How Not to Run a Railroad: Buy the Train but Ignore the Tracks

Liberals are fretting and conservatives are chortling over the mini-disaster that the rollout of the Affordable Care Act has been.

Here are the details:  The opportunity to sign up for affordable health insurance was supposed to be available on a government website as of October 1.  But almost immediately, it became apparent that the government had not prepared adequately for the kick-off.  As the website specially constructed for the purpose came on line, it absorbed millions of hits from consumers wanting to choose their health care plan.  Within days, the site was unable to handle the load, and the problem has yet to be fixed.

As the month came to an end, many liberals were caught in the purgatory of having to defend an indefensible case of incompetence, and most conservatives were protesting angrily while loving every minute of the snafu.  It would be great political theater if it was fiction, but it isn’t.  Instead, it’s a case of ineptitude and hypocrisy, and the shame is easily attached to all the players.

I don’t claim to be anything close to an expert on matters relating to information technology.  I know how to turn on my computer, and I can generally use it to send e-mails, browse the Internet, and draft documents, essays, and the novel I’m struggling to finish.  But how it works or why it sometimes doesn’t work are things I have no understanding of.

So, all I can surmise from the failure of the administration’s website to handle the flood of consumers who wanted to sign up for the new affordable health care promised by Obamacare is that the folks in charge were incompetent.  Maybe, in truth, they weren’t.  Maybe, as some have weakly argued, the system was just overwhelmed with the deluge of “hits” it received.  Maybe nothing could have been done to avoid the catastrophe that has developed this month.

Maybe.  But if the program in question is the hallmark of your administration, if you claim that it will transform the nation for the better and will change the way health care is delivered for most Americans, in much the same way that Medicare did for seniors, and, most importantly, if yours is the party that claims that government is important and valuable and desirable, instead of being incompetent and slothful and destructive of the human spirit, then you’d better make sure you have everything ready to go before the big program is made available to the masses.

So count me among those who are dumbfounded by the failure to have the railroad tracks fully laid and tied when the train starts to rumble out of the station.  And if Obama isn’t ultimately responsible for the failure, he needs to fire whoever is.  Ineptitude should never be countenanced by a president, especially one who is slipping steadily in the polls and who has a lot of unfinished business on his agenda.

Conservatives don’t like Obama.  They have never liked him, for reasons that are many, but they definitely don’t like his signature domestic achievement, which they delight in calling Obamacare.

They hated it from before it even existed, from the moment the newly elected president announced that he wanted to enact health care reform.  Back then, let’s recall, the options were all on the table, and what ultimately got the necessary votes to become law was a compromise that no one fully embraced.

The alternatives were the status quo (rejected by the president and his party), a single-payer plan akin to Medicare (rejected by the Republicans and many blue-dog Democrats), or a government-option plan (never pushed by Obama for reasons that have never been clear).  What was ultimately passed was a plan that had been proposed some 15 years earlier by the Republicans themselves: a plan to require that private health insurance be purchased by everyone who can afford it so that those who can’t can receive a comparable plan.

The plan is a boon for insurance companies, who now get to insure many more consumers than they were able to reach before.  And, once the plan is up and running, most of those companies will do just fine, because, as with all private insurance, they will establish coverage plans and premium rates that keep them in the black.  Many consumers will get health insurance that they didn’t have before.  Some who did have it before will pay more for it; some will pay less.  It will, as they say, all come out in the wash.

That is the reality of what is going to happen, ultimately, with Obamacare.  It will become the way Americans get their medical needs taken care of.  It will work in keeping the cost of medical treatment down, but it will also limit the health care options that are available under the basic coverage provided.  Those who can afford more will pay more to get better coverage.  Those who can’t will at least have a minimal level of protection against the basic things that will be covered (like annual checkups and emergency surgeries).

Conservatives know these things.  They just don’t like the idea of it, because it smacks of more government in their lives, and they don’t think government should be in their lives.  And so, given the opportunity to stomp their feet in feigned anger at the failure of the government website, they do just that.  In doing so, they are trying to say, “how dare you be so incompetent?”

But, of course, they are complete hypocrites.  They don’t want the plan to work.  They want Obamacare to fall flat on its face.  They want the status quo ante, wherein 40 million Americans have no health care coverage, and many of the rest are slaves to outrageous insurance premiums if they aren’t fortunate enough to be covered by their employers.  They want what no other industrialized country in the world currently has: a free-market system that serves the well-to-do and leaves everyone else to hope for the best.

Ineptitude and hypocrisy: quite a combination.  And we wonder why the railroads don’t run on time.