The best jokes about the absolutely abysmal rollout of Obamacare have come not from the program’s critics but from the Affordable Care Act’s two biggest champions. And the biggest tears? Well, those will come from the rest of us over the coming years, in the form of declining levels of choice in health care and rising prices.
Faced with the manifest—and ongoing—failure of the federal exchange at Healthcare.gov to allow people to shop, compare, and enroll in great new insurance at low, low prices, Barack Obama huffed, “Just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.”
The president’s comments deliberately echoed that of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who on the launch date pleaded with Americans to “give us the same slack they give Apple…If there’s not quite the operational excellence right away, we’ll continue to press for that.”
Operational excellence? Equating a glitch in an operating system that has revolutionized mobile and tablet computing to an unproven program whose website seems to be infected with the Stuxnet virus? Do these people think we’re Republican-level stupid or what (more on that later)?
