Schadenfreude Shootout at the Obamacare Corral

Thinking up a decent new simile to name this catastrophe after everyday is getting to be a greater challenge than finding new material. It's kind of sad. But what better image than the good guys vs the bad guys (even if the issues in Tombstone were somewhat murkier)?

Obamacare's New Goal: Stay Alive Until 2015

...The administration has given up on success, as it might once have defined it. The object is no longer 7 million people signed up through the exchanges, with 2.7 million of them young and healthy, and the health-care cost curve bending back toward the earth. It is to keep the program alive until 2015. The administration's priorities are, first, to keep Democrats from undoing the individual mandate or otherwise crippling the law; second, to keep insurers from raising premiums or exiting the marketplace; third, to tamp down loose talk about the failures on the exchanges; and, only fourth, to get to the place where it used to think it would be this year, with lots of people signed up for affordable insurance. It is now measuring the program’s success not by whether it meets its goals, but by whether it survives at all. And all of its choices are oriented toward this new priority.

You can see this in the decisions the administration made about fixing HealthCare.gov: It focused on the part that voters can see, even though the part that accurately transmits data to insurers is arguably more important -- is it better, or actually worse, to “sign up” a bunch of people when you can’t get that information to the insurers who need to write the actual policies? You can see it in the strategic delays, particularly the delay of the open enrollment deadline until after the 2014 elections. And you can see it in how the administration is treating insurers. As plan cancellations became a big political problem, the administration looked like it was preparing to blame insurers, which has been a very successful political tactic for them in the past. But it quickly walked that back, because with the program’s survival on the line, it needed insurers on board. That’s why the administration is looking to get extra money to the insurers; it’s the sweetener it needs to forbear little things such as possibly not getting accurate enrollment data, or payments, for months...

Iowahawk has come up with the perfect name for the new Obamacare website's system for stalling queuing  users:

The Obamacare website, touted as now being able to handle 50,000 simultaneous losers users, starts putting them in in queue at 35,000:

Still, not all was smooth. By mid-morning Monday, some Americans trying to use the Web site were running into a logjam. And by late morning, when the number of people on the site was roughly 35,000 — or 15,000 fewer than administration officials had said it could handle — some consumers encountered a “queue,” a new feature intended for times when the site was too crowded. The feature limits the number of people on the site and notifies others by e-mail when it’s a better time to log in.

Maybe they could just sell healthcare plans at Amazon., and have the policies delivered by drones.  Oh wait, they won't anyone sell insurance plans across state lines.

Ann Althouse proposes that the problems with the website are a deliberate attempt to promote single payer:

So, there are a lot of people — who don't yet know who they are — who are eventually going to be quite upset. They did what they were told to do. The machine told them they'd done it. But they had not done it. I guess everyone who thinks he's signed up needs to worry that he's one of the "orphans." Should you get upset now or wait until you discover you're one of the unlucky ones? There should be another website selling insurance against the risk of being one of those whose insurance turns out not to be insurance.

Perhaps the goal is to drive everyone nuts about insurance, so that no one wants to hear the word "insurance" again. A collective cry goes up: "Health care should just be free!" I think the main reason that doesn't happen is that too many people believe they have access to health care services that are significantly better than what would be available for everyone if the link between care and paying for it were broken and the government — over there somewhere — paid all the bills.

Yes, everyone deserves basic access to medical treatments, but I deserve more, my family deserves better. Isn't that what you think?

I think that might be giving them too much credit for intelligence.  But, they'll certainly try to twist it that way after the fact.

Peggy Noonan suggests that just maybe Obama isn't always the smartest guy in the room afterall:

The president’s problem right now is that people think he’s smart. They think he’s in command, aware of pitfalls and complexities. That’s his reputation: He’s risen far on his brains. They think he is sophisticated.

That is his problem in the health insurance debacle.
...
Commentators like to decry low-information voters—the stupid are picking our leaders. I think the real problem is low-information leaders. They have so little experience of life and have so much faith in magic—in media, in words—that they don’t understand people will get angry at you when you mislead them, and never see you the same way again.

