Failure to Launch - How Obama Fumbled HealthCare.gov

Foreign Affairs ^ | March/April 2014 | Jonathan Alter

[Theoria]

President Barack Obama has often said that his proudest domestic achievement is the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly known as the ACA or Obamacare). The sprawling law, pushed through Congress in 2010 in the face of fierce Republican resistance, made numerous important changes to the U.S. health-care system -- a system so big that, on its own, it represents an economy about the size of France’s.

Thanks to the ACA, which took effect on January 1 of this year, the U.S. government has finally joined most other industrialized nations in offering its citizens health security. The reform, by many estimates, will save tens of thousands of lives as Americans reap the benefits of such provisions as greatly expanded preventive medicine and a prohibition on insurance companies’ discriminating against those with preexisting conditions. The era when millions of Americans were bankrupted by medical expenses will end. If the law works as planned, it will also contain health-care costs, reducing the U.S. budget deficit. And by freeing employees from the perpetual fear of losing their health insurance, the ACA should, in theory at least, make it easier for them to leave their jobs to start new businesses, boosting domestic and global growth.

Given such stakes, and the intense Republican opposition Obamacare still faces, the disastrous manner in which the White House allowed its signature program to be rolled out last fall presents a great mystery: Why didn’t the administration pay more attention? For the debut of the plan and its website, HealthCare.gov, was nothing short of a fiasco. In early 2013, the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that once the ACA got going, seven million Americans would enroll in the new national health exchange in the first six months.

[Theoria]

CFR pov.

[Jim Robinson]

Total b/s.

[VRWC For Truth]

Jug ears has never run a business. The results rot from the head.

[Gen.Blather]

The entire article was ruined by the glowing description of what it could have done and how great it was that the US had finally joined the other socialist nations that have already failed at health care. (Why, pray tell, do Canadians regularly get airlifted to the US for heart problems because simple drugs are out of stock? Why does Britain have one of the lowest cancer survival rates?)

[Liz]

"Those Democrats leering over my shoulder owe me bigtime.
My signature healthcare plan guarantees a permanent Democratic majority."

" All except those Tea Party types, swallowed hook, line and sinker my promises that they could:

(1) keep their existing health plans,
(2) keep their own doctors that they like,
(3) keep their 25-year-olds on the family health plan,
(4) never be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition,
(5) sign up instantly on my tech-savvy government Web site,
(6) buy insurance only after becoming seriously ill."
(7) save $2,500 in annual premiums in the bargain....
(8) All without any new taxes."

"Them sonovagun Tea Partiers will rue the day they criticized my wonderful bill."

REMEMBER THIS DEMOCRATS? As far back as 2008, at the Democrat presidential debate in Nashville, Democrat candidate Obama smilingly campaigned on the glories of his signature healthcare plan---ultimately enacted, by an historic straight Democrat party-line vote, into the "Affordable Care Act"

QUOTING 2008 OBAMA: "No. 1, let me just repeat, if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it. All I’m going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it. You’ll still have choice of doctor.”

Repeated over and over ---- with the promise that every American family would be saving $2500.00 on healthcare costs.

Significantly, Obamba NEVER corrected lock-stepping Democrats, all reading from the same Democrat talking points, all of them repeating the same Democrat promises---over and over again.

LOCK-STEPPING PARTY LOYALTY NOT SEEN SINCE 1930- 40's ERA EUROPE Obama And The Dems marched in lockstep. The persistent Dumbocrat drumbeat ---- in obeisance to Obama ---- kept ringing reassuringly in our ears: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

====================================================

A FRIENDLY REMINDER TO DEMOCRATS: You voted for all of this: (1) throwing Americans off affordable health plans, (2) burdening Americans w/ ruinous deductibles, (3) nationalizing 1/16 of the US economy, (4) abandoning the elderly and the chronically ill, (5) empowering IPAB's (Death Panels),(6) decimating intergenerational transfers of wealth, and, (7) drug rationing.

====================================================

The Republican controlled house has passed over 30 different bills amending or replacing O/Care. Sen Harry Reid is the Democrat roadblock who allows no such bill to come before the Senate.

[Iron Munro]

It's difficult to believe that Barack had anything to do with the ObamaCare screwups.
After all, everyone knows that both he and Michelle are absolutely brilliant.

[DocJhn]

How can you fumble when you never had control of the ball!
The man has no clue about anything but money and how to lose it! He’s a dynamo on that!

[facedown]

Jonathan Alter is what Pajama Boy grows up to be.

[Hardastarboard]

the U.S. government has finally joined most other industrialized nations in offering its citizens health security.

Umm - Mr. Alter - do you want to reconsider the last part of that statement? You don't keep up with the stories of all the cancer patients who have lost their insurance, have you?

[alloysteel]

Obamacare - the stepchild living in the basement. The Current Occupant took in the Hillarycare orphan from the early 1990’s and made it his own, but it still is not able to be a self-supporting, self-sustaining entity without massive subsidies and a carrot-and-stick approach to get the neighbors to accept its presence.

Nobody loves this obstinate, incomprehensible and misshapen monstrosity. It eats jobs, drains productivity from the economy, and acts as a disincentive to compliance with its rigid application, permitting no exceptions or substitutions.

If a law could be said to enshrine an obsessive-compulsive disorder, this would be it.

[woofie]

Nobody loves this obstinate, incomprehensible and misshapen monstrosity. It eats jobs, drains productivity from the economy, and acts as a disincentive to compliance with its rigid application, permitting no exceptions or substitutions.

And it doesnt work too good neither

[musicman]

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[DannyTN]

"The results rot from the head."

Penny: ...You're not really interested in the homeless, are you?
Billy: No, I am, but- It's a symptom. You're treating a symptom, and the disease rages on, consumes the human race. The fish rots from the head, as they say. So my thinking is, why not cut off the head?
Penny: Of the human race?
Billy: It's not a perfect metaphor,...

[CivilWarBrewing]

This was a manufactured crisis to justify implementation of the Single Payer system. Alinskyites create problems so they can transform the American system THEIR WAY. If you want to kill off oil, coal and gas just sabotage a BP oil rig, double down on onerous EPA regulations and refuse to approve the keystone pipeline.

[Secret Agent Man]

Failure to launch.

failure to build.

failure to plan.

failure to unite.

failure to cover the uninsured.

[Pollster1]

American liberalism is based on the faith that an active government can improve the lives of people -- that the government possesses the core competencies necessary to implement an ambitious agenda. But if Obamacare isn’t fixed soon, that faith could be seriously undermined, making it much harder for progressives to advance any social reform in the foreseeable future.

I have prayed many times for four years that this prediction will come true. I hope God cares enough about America to make it finally happen.

[parisa]

President Barack Obama has often said that his proudest domestic achievement is the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly known as the ACA or Obamacare).

Thanks to the ACA, which took effect on January 1 of this year, the U.S. government has finally joined most other industrialized nations

That's it then. obama's proudest moment, to transform America from a leader and an emulated one in the world into a follower and weak imitator of every whim and fancy of the "industrial world" that has brought us 2 WWs, fascism, communism, and every other failed cockamamie idea that has left in its path nothing but ruin and bloodshed and misery in the world. A legacy to be proud of indeed.

[Mr. K]

I noticed that too... USA has ‘finally joined’ all the other left-leaning economic disasters in giving people health care?

Why do we want to join economic basket-case nations in destroying ourselves?

[upchuck]

Posted just today: Stephen Blackwood: ObamaCare and My Mother's Cancer Medicine

Sorry, we'll see more and more of this over the coming months.

Y'all had enough?

[PLMerite]

Every time I see that picture, I think of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_3WQYyy7nA