In response to Ezekiel Emanuel’s Lazy Standards for Success:
The nonsense spewed by ObamaCare apologists is an interesting contrast with the crushing burden of the hyper-regulatory State. I’ll bet lots of private companies wish they could just B.S. their way out of problems like President Obama and his flacks. If only they could move the goalposts dozens of times, and re-define failure out of existence!
Aside from a very modest improvement in traffic capability – which was nowhere near the boasts of the ObamaCare team, because the system crashed again today – the big “improvement” appears to be a new “waiting room” webpage that captures 404 page-not-found errors and dumps the victims at a much more polished-looking page that offers to take your email address and let you know when ObamaCare is ready for you to use it. That’s right, folks: Barack Obama’s billion-dollar website can’t even handle fifty thousand people. It tells you to come back later. And according to reports, even that part of the system crashed today, and stopped accepting email addresses!
There are two crucial differences between Obama and his team of incompetent bureaucrats, and the private sector they love to compare themselves with. Number one: they have a captive audience. As far as they’re concerned, the American people lost a political battle with Barack Obama in 2012, and we’re trapped in the dungeon of his lousy healthcare system forever. A private-sector CEO would fear losing his customers; Obama need only suppress the vast amount of dissent that would be necessary to override his veto and repeal ObamaCare before he and his veto pen are gone.
Number two: nobody regulates ObamaCare. There is no accountability, no one to hold them responsible. They lie, and lie about their lies, and then tell new lies. It doesn’t matter, because they can’t be hauled into court and prosecuted for fraud. The crazy promises of a functional website they made in October helped to fend off political doom for a couple of weeks; they will not be held accountable for utterly and completely failing to meet those promises. There is no regulatory agency standing by to haul Barack Obama, Kathleen Sebelius, Jeff Zients, and the rest of the crew into court for promising a November 30 relaunch they could not deliver.
Compare that to the latest excess of the hyper-regulatory State, in which General Motors had to recall almost 19,000 Chevy Camaros because the air bag warning label on the sun visor might peel off. And God forbid anyone should sit down in a car without the option of pulling down the sun visor and reading the air bag label!
Imagine what would happen to ObamaCare if it were subjected to such standards. We wouldn’t have to worry about repeal; the whole misbegotten mess would have been wiped out by regulators by the second week of October.