Super Liberal Attacks Obamacare

• Let me try to understand this: the key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care superstores — called exchanges. The Administration has had three years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so.
• This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning?
•  But now, the Obama administration has announced that it won’t have the exchanges ready in time, that small businesses will be offered one choice for the time being — for a year, at least.
•  Just a few weeks ago, I reported on the failure of the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs to come up with a unified electronic health care records system. There has also been the studied inattention to the myriad ineffective job-training programs scattered through the bureaucracy. There have been the oblique and belated efforts to reform Head Start, a $7 billion program that a study conducted by its own bureaucracy — the Department of Health and Human Services — has found nearly worthless. The list is endless.
• Sooner or later, the Republican Party may come to understand that its best argument isn’t about tearing down the government we have, but making it run more efficiently.
• Sooner or later, the Democrats may come to understand that making it run efficiently is the prerequisite for maintaining power.
• I am really growing concerned about the sloppiness of this administration.
• Barack Obama is not a “how” President. Oh, he pays lip service to government reform. His people can tell you the number of unnecessary regulations they’ve eliminated. It barely scratches the surface of what needs to be done—there is no creative destruction in government, regulations pile up on top of each other like silt, generation after generation.
• He (the president) does the right thing by making health care available to the working poor, but he pays very little attention to how it will be implemented.
• The problem is not, as the Republicans claim, big government. It’s bad government.

Big anything, in my humble opinion, is always problematic.   Big government, by  definition, is bad.   Small nimbler solutions for our healthcare system would have been better.   Even massive private companies (managed care, mega hospitals) don’t work well.