From Stacy McCain (just to show my feelings weren't hurt), You know they’re desperate when they invoke “McCarthyism”:

When House Republicans unveiled a proposal in the fall aimed at avoiding a dead-end government shutdown over Obamacare, the conservative backlash was swift and brutal: they called it a surrender, a betrayal, an appeasement of the health care law they all abhor. . . .
Since then the phenomenon has grown and taken hold in the 2014 primaries as Republicans accuse their opponents of privately harboring sympathies for Obamacare. . . .
In a way, the phenomenon is reminiscent of McCarthyism, named after Sen. Joe McCarthy, who in the 1950s accused U.S. government officials and others of secretly sympathizing with communism.

ObamaCare isn’t about some shadowy threat of foreign subversion, it’s about a bad domestic policy that is directly hurting the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans who are smart enough to realize that they’re getting the shaft because Democrats wanted to give away “free stuff” for which hardworking taxpayers will foot the bill.

As policy, this is bad for everybody. As politics, it’s bad for Democrats, and it’s only going to get worse. No wonder they’re desperate.

And also by way of  Stacy: Obamacare Just Doesn't work.



And still more Stacy McCain (who was on a roll yesterday after listening to the "The Great Leader").

Just got through watching President Obama lying on TV, and the method of his dishonesty is what fascinates me. He (and other liberals) engage in a sort of rhetorical prestidigitation, whereby health insurance is conflated with health care. In other words, the Democrats would have you believe, if you don’t have insurance, you just get sick and die. But what they never mention is that most people are healthy, and the vast majority of Americans — whether healthy or sick — had health insurance before ObamaCare was enacted. . .

That’s right: Republicans want people to get sick and die, because illness and death are the only alternatives to the President’s policy.

And we all remember what life was like before ObamaCare: Everybody was either sick or dead, except greedy Republicans, who made lucrative profits from their investments in Death, Inc.

As I say, the method of his dishonesty is fascinating.

ObamaCare and the Totalitarian Mindset

Suppose some inventor hatches an idea for what he thinks would be a great and revolutionary new product. He raises money from investors, sets up office, hires people--and fails spectacularly. The company's customer service is atrocious, the product is expensive and lousy, and the whole business plan is fundamentally flawed. Who's to blame?

The news media, of course. After all, journalists could have put out stories touting the virtues of the product and explaining how to navigate the crummy customer-service system, and maybe then the whole business plan would have worked out.

That, at any rate, is the argument Paul Waldman puts forth in an article for the leftist American Prospect. Of course being a good leftist, Waldman is not blaming the media for the failure of a private business. But then neither would any nonleftist. Yet because the enterprise in question is a governmental one--ObamaCare, in case you've been away from Earth for the past two months--the argument somehow makes sense to him. . .

What is objectionable, however, is Waldman's claim that news organizations have a journalistic "responsibility" to provide service journalism on that particular subject--that doing so is, as Waldman puts it, "part of any major media outlet's mission." No one would say that about film reviews or advice columns. Service journalism is a peripheral form of news.

And this 'good news' from Ace: Security Expert: No Security Built Into Obamcare; Flaws Are Big Enough to Permit Hackers to Use Healthcare.gov to Hack Users' Computers; Could Take a Year to Fix Even Just the High-Priority Flaws

Good God. Video at the link, and it's worth watching.

"We're talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself."

And that's just to fix the big holes in security, nevermind closing the smaller exploits.

This expert's advice? If you like your identity, you should keep your identity off Healthcare.gov. Period.

 And how about some "Gratuitous Obamacare Cartoons (because it's too damn easy)?

Go to the link to see the rest.

But the final word goes to President Obama, No matter how bad Obamacare is, "We're Not Going Back" or as Instapundit so succinctly puts it:

OBAMA: “We’re not going back” to that horrible time when 87% of Americans were happy with their health insurance.

Sadly, that's probably true.  You can't put the eggs in this fallen souffle back into their shells.  We can only throw it away and start over.