It’s like this administration doesn’t want to learn.
Administration officials scrambled Friday to find a quick fix to a problem President Obama said would never come about — millions of insurance policies canceled for people who have health plans they want to keep.
But as the controversy threatened Obama’s efforts to reassure fellow Democrats that he had things under control, administration officials and policy experts said they didn’t yet have a plan to solve the problem without further bogging down the president’s signature health reform plan.
Seriously? Seriously? Look, we are no longer in the land of the simple solution. Contrary to the apparent mindset of the hothouse flower technocrats that have flocked to this administration the way that pigeons flock to a pile of bread: people tend to try the obvious answers and easy fixes first. There probably never was a simple solution to the problem Obama is facing – which is to say, he lied to people about how they could keep their plan if they liked it* – and even if there was, well, that ship has sailed.
I will have to break my usual rule about political books and read the postmortems on this administration. There’s a definite missing mechanism in the executive branch; it’s like they don’t know how to break contract from a failure. Which is precisely the problem, of course. The media always did it for the Obama administration before, but the media is having too much fun right now consuming what they love.
Via @Allahpundit.
Moe Lane
*Here’s something that a lot of the people trying, valiantly**, to push back the grandfathering tide either cannot or will not admit: prior to Obamacare when people changed their health care plans, or had their plans changed for them, the majority of them didn’t really think that they were changing their plans at all. This was because their new plans were generally close to their old ones in price, deductible, network… sure, prices went up, but they did so at a level that did not trigger sticker shock for most people. But you cannot double a person’s premiums and deductible and not expect sticker shock. You simply cannot.
**I am a veteran of the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. I know what it’s like to look up and watch as the tsunami blots out the sun; and while I may not have any sympathy for the Obamacare rearguard I can indeed recognize as meritorious the trait that permit an activist to choose to go down swinging.
I’d have said the technocrats flocked like flies to dung, but I’m notoriously mean-spirited.
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Which reminds me of a quotation from one of my favorite films, Rob Roy. For context, the Duke of Argyll has just confronted the Marquess of Montrose (played by the wonderfully villainous John Hurt) about rumors that are being attached to Argyll:
Montrose: (airily) Great men’s names draw rumours as shite draws flies.
Argyll: You are the shite, Montrose! And the flies upon it!
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Make of that what you will…
“I can indeed recognize as meritorious the trait that permit an activist to choose to go down swinging.”
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Me, too. But I will still help “put the boot in” when they do go down, and take a great deal of satisfaction in doing so. Anyone who can support that monstrosity deserves to have their career stomped to death, so that they have to spend 60-80 hours a week crawling through all manner of filth to earn a bare living while some inside-the-beltway bootlicker tries to tell them how what little money they do earn has to be spent.
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Yeah, you could say that I’m just a wee bit past “not having any sympathy”….
I’ll help hold them down for you.
Yes, but then you lose the people like *me*.
Crawling through all manner of filth 60-80 hours a week is how I have to make my living…and it’s a pretty sparse living at that. I’d like to see every one of the bastards involved with creating and/or defending “Obamacare” have to earn their living the way I do. Not a single one of them could cut it, I bet.
Loyalty is a fine quality, but it doesn’t make up for the combined arrogance, stupidity and venality of the Obama administration.
Heh. The shock, for me, has always been in finding out what COBRA would cost…
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Mew
COBRA coverage costs the employer portion plus the employee portion plus two percent admin fees. That is the law. So the shock is learning how much of the tab your employer was picking up.
My father told me when I was a boy: Son, there is the easy way and there is the RIGHT way.
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Too bad Obama didn’t get that advice from his father.
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Yes, I went there. I regret nothing!
Cobra was never a good idea Acat, it’s at best a stop gap on the way to losing coverage. I know I’ve paid it before, it sucked then and I’m sure it sucks now.
This is only small potatoes to what’s coming when the employer mandate kicks in, if they can’t come up with something now, what are they going to do next year. And that was always the problem Government cannot respond to crisis in a timely manner, even when the crisis is of it’s own making. They KNEW this would happen and yet they were still caught by surprise! They wrote the frigging rules that caused this and still they’re surprised!
I found out this week that my employer-provided health plan will change again next April. Among other as-yet unknown changes, if my wife is employed and that employer offers health care, my plan will no longer cover her. People keep telling me Democrats favor choice, but every time they get in power more choices are taken away.