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A Call for Healing

A Call for Healing
Democrats Call for Healing the Country

Nov 7, 2013

Obamacare Hearings: Government by Anecdote

There is an unintentionally funny article today by Dana Milbank which complains about “Government by Anecdote.”  His specifics have to do with letters from complaining constituents that Republicans read during the Obamacare Congressional hearings.  Democrats have been governing by anecdote since the New Deal 1930's, with great political success for their programs.  Now that the Republicans are using government by anecdote to bash Democrats, Mr. Milbank wants Republicans to stop doing it.  If Republicans have learned anything from Obama, it's to fight as dirty as possible and use the entire Democrat playbook against them.  Since Obamacare was built on lies and anecdotes, it really seems like poetic justice to attack it with truth and anecdotes. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. 
Brietbart.com quotes Harry Reid’s comments on the Senate Obamacare hearings.  “My Republican colleagues, why don’t they just – let’s number their 1 through 50 criticisms and giving all these speeches, just give us a number, and we would all – because we’ve heard these things so many times – we would immediately laugh because they’re jokes, too.  With this comment, Harry Reid seems to have admitted that there are at least 50 complaints that can be made against Obamacare. However, since Mr. Reid usually underestimates the cost of government programs, it's likely he underestimated the number of possible complaints as well. It seems to this ignorant red neck in fly over country that Mr. Reid is himself the biggest joke of all. Further, I am really enjoying the consequences, for Mr. Reid and his party, of the Obamacare” joke” he perpetrated on all of us. It seems to have backfired.

Some Obamacare critics say our Dear Leader and friends messed up on an easy web site.  I don’t think this project was easy, even though The Smartest President Ever seems to have thought so.  I've been a professional programmer for over 40 years and this is a very difficult, complicated application. In order to verify eligibility, the web site has to retrieve information from a lot of different databases, each with its own format and access methods. The sources of information include 36 states and several federal departments. Worse, the web site has to do all of this while the customer is waiting. Each piece of information retrieved introduces another chance of delay or failure. As hard as all of this is, HHS made it even harder by hiring 55 contractor firms to do various pieces of the project with no general contractor to manage integration and end-to-end testing. With HHS serving as its own general contractor, a Pearl Harbor style disaster was locked in. I don't see any way this thing is going to be ready by November 1, 2014, let alone the end of November this year.

Some Liberal commenters say that the number of insured will justify Obamacare by 2020.  What happened to the fierce urgency of now?  This argument reminds me of the famous economist John M. Keynes’ saying, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”  With any luck, Obamacare won't make it to 2020.  Given my comments above, it's not clear that the Obamacare web site will be up by November 1, 2014.  As a result, Obamacare will be lucky to survive until the end of 2017.  To the commenter’s point, it's not entirely clear that the net increase in people covered will exceed the number of people dropped from the existing plans that they liked better.   While other administration scandals can be covered up, many, many people will have first-hand experience with the effects of Obamacare.  No amount of spin from the Pravda Press is going to convince people that they are better off now than they were before Obamacare.  

A liberal author’s article comments got erased earlier today.  In response to suspicious Conservative commenters,the author promises the technical glitch will be fixed.  And I believe his promise is just as likely to happen as our Dear Leader's promise of better healthcare.  Liberal promises always boil down to, "Trust us to do the right thing for all of you."  What this really means is "Trust us and we'll do the right thing for us to expand our power."  Helping the downtrodden is such a Liberal desire, they want to create more downtrodden.  Obamacare has succeeded in taking relatively self-sufficient people and making them dependent on and subservient to the Liberals.  If we don't vote Liberal, there will be consequences to our healthcare.  That's the Chicago way. 

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