Obamacare’s “insurance marketplace” works just as well as every other Soviet-style system.
The most surprising thing about the botched launch of Obamacare’s “online insurance marketplace” is that the failure surprised anyone. From the moment, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that Barack Obama began promising to reform our medical delivery system, conservatives have repeatedly warned the public that his view of the issue was distorted by tired statist shibboleths. We pointed out that Obama’s closest friends and most influential mentors were communists and that, for him, “reform” was a euphemism for “federal take-over.” Based on these realities, we predicted that Obama’s brave new health care system would be a government-dominated, command-and-control disaster.
Nonetheless, there was widespread shock and bewilderment when the government bureaucrats steering Obamacare’s flagship ran it aground on its October 1st maiden voyage. How can anyone be surprised? The story of PPACA’s online marketplace is just another cliché-filled scene in the tragicomedy of centrally planned, government-run systems. It doesn’t matter if they are conceived in Moscow or inside the Beltway. All such systems meet the same fate. Whether imposed by well-meaning but naïve zealots or foisted on the electorate by despots who simply lust after “command” and “control,” they are always holed below the water line by the sheer incompetence of government bureaucrats.
Yet Obamacare’s advocates thought their pet project would be different. And it’s not like we right-wing knuckle-draggers were the only doubters. The HHS bureaucrats themselves feared that the technology of HealthCare.gov would not be ready for prime time by October. A mere six months before go-live, the government apparatchik overseeing its software development had given up on the possibility that it would be efficient and was obviously clinging to the pathetic hope that he was headed for a little rough weather rather than an outright shipwreck. He told a national policy meeting of America’s Health Insurance Plans, “We are under 200 days from open enrollment, and I’m pretty nervous.”
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