President Obama once again compared the mind-boggling disaster of the ObamaCare rollout to an iPhone product launch today. This is a really dangerous comparison for him to make. It does not reflect well at all on ObamaCare.
For starters, the obvious difference is that nobody is required by law to purchase an iPhone. But the designers of ObamaCare had three years and a billion-dollar budget to get ready for today. They knew roughly how many “customers” were going to show up… because anyone who doesn’t is going to get tax/penaltied to within an inch of their lives. Of course, a lot of them will decide it’s cheaper to pay the tax/penalty and take a pass on insurance. Behold the genius of socialism: raising money by making a mandatory “service” so lousy and overpriced that people will pay to escape from it.
Wasn’t it just yesterday that Obama was telling us hardly anybody would be going into the exchanges, don’t worry about it, most people already have insurance and they don’t have to do anything, no big deal? But suddenly Obama dead-enders are trying to claim the exchanges crashed because they were so incredibly popular.
Another reason Obama should steer away from this silly iPhone parallel is that he doesn’t want people dwelling on what smartphones would be like if the government designed and distributed them. (They’re sort of in the distribution business with the absurd “free cell phone” welfare program, but the products are created by private industry, and private companies are getting very rich off the redistributed money siphoned out of paying customers’ cell phone bills.)
If the government had been manufacturing and distributing cell phones for everyone, all along, they wouldn’t be smart phones. They’d be grungy, overpriced bricks churned out by fat-cat government cronies. The competitive pressures that produced the astounding capabilities and remarkably low cost of the modern phone would be entirely absent. Carriers wouldn’t be offering deals to attract customers – you’d be forced to pay for cell phone service by law. The crazy creative energy that led to the competition between iPhone, Droid, and Blackberry would never have existed. Central planners would never have imagined the uses people have developed for their phones.
Apple doesn’t have ObamaCare-scale launch disasters because they know competitors would eat their lunch, so they plan accordingly. Obama’s vast array of secretaries, czars, commissars, navigators, and enforcers know you don’t have anywhere else to go. They found plenty of uses for their massive slush funds that have nothing to do with providing good service to insurance customers, much less increasing the availability of medicine.
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