Note: This is not from DU but ASMB, another hole full of liberal idiots who cant think for themselves. Luckily I'm there to inform them of how wrong they are :D
Anyways, as Obamacare just gets worse and worse Democrats are in desperation mode to try to revise history and blame someone else.
Can you guess who?
ShowUsYourTaint:
As you may have noticed, the Obamacare launch has not exactly gone off without a hitch, and mostly it boils down to the Federal website not working. People living in those states that did not set up their own private exchanges are finding it impossible to compare plans or sign up for insurance because their sole resource for doing so is inoperable. Many people have wondered: How could Obama be so incompetent to let his signature health reform he had years to prepare for be so unprepared for the requirements placed on it?
There are many reasons why the website doesn't work. The main reason, though, is the inability of the Federal website to handle the kind of traffic required of it and provide for all of the intricate details personalized to individual users like it needed to. Originally, the plan was for every state to set up their own private insurance exchanges, which would have spread the overall internet traffic for Obamacare around to various state exchange websites linked to at healthcare.gov. But it turns out that some states don't like Obamacare at all, so many of these states did not set up exchanges at all, and the conservative justices of the Supreme Court ensured that states could "opt out" of the medicaid expansion as well. Which meant anyone signing up for insurance in those states would be solely reliant on the federal website to get coverage. This was an increase in traffic that was not foreseen by the people making the website, so inevitably the website failed, and it was largely caused by a lack of cooperation on Obamacare which should have changed the scope of the project. The people working on it should have foreseen that the Republican response would be to oppose the law at the state level and adjusted the scope of the project accordingly, but alas they did not because they trusted that they could get some cooperation on a law that Republicans wrote.
Unfortunately, adjusting the scope of the project also means cost overruns, and spending more money on the website would give the opposition ammunition, so they couldn't do that either.
That wasn't the only reason though: Because many business interests are united so strongly against Obamacare, Obama could not trust that if he contracted out the job of making the website to a major IT firm they would not sabotage it (or simply nobody who could do the job would take the job when offered as a different way of sabotaging it). So essentially, he had to give the job to people he could trust to do the job, even though their IT knowledge was lacking for the size of the project they were now taking on (after the red states did not set up exchanges and opted out of the medicare expansion). So when you combine the fact that the people who made the website were not the best of the best as far as IT goes, and the fact that more people than originally expected were going to need to use the federal website after the red states bucked the law, you can see how things got out of hand here pretty quickly. Obama had a problem with "moral hazard" here, which occurs when you cannot trust the people you hire to be able or willing to do the job they are tasked with. The problem here is a lack of trust in the people who had the skills to pull this job off.
Some of this is on Obama himself, of course. He probably overreacted to the seemingly constant stream of Republican opposition at every turn and this led him not to trust private firms to handle the website when I am certain some of them value doing a good job at whatever they're hired to do even if they personally disagree with it.
So why are business interests so opposed to the law that they would fight, scratch, claw tooth and nail and generally do everything they can to kill it? It really boils down to perceptions of the poor. They don't want people who they feel are not contributing to society to have healthcare. They feel that this is propping up dead weight, or is an inefficient allocation of capital, because if people were providing something they would already have good paying jobs that provide employer-based coverage, people who are standing on their own two feet, lifting up themselves and society together are ultimately what they want. They feel that they worked hard to get where they are and other people should have to as well, and giving a benefit like healthcare for nothing might present a "free rider problem" where people are receiving a benefit without paying into the system by working for it. The problem is there is a rather narrow view of the value provided by human beings inherent in this judgment of worth of people, and unless you want to take this line of thinking to it's logical extreme (cutting off the dead weight) you are going to have to pay to support these people anyways, so you might as well work at building them up instead of letting them implode until they die or something. But ultimately, the problem here is a lack of trust that this investment will be worth it, and that is an understandable concern because it is not always obvious how these people will be "useful to society".
There are other reasons for the failure too, but I think this paints the overall picture of how partisan gridlock makes government dysfunctional.
If you guessed Republicans, your right!
This one really runs the gambit of liberal lunacy.
First off you've got the "GOP obstructionist" argument. Always a favorite of mine. I mean, its not like the Democrats did everything they could to stop President Bush or anything. This kind of "obstruction" has never happened before in the history of....ever.
Then of course is SCOTUS daring to not allow the massive expansion of federal power to mandate what a state can and cannot do with Medicaid/Care. How dare SCOTUS strike down this law! Dont they know that Obama and Obamacare are simply above the law?!
Of course no good liberal rant would be complete without the "Businesses want poor people to die" claim, as well as the hilarious claim that Obama didn't hire a IT group to design healthcare.gov because they would sabotage it(what with them being big business poor people haters and all).
And just to make sure we hit all the typical liberal talking points he finishes up with the classic "partisan gridlock" statement.
The entire thread can be read
http://boards.adultswim.com/t5/Babbling/The-Problem-With-The-Obamacare-Website/m-p/69327777#U69327777hereIts worth it to. It really just devolves from here.
