This Piece Titled “Why I’m Getting Sick Of Defending ObamaCare” Explains How Bad a Position Democrats Are In

February 11, 2014

The latest delay in ObamaCare is causing severe problems among the law’s rank-and-file defenders.

“It’s getting difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care Act,” National Journal’s Ron Fournier writes. “The White House has politicized its signature policy.”

Fournier points out that the “win-at-all-cost mentality helped create a culture” that led to the development of a “dishonest talking point.” Then, the multi-billion dollar website failure “revealed an epidemic of incompetence that began in the Oval Office and ended with no accountability.”

Then, Fournier points out, officials began to twist numbers and massage facts to try and defend the law, hurting its credibility even further.

“Think of the ACA as a game of Jenga,” he writes. “Adjust one piece and the rest are affected; adjust too many and it falls.”

ObamaCare continues to fall apart as a failing law, and the White House’s incompetence and politicized approach to saving Americans from this healthcare disaster is only speeding up the train wreck.

From National Journal:

It’s getting difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care Act. The latest blow to Democratic candidates, liberal activists, and naïve columnists like me came Monday from the White House, which announced yet another delay in the Obamacare implementation.

Not coincidentally, the delays punt implementation beyond congressional elections in November, which raises the first problem with defending Obamacare: The White House has politicized its signature policy.

The win-at-all-cost mentality helped create a culture in which a partisan-line vote was deemed sufficient for passing transcendent legislation. It spurred advisers to develop a dishonest talking point—”If you like your health plan, you’ll be able to keep your health plan.” And political expediency led Obama to repeat the line, over and over and over again, when he knew, or should have known, it was false.

Defending the ACA became painfully harder when online insurance markets were launched from a multibillion-dollar website that didn’t work, when autopsies on the administration’s actions revealed an epidemic of incompetence that began in the Oval Office and ended with no accountability.

Then officials started fudging numbers and massaging facts to promote implementation, nothing illegal or even extraordinary for this era of spin. But they did more damage to the credibility of ACA advocates.

Advocates for a strong executive branch, including me, have given the White House a pass on its rule-making authority, because implementing such a complicated law requires flexibility. But the law may be getting stretched to the point of breaking. Think of the ACA as a game of Jenga: Adjust one piece and the rest are affected; adjust too many and it falls.