Will Obama delay Obamacare?

Andy Matthews

Every week, NPRI President Andy Matthews writes a column for NPRI's week-in-review email. If you are not getting our emails, which contain our latest commentaries and news stories, you can sign up here to receive them.


Will Obama delay Obamacare?

Liberals view government as the solution to society's problems.

“If only we spent more on education…” “Government needs more control to stop those greedy businessmen and women.” “We need government intervention to fix our housing problems.”

If someone in society has a problem, inconvenience or even a perceived slight, liberals have a solution: government. Just give liberals more control, funded by more of your money, and they will plan out your life better than you can. “We can't trust you to save for retirement, so let's force everyone into Social Security. No, it's not a Ponzi scheme. It's a government program structured like a Ponzi scheme, which is totally different.”

And there is no program liberals have touted more heavily in recent years than Obamacare.

The Obama administration even brought in celebrities like Jennifer Hudson and Michael Cera to encourage young people to sign up for Obamacare on Oct. 1, when the Obamacare health insurance exchange website went live.

And the Obama administration was wildly successful … at generating publicity for the site.

But when citizens went to the Obamacare website on Oct. 1, they found error messages, long wait times, and a screen telling them: “The system is down at the moment.”

The system was such a disaster that an Arkansas kick-off event had to resort to paper applications. And when citizens called the helpline, they were told that the so-called navigators were also locked out of the system.

And once programmers started looking at the website code, their reaction swung between being amused and mortified. The Wall Street Journal reported that tech experts indentified numerous coding problems and flaws in the architecture of the system. John McAfee, the founder of the computer security company McAfee, Inc., said the government website is a hacker’s “dream.”

As Jonah Goldberg wrote recently, this can’t be blamed on glitches. A “glitch” is when your tail light doesn’t work. When your brakes fail and you go careening off the overpass, that’s more what we’d call a “catastrophic failure.”

The news since Oct. 1 has only gotten worse for the Obama administration.

Now we know that insurance companies are getting bad data from the exchange.

Now we know that the site was built using 10-year-old technology.

Now we know that the Obama administration hid rates until after you created an account (which contributed to overloading the servers), because they were worried about sticker stock if Americans saw the unsubsidized costs of insurance.

Now we know that the Obama administration didn’t even test the system until a week before the launch, when comparable sites require four to six months of testing!

Now we know that the government can create a system that makes the DMV look good.

We know it’s been an utter failure, and you know who else knows it’s been a disaster?

President Obama.

Rumblings have even started that the Obama administration is considering the politically unthinkable — delaying Obamacare. If the website can’t register the young and healthy adults needed to subsidize the “insurance” of the old and sick, then the insurance death spiral conservatives and libertarians have warned about will spin out of control.

The incompetence Obama and his administration have demonstrated in trying to build a website only underscores the most important point: Government shouldn’t be running our nation’s health care system or move beyond its core functions to try to fix society’s problems.

It’s time to let markets work. If we don’t try to steer them, they won’t go berserk.

Until next time,

Andy Matthews
NPRI President


Remember, if you'd like to receive the latest from NPRI, sign-up for our emails here.