IT experts are starting to weigh in on the spectacular fail of the ObamaCare launch, and explain what happened: political imperatives trumped everything else. The debut of ObamaCare is a perfect demonstration of why government should not be trusted with our health care.
People with common sense and reality-based principles — in a word, conservatives — understand that government programs are by definition political. Politicians and bureaucrats are not personally accountable for failure, as in the private sector, so failure is acceptable to them. Cost overruns, fraud, and poor service are the norm in government programs for a reason.
Politics has driven the ObamaCare launch failure from the beginning. Political consideration number one was the 2012 presidential election. The Democrats did not want voters to know there would be a huge jump in the price of insurance for most people not being subsidized. They didn’t want us to know about the four- and eight-thousand dollar deductibles, and the limits on what hospitals you would have access to and what doctors you could see. They knew voters would flock to the Republican ticket to stop it.
In order to hide ObamaCare from voters, the administration didn’t reveal the details of the law to the companies building the exchanges either, until safely after the election. As a result, the exchange designers weren’t able to begin writing software until the spring. Less than six months to create a system this complex made failure inevitable. Obama would not have been re-elected otherwise, so the choice was easy.