Despite all the trouble ObamaCare has been having since health insurance exchanges opened about two weeks ago, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on ABC’s This Week Sunday predictably had nothing but praise for the law.
Fortunately the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan and former Mitt Romney advisor Dan Senor were present to set the record straight (video follows with transcript and commentary):
DAN SENOR: There's no doubt that this is damaging to the Republican brand. That said, a year from now, this will have been long resolved and I don't think voters will be talking about this shutdown and the dysfunction. What people will be talking about is the failed implementation of ObamaCare.
There are very few House seats that are really in play. There’s like a tiny percentage of Republican House members that are in districts that President Obama won. There are six Senate seats, Democratic Senate seats that need to be defended that Mitt Romney won by more than ten percent. So, the field both in the House and the Senate is much more favorable to Republicans.
I think this is a bad moment for Republicans. I think it will pass. I think the field, the history of the Party out of the White House winning midterms combined with the failed implementation of ObamaCare is going to be advantageous.
PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: I want to say something about that. The ObamaCare thing will also be long passed. They messed up the software for the federal version of it. But we have the exchanges working just fine in many states which means it’s fixable and it will be fixed. California has a perfectly well-functioning exchange which it’s running itself. If you can do it for 30 million people, you can do it for 300 million. So, that will be, ObamaCare will be working fine by next November.
A few minutes later, Noonan chimed in:
PEGGY NOONAN, WALL STREET JOURNAL: Paul, I got to tell you, I don't think, I disagree with your point on ObamaCare of course. I think for the next year, as Dan said, it's going to be a big suppurating wound. There's too much connected to it that is going to be a constant grinding tension. One is this Congressional thing where Congress passes things but they get special benefits, the American people don't get them. You think it…
KRUGMAN: It’s really not true. But the main point is software, I mean, a software glitch…
NOONAN: Ah.
SENOR: It's more than software.
KRUGMAN: …it’s embarrassing.
NOONAN: It’s more than software.
SENOR: They’ve had to stitch together web platforms for the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, Homeland Security in order to make this enrollment work. It's a technology disaster. The architect of the website said in March that we'll be lucky if this thing doesn't look like a third world experience.
KRUGMAN: Right, so they messed up. But the thing is, again…
SENOR: It’s not just a small thing to mess it up.
NOONAN: Yeah.
SENOR: It’s a kind of big thing to mess up.
Indeed it is.
Why would anyone trust the government to manage 1/6 of our economy when it can't even create a functioning website?
But something they didn't touch on was all the people across the fruited plain that are either losing their current healthcare coverage or will find it too expensive to do so as a result of this ridiculous law.
As more and more people get such notices from their insurers and/or companies they work for, the public outrage over ObamaCare will become greater.
Of course, that won't matter to a shill such as Krugman, for he'll continue to pound his desk about how wonderful the so-called Affordable Care Act is.
It must be nice for the President to have such people in the media.
