“I’m sorry” is not a common phrase heard from the second most powerful man on Earth. In an interview with NBC, President Barack Obama gave a half-hearted apology regarding the epic failure that was the health care website’s rollout.
His exact words were, “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” which roughly translates to “I’m sorry you caught me in a blatant lie.”
That lie was the much-heard phrase, “If you like your plan, you can keep it, period.” I guess he forgot to mention that the law would force millions of Americans off of their plans, 93,000 of whom are in Louisiana.
That’s 500 more people than Tiger Stadium can hold. But hey, we had to pass it to find out what was in it, right?
Adding insult to injury, the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Benedict Arnold, aka Chief Justice John Roberts, chose to uphold this legislative atrocity. Former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, whose court struck down the National Industry Recovery Act, must have rolled over in his grave.
The cherry on top is that the website people are supposed to use to sign up in the health care exchanges, health care.gov, doesn’t even work after half a billion in funding and more than two years to construct it.
That’s more funding than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Spotify each had in their respective infancies.
The contractor responsible for a majority of the site’s development, CGI Federal, a subsidiary of Canadian based CGI Group Inc., was awarded the contract for health care.gov 18 months after the ACA’s passage.
This is a company with a highly suspect past, almost single-handedly wrecking Canada’s gun-registration program, whose website it was asked to build in the 1990s. According to Tony Bernardo, executive director of the Canadian Shooting Sports Administration, CGI “could screw up the Lord’s Prayer.”
You would think the federal government could do a basic background check on a corporation now responsible for the functionality of a multi-billion dollar industry.
The website’s failure is indicative of the law’s overwhelming deficiencies. It is a bloated mess that throws a wrench into an advanced health care system, all for the sake of trying to ensure a few million people have health insurance who could have just been subsidized directly.
Perhaps the one ray of sunshine in this nightmare is that the Supreme Court ruled individual states can opt out of the law’s expansion of Medicaid, which Gov. Bobby Jindal has embraced whole-heartedly.
The expansion would cost $1.7 billion over the next 10 years, and would be a gross increase in Louisiana’s welfare woes. Jindal needs to stand firm in the face of cries from the left to expand the program.
The fact of the matter is that the ACA is an unmitigated failure. It will harm millions of Americans across the country, be it in the form of delayed coverage, increased premiums or loss of hours at work.
Instead of forcing this law on the American people, the responsible thing to do would be for Congress and the administration to admit their mistakes.
Congress should then draft and pass an amendment to the law that would allow for an across-the-board delay for at least a year, so lawmakers can sort out a lasting solution to this mess. In fact, our very own Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has proposed an amendment that would reinstate plans dropped due to the new standards set by the ACA.
The president should then bite the bullet and sign the amendment. He does not want to harm his landmark legislation or his legacy, but as it stands right now, neither looks very good.