America, stranded on the beaches of ObamaCare

In response to Guess What? There’s No Plan B If ObamaCare Falls Apart:

This is yet another reason Obama’s frequent comparisons between his health-care disaster and a troubled private sector product rollout – to cite his favorite example, Apple launching a new iPhone – were always ludicrous.  (I guess he’s come to see it that way, too, because he doesn’t make those comparisons any more.  He knows he’d be laughed off the stage.)

It’s absolutely essential to have fallback plans in case your business model doesn’t work out, particularly when the enterprise is undertaken on a grand scale.  It’s not at all surprising that ObamaCare finds itself facing a “death spiral” of young, healthy people taking a pass on jacked-up premiums that would pick their pockets to subsidize premiums for others.  We critics have anticipated this as the likely scenario since Day One, but even ObamaCare proponents should have been able to anticipate it was a strong possibility, even before the non-law was fully implemented.  (At this point, it’s pure propaganda to refer to the Affordable Care Act as a “law,” when it manifestly is not.)  

Once the ACA did go into effect, it was very swiftly apparent that the death spiral was under way.  The scam artists who run this Administration have always had enrollment figures and demographic breakdowns, just as they’ve always known the one metric of ObamaCare “success” that really matters, the one they refuse to divulge: the number of valid enrollments with a premium payment fully processed.  They lie incessantly, both to the American people and to Congress, about the supposed unavailability of those numbers due to their crappy $637 million computer system, which allegedly can’t perform simple spreadsheet functions on a database that only contains a few hundred thousand entries at most.  Those lies have always prompted gales of laughter from anyone who knows the first thing about computer programming, but really, even if you’re a computer novice, common sense tells you a simple report on the tiny dataset of ObamaCare enrollees could be prepared by hand in a matter of hours.

So yes, the Administration knows everything it refuses to tell us about demographics, and it knows the death spiral is well under way in many states, if not most of them.  One must remember that it’s a state-by-state phenomenon, which actually makes it worse, because it’s hard to justify the continued existence of a national program that turns into an utter black hole of absolute failure in certain states, prompting insurance companies to throw in the towel.  (The “solution,” of course, will be a bailout of epic proportions, in some ways a preview of the bailouts to come when the big blue state government begin collapsing and demanding federal rescue.  The ObamaCare collapse might even trigger these state fiscal Armageddons, and if that doesn’t do it, the loss of 100 percent federal funding for the Medicaid expansion in a few years might.)

But even with the knowledge they’re keeping to themselves, they still haven’t formulated a Plan B?  That’s because they think of success and failure in entirely political terms.  Plan A was like Cortez burning his ships to take the possibility of easy retreat away from his men.  The major priority of ObamaCare’s architects was making the program difficult to repeal; everything else was very much a secondary consideration, which is one reason implementation has been so chaotic and incompetent, with so much of the Administration in a perpetual state of hand-wringing shock.  They’re not going to worry about Plan B just because ObamaCare isn’t working.  They’ll worry about it when, and if, they think opponents have amassed enough political energy to repeal the law, and that probably won’t happen until Obama leaves the White House, so they still think they’ve got plenty of time.