Daniel Henninger argues, in the Wall Street Journal, that we have nothing to worry about: Obamacare is going to collapse of its own weight.
The public’s dislike of ObamaCare isn’t growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.
Big labor unions and smaller franchise restaurant owners want out. UPS dropped coverage for employed spouses. Corporations such as Walgreens and IBM IBM are transferring employees or retirees into private insurance exchanges. Because of ObamaCare, the Cleveland Clinic has announced early retirements for staff and possible layoffs. The federal government this week made public its estimate of premium costs for the federal health-care exchanges. It is a morass, revealing the law’s underappreciated operational complexity.
But ObamaCare’s Achilles’ heel is technology. The software glitches are going to drive people insane.
Creating really large software for institutions is hard. Creating big software that can communicate across unrelated institutions is unimaginably hard. ObamaCare’s software has to communicate—accurately—across a mind-boggling array of institutions: HHS, the IRS, Medicare, the state-run exchanges, and a whole galaxy of private insurers’ and employers’ software systems.
Recalling Rep. Thomas’s 1999 remark about Medicare setting prices for 3,000 counties, there is already mispricing of ObamaCare’s insurance policies inside the exchanges set up in the states.
The odds of ObamaCare’s eventual self-collapse look stronger every day. After that happens, then what? Try truly universal health insurance? Not bloody likely if the aghast U.S. public has any say.
Enacted with zero Republican votes, ObamaCare is the solely owned creation of the Democrats’ belief in their own limitless powers to fashion goodness out of legislated entitlements. Sometimes social experiments go wrong. In the end, the only one who supported Frankenstein was Dr. Frankenstein.
Read the whole thing.
GoneWithTheWind
It was enacted with zero Republican support but there were a number of political and possibly illegal tricks associated with it. We all remember that the house “deemed it passed”. But how many remember that Massachusetts disallowed the governor to appoint a replacement for Kennedy thus assuring a Democrat senator when the bill could have been stopped by 41 Republicans in the Senate. There were a few other hi-jinks that might not pass constitutional muster but the bottom line is this bill is probably not a legally passed law no matter what the Supremes say.
Will it collapse? Sure after it destroys the health care system and cause tens even hundreds of thousands of deaths from poor or lack of health care and wastes trillions. As someone famous once said “what difference will it make” that it will eventually collapse if in the meantime it destroys us?
Funktacular
No federal program ever collapses. Henninger should know better.
James
No, these are true believers. They never give up or lose faith. They will fight to the bitter end just get on root in place.
Jason in KT
“Reconciled” on Christmas Eve because it was the last possible moment it could be done before there were a cloture-blocking 41 Republicans in the Senate. The more it’s implemented, the harder it will be to undo. The more it costs, the less will be delivered in order to keep it balanced on the books. And in two generations, it will always have been like this.
SDD
Let’s look at history. When government fails at something, what do people demand? More government action. Not less. [See Dodd-Frank].
Ergo, for Democrats, there is no downside to failure.
Please Leave a Comment!