The failure of the Healthcare.gov website to operate smoothly has been amply documented in virtually every corner of the corporate media. One of the themes of the coverage, though, is worth unpacking, since it advances an argument that could do profound damage far beyond one particular website or program.
As this story goes, the fate of the enrollment website is not so much about a bungled tech project–it’s about government itself.
Very early on, the Washington Post‘s Dan Balz (10/26/13) wrote that while Barack Obama was an “advocate of big, bold actions to address large and seemingly intractable problems, he has struggled to convince the public that government is equipped to carry out such transformational changes.” Balz went on to argue, “The whole episode points to the broader debate that the president has yet to win about the role of government.”
A New York Times account (12/1/13) of the internal White House deliberations observed:
Out of a tense meeting grew a frantic effort aimed at rescuing not only the troubled insurance portal and President Obama’s credibility, but also the Democratic philosophy that an activist government can solve complex social problems.
The PBS NewsHour structured a debate around the premise that the website problems reveal deep questions about the role of government in society (11/28/13). Anchor Hari Sreenivasan introduced the segment this way:
Now a look at some of the larger issues raised in the ongoing debate over the Affordable Care Act, questions of how deeply a government should involve itself in the personal welfare of its citizens, of individual rights and collective responsibilities, even whether the law’s troubled rollout might be seen as a challenge to the viability of the liberal philosophy at its core.
And on CBS‘s Face the Nation (12/1/13), neocon pundit Bill Kristol mused:
If a bunch of private companies were competing…they would pay a price if the website crashed and people would go to another company. That doesn’t happen with the government, which is why government shouldn’t run big chunks of our economy like healthcare.
New York Times columnist David Brooks boiled the issue down to a football metaphor on Meet the Press (12/1/13):
I have to say, people are appraising whether this government can work. Can government be nimble? Can it learn from its mistakes? And I would say the website is just a small symptom that is not nimble. Government is like an offensive lineman. It can do something really well. It can do blocking. It can create order. But when you ask government to be a wide receiver, then you’re asking it to do things it can’t do. And I think we’re in a situation like that. We’re asking it to do things it can’t do. Republicans win elections when Democrats overreach by asking government to do things it can’t do.
Indeed, the stakes are enormous. As NBC‘s Andrea Mitchell said on the same edition of Meet the Press, the White House is “at risk of losing the credibility of government as an agent of change for a generation.”
The implication in all of these discussions is that the Affordable Care Act represents some kind of “activist government” intervention to disrupt the normally smooth workings of the private sector.
But that is neither the intent nor the effect of the law. The main purpose of Obamacare is the preservation of the private insurance system; the website functionality that has generated so many headlines is largely due to the fact that a decentralized, means-tested system has to be grafted onto a complex, profit-seeking insurance industry. If the White House was rolling out an actual “big government” healthcare policy options–a public option, or a single-payer system–and there was anything like the current mess, then perhaps this conversation would make some sense.
Indeed, if any part of Obamacare could be considered a government effort at “transformational changes,” it might be the expansion of Medicaid, an actual “government-run” system to help the poor. By many accounts, that system is functioning pretty smoothly.
So if anything, the Healthcare.gov rollout disaster is story about the success of a government-run system and the collapse of a quasi-private scheme that was, until the Obama administration, championed by Republicans and conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation.
“If a bunch of private companies were competing … they would pay a price if the website crashed and people would go to another company.”
That’s certainly the way it works with defense contracting, isn’t it?
Cost overruns, faulty technology …
How many corps that have “[paid] a price” for their ineptitude and malfeasance?
And not mentioned here is the fact that this site was designed and built in large measure by private contractors, as well.
So gummint is at fault here, as is so often the case, not for “disrupt[ing] the normally smooth workings of the private sector”
But for letting the private sector, with its “profit uber alles” mentality, hoover up taxpayer dollars in exchange for a shoddy product
Which is one thing they are extremely proficient at doing.
Obamacare’s reason for being was to mask the cost of Medicaid expansion to everyone including illegals and the cost $1T annually would be hidden until the bill comes due.
