Every once in a while, I get to a place where I would like to move on to a different topic in my daily commentaries, yet it would seem best to stay on the topic that dominates the news cycle. We’re at one of those places today. Obamacare is so central to what’s happening—or not happening, in this case—that I feel practically compelled to comment on it again.
The reason is the truly incompetent unveiling of the program. Not that I mind the incompetence, of course. The more incompetent, the better, in my view. Anything that can derail this is most welcome. But this rollout has been so incredibly incompetent, it could set some kind of record.
This massive failure is destined to be used in textbooks on business, management, and politics for years to come, all of which will point to the lack of planning [ironic, considering these people spend their lives trying to plan everyone else’s] and lack of testing beforehand. I haven’t tried to log on to the website, and would rather not have my name ever be associated with the program, but most who have tried have come away empty.
Washington Times commentator Wes Pruden offered this: “Obamacare is the work of Marxists—Groucho, Chico, Harpo.”
The person directly responsible for the fiasco is HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius. She puts on a good front, acting like there’s nothing seriously wrong, but if she were really honest, here’s how she might want to appear in public:
President Obama is doing his best impersonation of Sebelius. On Monday, he held a sort of press conference to say everything is just fine:
Byron York of the Washington Examiner reported, “Few expected an out-of-touch, in-denial pep rally. But that’s what happened.”
The administration refuses to say how many have successfully enrolled. It claims not to have the numbers. Does anyone really believe that? In reality, the numbers are so embarrassing, officials don’t want to release them. States are doing some reporting, though. Delaware signed up its first person a few days ago. New York apparently has no one signed up. This is far more than embarrassing; a new word needs to be coined to describe this.
What might we expect next?
None of this should be all that surprising, though. Obama and his people have always been long on talk and short on performance. That’s also a pretty good description of socialism—always promising the world and delivering misery. As one of my favorite writers, Thomas Sowell, has noted, “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
Not to fear. If every excuse falls flat to explain its failure, there’s always a “card” that can be pulled:
