World News Korner

Sunday's Washington Post article makes it quite clear how the Republican party created the "train wreck" of an Affordable Care rollout that they could use in talking points to discredit the entire program.

Much of this article focuses on mistakes the administration made by being too insular for fear of being sabotaged by the Republicans who made no secret of the fact they would do just about anything to keep it from being successful:

Based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and outsiders who worked alongside them, the project was hampered by the White House’s political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law — sensitivity so intense that the president’s aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition. Inside the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the main agency responsible for the exchanges, there was no single administrator whose full-time job was to manage the project. Republicans also made clear they would block funding, while some outside IT companies that were hired to build the Web site, HealthCare.gov, performed poorly.

However their vigilance did little to stop the political IED's from being placed along it's path:

Although the statute provided plenty of money to help states build their own insurance exchanges, it included no money for the development of a federal exchange — and Republicans would block any funding attempts. According to one former administration official, Sebelius simply could not scrounge together enough money to keep a group of people developing the exchanges working directly under her.

Bureaucratic as this move may sound, it was fateful, according to current and former administration officials. It meant that the work of designing the federal health exchange — and of helping states that wanted to build their own — became fragmented.

This allowed the Republicans to point the finger at the Obama administration for their ineptitude when it fact they had dammed off the flow of money needed to fully develop the federal exchanges.

I think we all know what their next step was:

A larger number of states than expected were signaling that, under Republican pressure, they would refuse to build their own online insurance marketplaces and would rely on the federal one. The more states in the federal exchange, the more complex the task of building it. Yet, according to several former officials, White House staff would not let this fact be included in the specifications. Their concern, one former official said, was that Republicans would seize on it as evidence of a feared federal takeover of the health-care system.

And there you have it. Strike fear in the administration's heart concerning possible sabotage, block funding for the federal exchanges to cripple them and make them less effective, and then keep Republican run states from developing local exchanges to relieve the pressure and smooth the way for progress.

Instant train wreck.

And the only casualties are the millions of Americans who still cannot get access to affordable health insurance, the millions more who are now being victimized by greedy insurance companies who have kicked them off their health plans only to offer them more expensive ones, and of course the trust of the voting public who naively believed that the politicians they elected would work for them, and NOT simply engage in partisan battles to the detriment of the government and of its people.

(H/T to Jonathon Capehart)

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