12 Must-Read Quotes from This Article On Why ObamaCare Needs a “Drop-Dead Date”

Megan McArdle penned a stunning analysis yesterday at Bloomberg on why ObamaCare is failing, and suggests that the failing health care law may need to delay itself, or risk an implosion that drags our entire health care system down with it.

The Obama Administration delayed ObamaCare’s rule-making for political purposes, and now the White House is reaping what it sowed via the train wreck implementation of the health care law. If President Obama can’t prove – soon – that the ObamaCare website is capable of doing what the law requires it to do, the entire insurance marketplace may be at stake.

Read the whole thing. If you don’t have time, we’ve highlighted 12 must-read quotes the article offers as to why ObamaCare needs a “drop-dead date.”

1. “The administration delayed writing major rules until after the 2012 election, because it didn’t want to give Republicans any ammunition for their campaign.”

2. “Henry Chao, the Health and Human Services Department’s digital architect of the insurance marketplace, seems to have been sounding the alarm bells internally…Chao was worried that the systems wouldn’t work, a concern to which higher-ups apparently responded by basically telling him in effect that, according to the Times piece, ‘failure was not an option.'”

3. “This is stunning. It’s far worse than I imagined, and I am pretty cynical. The law’s supporters are engaged in some high-speed blamestorming: It’s the Republicans’ fault for not giving the law more money, or it’s the fault of Republican governors who didn’t build their exchanges, or maybe it’s one of the vendors…But ultimately, the litany of mistakes that the administration made overwhelms these complaints.”

4. “Nor can you really blame the Republicans — an argument that makes sense only if you don’t examine it very closely. It starts by assuming (but never stating) that the administration passed a law that didn’t work as written, and then posits a civic duty for the opposition not to oppose laws that they oppose, but instead to help the majority party turn an unworkable law into something more to said party’s liking. This is absurd.” 

5. “What explains this long train of poor decision-making is some combination of bureaucratic inertia, a desire to hide what they were doing from voters who might not like it and a terrifying insouciance about how easy it might be to build a system of this size and complexity.”

6. “But given that they didn’t even announce that they were taking the system down for more fixes this weekend, I’m also guessing that it’s pretty bad. Bad enough that it’s time to start talking about a drop-dead date: At what point do we admit that the system just isn’t working well enough, roll it back and delay the whole thing for a year?”

7. “If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare — and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market. The reason that the exchanges were so important was that they were needed to attract young, healthy people into the insurance system…the healthiest people will drop out, because insurance is no longer such a good deal for them.”

8. “Without the exchanges, the death spiral seems almost assured. The amount of work required to find a policy, figure out your subsidy, buy coverage and file the paperwork will be very high. And it’s unlikely that folks who can’t even be bothered to go to ehealthinsurance.com right now will do it.”

9. “There’s a reason that virtually every person you’ve seen written up in an article as they tried to get insurance at a community center or clinic is some combination of over 55, retired or afflicted with a serious chronic condition.”

10. “But it will be even more politically embarrassing to get to December and find out that we have commanded millions of Americans to buy insurance on a system that doesn’t work. And it is not a good bargain to cover some people now, but in doing so, to make insurance unaffordable for millions more in a few years. If we can’t launch the system correctly, then we need to wait until we can.”

11. “If the system cannot reliably process 50 percent of its users on Nov. 1 — and I mean from end to end, including sending a valid enrollment file to the insurer — then the administration should ask for a one-year delay of Obamacare’s various regulations, including the individual mandate. Congress, including Republicans, should be ready to give it to them, with no strings attached.”

12. “The administration’s desire to avoid a giant political embarrassment is entirely understandable. But the rest of us have an even deeper and more important interest in a functioning market for health insurance.”