Oy. Avik Roy finishes up savaging the administration for creating a law that ostensibly was about making sure that the uninsured were insured (spoiler warning: it didn’t) with this:
…According to the Associated Press, at least 4.7 million Americans who shop for coverage on their own have had their plans canceled because they don’t conform to Obamacare’s regulations. So Obamacare has disrupted the coverage of millions of Americans, requiring many to purchase costlier policies with higher deductibles and narrower doctor networks, for a fairly modest expansion of coverage.
According to the administration, total sign-ups now exceed 4 million. But on a recent HHS conference call, Obamacare implementation point man Gary Cohen was asked the key question: how many of the people who have signed up for Obamacare were previously insured? His response: “That’s not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way.”
So. The whole point of Obamacare was to expand coverage to the uninsured. But for the tens of thousands of regulations that the law has imposed on the country, its authors never bothered to try to measure the one thing that they were actually trying to achieve. That about sums it all up.
Who here really believes that the administration isn’t collecting that data in a systematic way? Anyone? Anyone? – Yeah, I’m not buying that, either. What they’re doing is collecting that data in a systematic, yet deniable, way. There’s somebody out there whose job is now putting those numbers together, only s/he is listed as doing something completely different on the org chart and nobody says anything about that. And if the uninsured signup percentage numbers suddenly skyrocket? Then hey presto! …Turns out the administration was collecting that data all along.
I don’t even mind that so much, per se. I just wish that the Obama administration would stop assuming that they’re the only bright people in the room. It’s not true and their strategy isn’t working anyway.
Moe Lane
Moe-I have to disagree here. I think they were so cocksure about the mission, they did not do basic stuff. This wasn’t something they even thought about measuring. An oversight, oh, like…. too numerous to mention. They really, really don’t know squat. Magic wand time.
I have to disagree also. We are not dealing with efficient teutonic Fascists here, but Democrats. The only way they get the details of power and oppression right is to co-opt a military or Republican created organization and alter it’s mission with a few political generals and appointees. Can anyone say NSA? It is not just the philosophy that is morally and intellectually bankrupt, it is the implementation.