President Obama held a press conference Thursday to apologize, yet again, for all the problems with the Obamacare rollout. He says no one is more frustrated than he is, which means he hasn’t been looking at the polls, because at least he still has his health coverage.
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And it must mean he hasn’t been talking to the multitude of vulnerable Democrats who staked their political careers on his (subtle) promise that Obamacare would be so popular that the public would keep Democrats in power for decades.
Even if the press conference demonstrates the president hasn’t learned much, here are five things the rest of us have learned.
1. The man in charge didn’t know ‘nuthin about all the problems—until a week after the disastrous rollout. This has to be the least believable of Obama’s claims, though press secretary Jay Carney says it a lot. Everyone else knew there were significant problems the first day. Obama says people kept claiming that it needed minor fixes, but after a week it was clear that it was more than minor fixes.
Presidents need people around them that will tell them the truth. Apparently, Obama doesn’t have anyone like that. And it’s not just Obamacare, it’s Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS and many more.
2. The government is terrible at doing IT, which is why he placed all his Obamacare bets on creating the most complicated website “eveh.” The president explained to the press how bad the government is at doing big IT rollouts, even providing some examples. He’s right.
But if he knew that, why did he put all of his emphasis on healthcare.gov? It’s like saying that there is no one more untrustworthy with your money than Bernie Madoff, which is why he has made him secretary of the Treasury.
3. “Hey, trying to micromanage the whole health insurance system is really tough.” Every elitist, big-government liberal believes that he or she can see all the problems in a market and devise a way to make it all work better. They almost never recognize that those existing problems are a result of government interference, not a lack of it.
And so a group of the Ivy Leagues’ best and brightest decided how they thought the health insurance system should work and drafted a 2,700-page law to implement their vision. No experience in the industry they are remaking was required. And yet they are surprised, but mostly annoyed, when their vision doesn’t work as planned.
But the (false) lesson they always seem to learn is that if they had only imposed more restrictions and regulations in the beginning, it would have all worked out. They never learn—and you got that sense from the president’s conference—that humans cannot micromanage one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
4. The president will work with anyone to make Obamacare work better as long as there is no basic change to his unworkable law. Obama made it clear that the health care system that worked pretty well for the vast majority of Americans is not as good as his health care system that works for almost no one.
So he is eager to work with anyone who will help him fix his broken system as long as they don’t really want to fix it. It’s like his effort to keep adding patches to the website when the whole thing needs to be scrapped and completely redone.
5. He wants health insurers and state insurance commissioners to keep his promise that people can keep a “substandard” policy his law eliminates and that no longer exists. The most bizarre part of the conference is his effort to get health insurers and, if they aren’t cooperative, state insurance commissioners to make sure people aren’t being canceled from policies that do not qualify under the law.
Americans will be fined for not having “qualified” —which means Obamacare approved—health insurance. That’s why insurers were dropping those policies: they do not comply with Obamacare. People would be paying for coverage in addition to paying a penalty. Now Obama wants to stop that process and try to reverse it—which probably can’t be done.
Most of all, it’s clear the man who knew nothing about how the health insurance system worked before trying to remake it in his own image hasn’t learned anything in the intervening years—and especially the last six weeks.
Perhaps the only thing he has learned is how to use analogies he thinks the public will understand. And so he equates the disastrous Obamacare rollout to fumbling a football. But there is something he needs to know about fumbles: they can result in a turnover, with the other team getting the ball.
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