As readers of this blog know, I'm a big supporter of the Affordable Care Act, AKA "Obamacare." As readers of the web know, there are a lot of folks out there proclaiming it a disaster, a failure, a flop, etc. So far, however, I haven't seen this said by anyone I thought was capable of admitting it was a success if that was how things went. It's all people who predicted — and in many cases, prayed — it would fail. Those who so prayed are pretty awful people in my view. Since no one has offered up a credible, workable Plan B, hoping Obamacare flops is to me like saying, "Oh, I hope all those people who can't get health insurance because they're poor and/or have pre-existing conditions don't get it!"
We have two serious, related problems in this country. One is that there are all these men, women and children who can't get affordable health care. If that many people had their lives threatened by terrorists, we'd start drone strikes and marching off to war and surrendering more civil liberties. I don't understand not wanting to do something for those people. Also too, the rising cost of health care for all is crippling our nation's economy. I don't understand not wanting to fix that…and again, there is no real "other plan." When you hear someone say the answer is tort reform or setting up exchanges, that's someone who has about 4% of a plan. (They've instituted tort reform in several states and it lowers the cost of a policy an average of 1%.)
You want to get rid of Obamacare? Come up with a real alternative plan…something real-er than "we'll appoint committees to study the problems and make recommendations."
But the main reason I'm unimpressed by these articles about Obamacare being a failure is that the ones I read all seem to be about the website crashing…about people waiting online for hours and not being able to sign up. If that's true, as it seems to be, that's not an argument against Obamacare at all. I don't recall one single person who predicted it would fail saying, "It can never work because the website will be slow." They were all talking about the actual manipulation of money — what people would pay, how doctors would be compensated, how insurance rates would or would not fall. We haven't even gotten close to the part of this rollout that tells us how that will go.
Bad website design is not proof that Obamacare can't work. Websites are fixable. Each year, I get dozens of e-mails from folks who've tried to sign up for memberships and/or hotel rooms for Comic-Con in San Diego. It's getting better but it used to be that the site would crash, people would wait online forever and then get dumped off, people wouldn't get what they wanted…
That was, at best, an argument that the organizers had underestimated demand and/or had the wrong people design the sign-up portions of their website. It was not an argument that Comic-Con had failed and had to be repealed.