…cracks:
Alternate headline: The rats are jumping off the sinking ObamaCare ship. Remember all that talk about how damaged the GOP was after the Obama/Reid government shutdown? My, how things change in just a week. No longer able to obsess over Ted Cruz, the media realizes what a shambles the Democrats have become.
They’re not happy about it, either, but they’ve reached a point at which they can’t ignore it any more.
Some thoughts on email and battery conservation in airplanes.
Also from Achenbach: a nice review of Gravity (with spoilers, for those who, like me, haven’t yet seen it).
Can we fix it by taxing it?
In which Emily Yoffe offers common-sense advice, is accordingly attacked by “feminists,” and defended by Ruth Marcus.
It’s in danger of collapsing.
I’d say it’s collapsed. As Glenn often says, another Jimmy Carter was a best-case scenario in terms of foreign policy.
…weathers the shutdown. Jeff Foust’s report on last week’s ISPCS conference.
It’s time to propose some.
Yes, I think it’s ripe now, thanks to the monumental cluster effery of the administration.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Republicans next strategy to kill this monstrosity:
Alexander, the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has a plan for replacing Obamacare. It includes providing governors with more flexibility in operating state Medicaid programs, strengthening workplace wellness programs, permitting small businesses to pool their resources and offer lower-cost insurance plans for employees, expanding opportunities for consumers to purchase insurance across state lines and providing greater access to health savings accounts.
Alexander said his plan offers “step-by-step reforms that would reduce the costs of healthcare.”
Alexander isn’t alone in advocating for a process known as “repeal and replace.” The House Republican Study Committee, a conservative group within the GOP caucus, also has offered an Obamacare alternative that it intends to continue pursuing.
“American families and businesses deserve and demand real solutions to the serious problems that exist in our healthcare system,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the committee chairman. “The RSC’s American Health Care Reform Act is a common-sense bill that will lower costs using conservative, free-market solutions which give American families more choices without the unworkable mandates and billions in taxes included in President Obama’s healthcare law.”
The 200-page bill offers $20,000 in tax deductions to families and a $7,500 deduction to individuals to purchase insurance from vendors in any state — thus, supporters say, allowing people to save money by selecting lower-cost providers.
The measure also offers altered proposals to some of the more popular aspects of Obamacare – creation of a $25 billion fund to lower costs for those afflicted with pre-existing conditions, permitting people to carry their insurance from job to job and permitting coverage for adult children up to age 26.
That last remains stupid, regardless of how popular it is.
Aiiiieeeeeeee! It’s melting!!!!
Those horrid little Tea Partiers:
What is at issue here is not some sacred moral value, such as “In God We Trust.” Domestic politics or the affairs of nations are not an avocation for angels. But the coin of this imperfect realm is credibility. Sydney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman explained the terms of trade in “The Maltese Falcon”: “I must tell you what I know, but you won’t tell me what you know. That is hardly equitable, sir. I don’t think we can do business along those lines.”
Bluntly, Mr. Obama’s partners are concluding that they cannot do business with him. They don’t trust him. Whether it’s the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, the French, the Iraqis, the unpivoted Asians or the congressional Republicans, they’ve all had their fill of coming up on the short end with so mercurial a U.S. president. And when that happens, the world’s important business doesn’t get done. It sits in a dangerous and volatile vacuum.
The next major political event in Washington is the negotiation over spending, entitlements and taxes between House budget chairman Paul Ryan and his Senate partner, Patty Murray. The bad air over this effort is the same as that Marco Rubio says is choking immigration reform: the fear that Mr. Obama will urge the process forward in public and then blow up any Ryan-Murray agreement at the 11th hour with deal-killing demands for greater tax revenue.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a president reach complete lame-duck status so soon into his second term.
Why ObamaCare is similar to it:
…the Affordable Care Act’s insurance market reforms have created a system prone to what Charles Perrow dubbed “Normal Accidents.” By “normal,” he didn’t mean “minor” — the lead exhibit was Three Mile Island. Rather, he meant something like “hard to avoid.” The system is both complex and tightly coupled: All the pieces are interdependent, so a failure in one part is apt to cascade throughout the market. This is not a system where you want to start pulling out one piece to see how well the rest can get along without it.
The administration clearly understood this — right up to the point where a major component failed. Now it’s apparently planning to keep the reactor running with as many pieces as possible in the hopes that none of it will unexpectedly blow up. This is not sound policy thinking, or even sound political thinking, and I think that all of us who care about keeping insurance available for ordinary Americans should try to talk them out of it — for their good, as well as our own.
Sound policy thinking is not their hallmark.
As an aside, Perrow’s book is excellent — I used it for doing case studies of various tightly-coupled complex disasters when I was doing contract work for S&MA at NASA HQ a few years ago.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The buck stops with Obama:
He’s not very competent, and like most people who aren’t very competent, he tends to hire people who are no more competent than he. As they say: First rate people hire first rate people. Second rate people hire third rate people.
Except he seems to be a third rater hiring fourth raters. And this was obvious to some of us in 2008, but not enough, then or four years later.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama and Sebelius: The dog ate my homework:
The collapse of the Obamacare project over the first three weeks offers no such pathways away from responsibility. Obama and his team demanded that Congress pass the Affordable Care Act so that they could impose their own ideas of central-planning reform on the health-care industry, which makes up a sixth of the American economy.
It passed with no Republican votes, and thanks to its tax provisions, provides most of its own revenue streams. The Department of Health and Human Services has had 42 months to prepare for the rollout of the web exchange, the critical tool that would allow people to purchase mandated insurance policies under government supervision.
In short, the ACA was the Obama administration’s own bid to prove that activist, large-scale government was superior in innovation and competency. Instead, it has become a signature example of the lack of accountability, incompetence, and rank dishonesty that activist, large-scale government creates and protects. And that was just on performance. Despite the 42 months lead time and the outlay of $400 million, the web portal failed immediately, and two successive weekends of repair couldn’t make it work.
That’s actually the best news. One couldn’t have demonstrated Hayek’s thesis of the knowledge problem more spectacularly than this belly flop of a swan dive.
[Update a while later]
OK, if you don’t like the TMI analogy, how about the Titanic?
The Obama administration had three years to build Healthcare.gov, a website that is not fundamentally revolutionary when compared to the likes of Progressive.com or Amazon.com. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare during a window when they controlled all power in Washington, and were more concerned about passing a health care law than with passing a good health care law. Most of them never bothered to read the law they passed. Many of them sold their votes for pork or empty promises. While the Titanic had little advance warning of the iceberg, the Obama administration was warned by stress tests months before the site’s launch that Healthcare.gov would crash. But they did not heed those warnings.
Similar unjustified arrogance and hubris was involved.