By Donald Lambro
Friday, November 29, 2013
Soon after President Obama told the White House press
corps he was solely responsible for the botched Obamacare rollout, he decided
to shift part of the blame on Republicans.
A mea culpa can be hard to deliver in public when you are
the kind of politician who thinks he never mistakes and rarely if ever
apologizes for anything that went wrong. But Obama's apologies have a brief
shelf life, and a few days later they had reached their expiration date.
So at a gathering of business executives on Tuesday, Nov.
19, the president concluded that he had done enough groveling over his utterly
false claim that "if you like your health insurance policy, you can keep
it" and went on the political attack.
Somehow he decided that the Republicans in Congress were
partly to blame for the bungled mess that he and his administration had
created. That it wasn't all his fault.
He also said the broken, online, sign-up system was in
the process of being fixed and would be up and running at full throttle by the
end of November. That doesn't seem to be the case entirely, but more on that in
a moment.
Then he turned on the Republicans with a vengeance. He
suggested that their intransigent political opposition had inhibited the law's
implementation.
"One of the problems we've had is one side of
Capitol Hill is invested in its failure," he told the chief financial
officers at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council meeting in Washington last
week.
And he also suggested the Republicans' "ideological
resistance to the idea of dealing with the uninsured and people with
preexisting conditions" was also a factor in what went wrong.
Republicans had their own ideas about how to provide
wider access to lower cost health care, but it was not the costly,
government-run, top-down bureaucracy Obama wanted and got from the Democrats.
The larger organizational problems that presumably led to
the mess the government is still trying to fix stemmed from the political
bickering in Washington that threatened to damage his presidency's signature
achievement, he further suggested.
Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue needed to "break
through the stubborn cycle of crisis politics and start working together,"
he said.
Well, I did a little checking with Constitutional scholars,
and no one can find any provision in the Constitution that gives lawmakers any
role in the executive branch to help implement and/or administer laws passed by
Congress.
Obama has made bombastic claims over the course of his
presidency that have not proven true. But to blame the Republicans for any part
this debacle -- who control only one half of Congress -- is a huge reach, to
say the least.
By the way, he also blamed the government's archaic,
information- retrieval, computer system, saying the federal government's IT
system is "not very efficient."
Well, whose fault is that? He's the chief executive who
is in charge of seeing that the laws are carried out in a fair and efficient
way and insuring that they work and meet all deadlines.
Judging from the mountain of government audits that have
exposed waste, inefficiencies and other skullduggery in his administration,
he's not the least bit interested in the details and process of running
anything -- least of all his health care mess.
Now, about his claim that Obamacare's online computer
system would be fixed and ready for business by Nov. 30. Well, not all of it.
His promise to the CFOs came immediately after an
administration official who oversees the technical side of the federal health
insurance marketplace told Congress that 30 to 40 percent of the overall system
was unfinished and not ready to go.
Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer for the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said major parts of Obama's
program, including its accounting and payments to insurance companies, were
still incomplete.
"If the business functions are not in place on time,
it could create havoc with a system through which billions of dollars in
federal tax money will flow to subsidize coverage for consumers who otherwise
could not afford it, insurance industry officials said," Reuters news
agency reported.
"The upshot is that the (financial management)....
appears to be way off track and getting worse," a CMS official said in a
July 8 e- mail, obtained by Reuters.
The first payments were due by mid-to-late January, but
now we learn that the accounting system is far from ready to process the most
critical part of Obamacare.
But bigger financial problems loom on the horizon that
could bring Obamacare crashing down before it even gets started.
One is the need to get very large numbers of younger,
healthier people to sign up for insurance to pay for older, and poorer
beneficiaries. The administration promised the insurance industry this would
happen, but now that is very much in doubt.
"I now think there is little hope we are going to
get enough younger, healthy people to sign up, and that means that this law is
in grave danger of financial collapse," Robert Laszewski, president of
Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a health care industry consultant, told
the Washington Post.
The number of people who have signed up thus far are
relatively small, far from the tens of millions of applicants needed to make it
work.
There are also troubling questions about whether the
Internal Revenue Service will be ready to carry out nearly four dozen new tasks
under the law.
The IRS must figure out who has insurance and who does
not, and thus who they will fine for being uninsured, plus begin to distribute
trillions of dollars in insurance subsidies.
Meanwhile, five million Americans have had their private
insurance policies cancelled, and businesses are laying off employes or
reducing hours worked to avoid Obama's unpopular and unworkable insurance
mandates.
And Obama has started to blame the Republicans who warned
this would happen and voted against it.
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