Liberals like to think big. They like to think “comprehensive.” Whenever you read a liberal “big picture” plan, you will read thorough discussions of the various aspects of the problem to be solved, along with the appropriate solutions, and then you will get the kicker: you can’t address these problems separately; you have to do the whole thing in fell swoop.
This “all or nothing” feature is always presented as accidental, something forced on the creators of the plan, not something they sought, but of course that’s a lie. The whole point is to do something great, something huge, something without compromise, something where compromise, far from being a necessity, is a, or rather the, mortal sin.
The great granddaddy of Obamacare was a dude named Ira Magaziner, a graduate of Brown University who first dreamed of re-inventing Rhode Island via the “Greenhouse Compact.” Unfortunately, the Rhode Island folks declined to be re-invented, but a dude like Ira doesn’t fail downwards. He fails upwards, and Magaziner eventually linked up with the Clintons, pushing plans for a national industrial policy that, sadly, never materialized.
When Bill Clinton was elected, Magaziner was second only to Hillary herself on the White House Task Force to Reform Health Care, and had a major hand in creating that massive airship that never achieved liftoff. In 2008, a good 15 years after the failure of Billarycare, Team Obama naturally had no use for the advice of sixty-something has been like Ira, but that didn’t matter. Ira’s vision of rationalized, centralized planning, endowed with all the unprecedented powers of modern technology was inherently intoxicating to the liberal mind. One could at last go, where no person had ever gone before!
If Obama, his domestic policy advisors, and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her staff have any common decency, their faith in the ability of rational planning to improve the quality of American health care will be permanently reduced by the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act. This was, after all, quite possibly, the most important day in the whole eight years of the President’s two terms, and, with everything on the line, he failed to deliver, and not with a stumble but rather a belly flop of the first water.
This doesn’t prove that government is always bad and that the private sector is always right, but it does show that when government had every incentive to do its best, it couldn’t prevent itself from doing its worst.
Afterwords
Ezra Klein, the liberal blogger who has been more or less the mouthpiece of the Obama Administration on health care, provides the following “background”:
The White House’s senior staff—up to and including the president—was blindsided. Staffers deep in the process knew that HealthCare.gov wasn’t ready for primetime. But those frustrations were hidden from top-level managers. Somewhere along the chain the information was spun, softened, or just plain buried.
The result was that the White House didn’t know the truth about its own top initiative – and so they were unprepared for the disastrous launch.
I can’t believe that the president and his staff spent the past year sitting on their asses waiting for Kate to solve all their problems for them. If they did, they’re incredibly incompetent. But I strongly suspect that Ezra’s exclusive is a lie, and that Ezra is doing some pretty shameless source-greasing here. By passing along those sentiments without question and without attribution, Klein isn’t showing himself to be much of a reporter.
