At first liberals were blaming Republican governors for "sabotaging" Obamacare as an excuse for its failure. However as Obamacare failure reports poured in from liberal states with liberal governors such as Oregon, Massachusetts, and Maryland, a new excuse was desperately needed. And now Sarah Kliff of General Electric Vox reports on the latest Obamacare failure excuse: lousy management.
According to this excuse, the incredibly complex 2000 plus page Obamacare law along with its nearly 11000 pages of regulations are not at fault. No, the real problem as Kliff reports lies in the management. This latest liberal talking point comes to us via one of the usual suspects, the Center for American Progress:
A major liberal think tank wants an Obamacare management shake-up.
The Center for American Progress published a memo Saturday calling on the White House to change the way it manages the Affordable Care Act. The biggest change CAP proposed was creating a chief executive to oversee healthcare.gov, someone who could be a point-person for managing the online marketplace moving forward.
"There is still no single leader who is accountable for successful implementation of the Affordable Care Act," CAP president Neera Tanden, former Obama administration official Zeke Emanuel and Topher Spiro, who runs CAP’s Center for Health Policy, write.
Over the three years that the Obama administration spent building healthcare.gov, there wasn’t really one person specifically in charge of the website. There were lots of parts of the federal bureaucracy involved in the project including the White House, Health and Human Services and the Centers for Information and Insurance Oversight (a division of HHS).
That changed with the website’s botched launch. The White House began appointing temporary leaders to help manage the website in a period of crisis, including former Office of Management and Budget director Jeff Zients and, currently, former Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene. The idea would to be make these positions more permanent — and also add two advisory committees that would report to the hypothetical executive.
As the CAP report points out, this is the management structure that the 15 state exchanges use, each with a chief executive in charge of the effort and multiple advisory committees with specific areas of expertise...
Oh, I get it. Simply replicate the wonderful state Obamacare management system with a chief executive in charge.
...This model hasn’t always been successful: both Oregon and Maryland, for example, had one leader at the top of the chain of command. And both of them had pretty disastrous launches.
Oops! Perhaps not such a great idea. But have no fear, after the better management routine fails, another Obamacare failure excuse can be found. Meanwhile CAP is urging the Obama administration to work quicktime on preparing for better management:
Open enrollment for 2014 ended on March 31, and open enrollment for 2015 does not begin until November—seven months from now. While seven months may seem like a long time, a significant amount of work remains to be done. To optimize the consumer experience, a new management structure for a new phase of implementation of the Affordable Care Act is essential.
Or maybe not.
The White House says it will consider the proposal.
"We are working to make sure we learn from implementation and the turnaround of healthcare.gov," White House spokeswoman Jessica Santillo says. "While we have not reviewed this specific proposal, we will consider all ideas to improve implementation."
Translation: Implementation will begin sometime after the White House turns over to Congress all documents that they have subpoenaed related to the various scandals.