There was never any attempt to reign in costs because if there were the Tort laws would have been fixed so that trial attorneys would be unable to loot HC premiums of over $400B annually
Fortunately this fact was not lost on all of the MSM. Ezra Klein recently observed that, “Nothing about the law’s difficult debut … has undermined its huge expansion of Medicaid or Medicare; indeed, the argument for a broader single-payer health-care system is very much intact. Instead, the elements of Obamacare that are failing are precisely those market-based initiatives that Republicans most want to work.”
Corporate newsmedia continues to misinform. Government is not the problem, it’s the privatization and the promotion of corporations causing the problem. Definition of privatization: doesn’t work as well and costs a lot more.
Indeed, the private health insurance industry, not the Affordable Care Act, has failed to provide affordable health care, but this does not absolve President Obama from blame for the American health care fiasco.
Health care in the United States is the most expensive of the developed countries precisely because it is provided by for-profit health insurers. Their administrative costs — billing, claims adjudication, marketing, underwriting, profits, and of course, executive looting — account for 31% of health care spending in the U.S. vs. 17% in Canada’s single-payer system.
A CBS/NYT poll in January, 2009, indicated 59% of Americans favored a single-payer health care delivery system. In February that year, a CNN poll showed 72% of Americans favored such a plan. Obama then handed health reform over to Democrat Max Baucus of Montana, known as “the Senator from K Street,”
According to http://www.opensecrets.org, from 2003 to 2008, Baucus pocketed $3,973,485 from the health sector, including $852,813 from pharmaceutical companies, $851,141 from health professionals, $784,185 from the insurance industry and $465,750 from HMOs and health services. When he ran for his sixth straight Senate term in 2008, he raked in a phenomenal $11.6 million, 87% of it from out of state.
On the first day of Senate Finance Committee hearings on health care reform on May 5, 2009, Chairman Baucus had guards remove eight single-payer advocates from the room in handcuffs. During the next hearing a week later, guards ejected five more single-payer advocates, all of them doctors and nurses.
The Affordable Care Act is evidence that the U.S. Senate has degenerated into a private club with major committees chaired by bribe recipients from low-population states. Montana’s 2010 census population, for example, was 975,000, 2.6% of California’s 37 million.
Since their employers are now getting a huge windfall from virtually continuous campaign advertising, you can’t expect media hacks such as Dan Balz, Hari Sreenivasan, Bill Kristol, David Brooks and Andrea Mitchell to deviate from the views of the major campaign contributors.
The big money goes to candidates of the Republican Party, which has become corrupt beyond redeeming, and there is no longer any reason to support President Obama and Congressional Democrats for spineless positions that persistently ignore the wishes of the electorate.
The whole mainstream media is now a big con game. I can not watch it anymore. I tire of sorting out their lies.
“There was never any attempt to reign in costs because if there were the Tort laws would have been fixed so that trial attorneys would be unable to loot HC premiums of over $400B annually”
Texas implemented tort reform and it did nothing to lower the cost of healthcare in that state – what it did accomplish however, besides pardoning the guilty, was to leave a lot of seriously harmed families in financial ruin if they had a loved one injured as a result of medical malpractice or products liability. (The cost of medical malpractice and products liability insurance could be much lower if the perpetrators were outed – but like reckless drivers, the rest of us pay for their carelessness or outright criminal activity as in the case of drug companies pushing their unapproved products off label. But I suspect that if we revoked charters and professional licenses, we’d really have a “crisis” – when profit is your intention, what other outcome would you expect – health?) It’s more prudent to allow bigPharma to continue selling as much product as possible – dividends are higher when they aren’t responsible for paying compensatory damages.
The cost of properly caring for a lifetime of assistance would overwhelm and ruin a family. What WOULD have contained the cost is COMPETITION – Obummer should NEVER have conceded the public option. Supposedly the deal he made with the insurance industry was that they must use at least 75-80% of the premiums they collect on actual healthcare – they could gamble with the remainder. Is it surprising that the first thing they did was raise their premiums?? Now we’re screwed as insurance companies operate like the financial gamblers with nothing to curtail them.
The same geniuses that destroyed our manufacturing base came up with the idea that the U.S. should become a global financial hub – which is why in this FIRE economy – finance, insurance, real estate – we currently “produce” mostly bets. Now they’re out buying up all the foreclosed properties, bundling them up as they did the mortgages, securitizing them and blowing a new bubble. The next crash should finish off the empire – we’re on the hook for $250,000/deposit – and several weeks ago, the treasonous Congress passed legislation that put taxpayers back on the hook for investors’ follies – investment banks were not to be covered in the Dodd Frank financial regulation bill that’s now got more loopholes than Swiss cheese.
