In a much-discussed post titled "Five Thoughts on the ObamaCare Disaster," the Washington Post's Ezra Klein manages to cycle through the first three of Elisabeth Kübler Ross's five stages of grief:
• Denial.
"In the weeks leading up to the launch I heard some very ugly things
about how the system was performing when transferring data to
insurers--a necessary step if people are actually going to get
insurance. I tried hard to pin the rumors down, but I could never quite
nail the story, and there was a wall of official denials from the Obama
administration. It was just testing, they said. They were fixing the
bugs day by day."
• Anger. "Medicare
Part D was, at this point in its launch, also considered a disaster.
. . . Today, Medicare Part D is broadly considered a success. But
Medicare Part D had something the Affordable Care Act
doesn't: An opposition party that decided to be constructive. The
federal health-care law's not going to get much help from the Republican
Party."
Klein neglects to note that Medicare Part D, enacted in
2003, was a bipartisan bill. It's true that most Democrats voted against
it, but there were 16 Democratic votes in favor in the House and 11 in the Senate.
In both chambers enough Republicans voted "no" that the Democratic ayes
were necessary for passage. Even for those who voted "no," coming
around to support a new entitlement is much less of an ideological
stretch for a liberal Democrat than a conservative Republican. And many
Republicans now in Congress owe their seats to the backlash against ObamaCare.
Klein
is also angry at the administration, demanding: "Is anybody going to be
held accountable? Is anybody going to be fired? Will anyone new be
brought in to run the cleanup effort? Does the Obama administration know
what went wrong, and are therr [sic] real plans to find out? . . .
Heads should roll."
(Click link below to read more)
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Wednesday, October 16, 2013
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