Obamacare: How is Incompetence a Defense?

In announcing that he would “allow” insurance companies to extend current individual health insurance plans for another year (an impossible task for many), President Barack Obama made several excuses for himself and his party in an attempt to minimize the damage the Obamacare debacle will cause Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections. All of these excuses, however, try to use incompetence to excuse failure.

On the failure of the federal Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, for example, Obama said: “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to.” The implication is that someone below him failed to communicate with him. But if so, why has that person not been disciplined, or fired? And why, with all that was at stake, did Obama not make sure that he was kept informed?

The president also told the country not to blame congressional Democrats who repeated his lie that people who liked their insurance could keep it. But don’t Senators and Representatives have a responsibility to seek the facts for themselves? Are members of Congress merely PR mouthpieces for the administration? Did the same excuse fly for Obama and his party when they blasted bad intelligence on the Iraq War? Of course not.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, regarded by many as the architect of Obamacare, complained on Wednesday that “we needed a CEO who understood, who’s a really great manager understood the health side” from the start. He meant that Obama should have appointed someone great to run Obamacare. But Obama is the CEO of the nation’s government. And incompetent CEOs are fired even when they have the best of intentions.