On October 21, 2013 the sitting president Barack Hussein Obama gave a speech in the White House Rose Garden on how wonderful Obamacare is and that the only thing wrong with it are a few minor kinks on the website that need to be worked out. The launch of this website www.healthcare.gov has been such an unmitigated disaster that the president needed to come out and implement damage control. Here is some of what he had to say:
“The essence of the law, the health insurance that’s available to people, is working just fine.”
This doesn’t make much sense to me. The essence of the law is not the availability of health insurance. It’s the fact that it’s a law that mandates people purchase health insurance. And no, it’s not working just fine.
“In some cases, actually, it’s exceeding expectations. The prices are lower than we expected, the choice is greater than we expected,” he continues.
Baloney. It is not working and he knows it. He just tells everybody it is so they’ll believe him (because that trick has worked for him in the past). The way he delivers those false words sounds convincing to his low information voting base, and that’s good enough for the mainstream media.
Additionally, prices are higher for a majority of Americans in a majority of states, regardless of their age. The only people for whom prices are lower are those subsidized in some ways, meaning taxpayers, you and I, are helping pay for their insurance.
“The problem has been that the website that’s supposed to make it easier to apply for and purchase the insurance is not working the way it should for everybody. And there’s no sugar-coating it. The website has been too slow, people have been getting stuck during the application process, and I think it’s fair to say that nobody’s more frustrated by that than I am,” he blathers on.
Actually, it’s not fair to say. He did not have to endure the frustration of trying to go online and purchase his own awful product, one he tries to sell as “good” and “great.”
“Precisely because the product is good, I want the cash registers to work, I want the checkout lines to be smooth, so I want people to be able to get this great product. And there’s no excuse for the problems.”
Admitting to a problem with the rollout of his signature legislation is much easier than admitting to the failures of his signature legislation. But what Obama did not say, as Dick Morris pointed out in his line-by-line analysis of Obama’s speech, is that a large number of Americans are not purchasing the new government-mandated health insurance. If they were, wouldn’t the president be boasting about it? It certainly would be easier to believe him if it were so, but it simply is not.
He also doesn’t mention that those contracted to build the website www.healthcare.gov were his campaign donors. One would think that for $634 million, and three years to perfect, the website designed for the most massive entitlement program America has ever seen should be flawless and the launch should be seamless. But government is usually good at one thing and one thing only: wasting taxpayers’ money.