Face it – the U.S. economy is made up of a handful of industrial complexes that need to be removed from the welfare rolls – they call it free enterprise and I guess they’re right! – all the subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, public land and mineral giveaways with no responsibility for reclamation – talk about a totally free ride and complete dependency – why do we tolerate such a tiny number of parasites to cannibalize Main Street – even the national debt robs and transfers our tax revenue – they’ve managed to funnel nearly all of the country’s assets into their coffers while the nation crumbles. The empire is truly feeding off of the republic and what’s more astounding, this is a global pandemic yet their pundits are blubbering nonsense that’s so perverted it would insult Caligula!!
Obamacare is not just morally right, but it will be the right thing to do financially as well. If folks who are not insured continue to go to the emergency room, we all end up paying for it in the end. The healthcare industry was broken and needed to be fixed.
DL- exactly right. Where did ‘private companies’ ever get a reputation for being responsive… even vis-a-vis the government? I know it’s a common meme, but only if one ignores all those horror stories that you can easily hear from people on the street about corporate obstinacy. I’ve always believed it’s more a function of size. Big organizations — whether they be government, private enterprise, or NGOs, normally require a significant administrative bureaucracy to run them. Big bureaucracies — like big ships — are less maneuverable, but on the positive side they are less easily swamped/sunk by the peaks & troughs of life. Interestingly, large corporations won’t long abide an internal group who is constantly trying to sabotage the agenda of it’s leaders (like the Tea Party/right-wingers are currently doing in Congress.)
Though, like the other commenters here, I strongly favored single payer and was really disappointed when Obama chose to deep-six it, I have to admit that I was ASTOUNDED that he wouldn’t have held his task force’s feet to the fire during that website development. It’s common knowledge that implementing major software systems in large organizations is OFTEN a VERY problematic episode (I’ve assisted in several of them in the large company I work for), but worse than that was the fact that Obama KNOWS that the right-wing jackals are waiting to pounce on his every move – – – why the hell didn’t Obama constantly monitor the development??? The conservatives criticize him even when he does everything right, even if they have to invent lies to do it, so why would he give them a semi-legitimate opening by casually assuming that things would magically go alright with something so visible like this?? It’s politically naive and/or stupid, reminiscent of Clinton having sexual relations with Monica while being president.
Sadly, by all appearances, we are slowly losing the battle to the Fux Snooze Nitwork Trolls. They are incredible stupid enough to actually believe that it was a deliberate attempt by President Obama to ‘steal their freedom’ the long time meme of the Tea Bag Party. The Tin foil hat brigade has gone so far as to make the claim that ‘Russia and China’ are actually behind this and helping Obama to ‘take over the country’.
“”If a bunch of private companies were competing…they would pay a price if the website crashed and people would go to another company.””
I am not sure which planet this pundit lives, but to borrow a Phrase from the NBA Star Dikembe Mutombo, “Not in my house”. They would simply write it off, blame it on “the liberals” and the Moron Trolls would all sing the “Sheeple Chorus”.
Healthcare may indeed be a necessity for some, however I think that it should be remembered that healthcare and insurance are two completely different things. Healthcare is what you may need if you get sick or injured, insurance is not needed by anyone it its merely some kind of a payment scheme.
Common sense would tell us that it is more expensive to pay for healthcare AND insurance than it is to pay only for the healthcare. Insurance is an unessential third party parasite on the doctor patient relationship, sucking as much money out of our health care dollar as they can. From doctors as well as patients. Nobody needs insurance.” People need water, food, shelter, and sick people do need health care, but insurance is not a necessity to anybody. It’s tremendously expensive to operate an insurance company.
And don’t try to tell me that Insurance companies negotiate lower prices for people, the price that they negotiate includes, obviously, their own costs. They don’t care what it costs an individual, even less so under obamacare where subsidies will be paid directly to the insurance companies so that even people who can’t afford to buy insurance can become their customers at government expense. What is their incentive to charge lower prices if even the ability of people to afford it is not a consideration?
If a person is un-insurable and still needs, but can’t afford, expensive healthcare, then that person should be allowed to appeal to the government for assistance.
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