Posted on 03/08/2014 3:49:24 PM PST by 1rudeboy
This week's episode: Spending enormous resources on a program to reduce X, and then not tracking (or even putting in place a mechanism to track) whether X was reduced as promised. James Taranto quoting the National Journal quoting Administration officials:
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the health care law will reduce the number of uninsured people by about 24 million over the next few years, and that about 6 million previously uninsured people will gain coverage through the law's exchanges this year. So, is enrollment on track to meet that goal? Overall enrollment is looking pretty decent, but how many of the people who have signed up were previously uninsured?
"That's not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way," Cohen told the insurance-industry crowd on Thursday when asked how many of the roughly 4 million enrollees were previously uninsured.
Nicely done. The PPACA was passed first and foremost to bring insurance to the uninsured. I always thought that the Left misunderstood (accidentally or on purpose, I do not know) the nature of the uninsured and thus overestimated what impact the PPACA would have in this regard. But one way or another, you would track the impact, right? I can just imagine trying to explain to my old boss Chuck Knight why we spent billions to gain new customers for a product but didn't track how many new customers we gained.
Postscript: Here is my prediction -- The Administration will declare that no one had "real" insurance (as they define it) so everyone in the exchange was previously uninsured.
In the corporate world I had to train new managers how to state a problem, propose a solution, state why and how their plan would solve or improve the situation, and demonstrate the metrics that define “success.”
Look at Headstart. It doesn’t not succeed at doing what they said it would do. Time and again, this is proven. But since there were no metrics, accepted by all sides to define success, there is argument.
No reasonable person would deny improvements to our children’s lives. But, no reasonable person would continue spending money on programs that do not work. Therefore, our Congressional reps are not reasonable people.
Oh, we’re going to find out the real reason for Obamacare when the US Taxpayer money starts flowing to the insurance companies.
In general, if you do not need to deal with the federal government, you just don't. You keep your distance.
But once you work closely with the federal government, and see how they operate, how they approach things, what they think is important -- then you start to see very clearly why we are in a very bad situation.
It's Alice in Wonderland time. Many federal employees have no sense of what the real world is like. They have no need to think about such things. And it shows.
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