, rolling out with a program that isn’t ready to go live is worse than delaying it.
“It took a CNN reporter a week to create a login and two weeks to proceed with her application,” Lowry wrote.
Other reporters tried the 800 number and got busy signals, or got through and followed instructions only to be referred back to healthcare.gov.
These “glitches” are a huge disincentive to enrollment for healthy people who are already on the fence about whether to pay for coverage or incur the lower-cost fine.
But navigating a broken interface may be worth the effort for a person with health conditions in need of care.
What all that means is that the implementation of Obamacare has just magnified the already problematic issue of “adverse selection” — when the exchanges become full of sick people and the only hope of program success is for healthy people join, too.
It is fair to say that many Republicans were elected with the mandate to obstruct the implementation of Obamacare, but Republicans have nothing to do with the rollout. It is wholly up to the administration to get the bones of the program up straight, and that hasn’t happened.
As late as Sept 26, program administrators had not done any tests to determine whether a person could actually complete the application process.
While postponing the rollout would have made sense even to program supporters, the White House was married to the Oct. 1 date and went for it.
But in doing so, they have delivered to the American people a headache instead of a cure.
And that’s billions more costly, more eroding of public trust, and more disappointing than coming home with apples for a kid expecting ice cream.
