Investor's Business Daily Obama Care All These Lies And Incompetence, Too Nov 12 2013 Bureaucracy: In his interview last week with NBC News, President Obama tacitly admitted that the government that he has put in charge of the nation's health care system is virtually incapable of handling it. 'It is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn't work or it ends up being way over cost." No, that wasn't some hard-core Tea Party lawmaker calling for a radical downsizing of the federal government. That was Obama attempting to explain how it is that his administration could fail to build a working website despite spending 3-1/2 years and hundreds of millions of dollars on it. Even now, more than a month after it was supposed to launch, there's little hope the Healthcare.gov site will be fully functional by Obama's new Nov. 30 deadline. To be sure, Obama spoke specifically about federal IT purchases. He explained that his presidential campaign was so adept at using IT because he was "not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules." "Probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to IT," he said. But if Obama admits that a cumbersome, bureaucratic government can't handle something as simple as IT purchases, why should anyone believe it can manage something far more vast and complex, like the health care system, much less make it better and more efficient? Perhaps Obama doesn't notice that nearly all of our vast, bloated and intrusive government is bureaucratic and cumbersome, doesn't work and costs too much. An audit by the Government Accountability Office, for example, found more than 160 areas where federal agencies duplicate efforts and waste billions of dollars. There are 23 agencies that run 679 renewable energy programs; 15 that run 76 drug-treatment programs; three that oversee the vital task of catfish inspections. Waste, fraud and abuse cost a total of about $261 billion a year — equal to about 7% of all federal spending. The federal tax code is so mind-bogglingly complex that it costs about $1 trillion a year just to comply with it, according to a study by the George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Even then, the government fails to collect about $450 billion it's owed. This summer, the Transportation Department's inspector general told Congress that after nearly 10 years, the FAA's NextGen upgrade to the nation's ancient air traffic control system could still take another 22 years. Yet Obama continues to insist that when it comes to health care, it's the private sector that's flawed and that government bureaucrats can do a better job of, say, picking health insurance plans than millions of consumers and businesses acting on their own. As Obama sees it, these consumers are either hopeless dupes or idiots. They're all buying "subpar" plans, he says, or "bad insurance" that isn't "effective" and doesn't provide "real coverage." Only the government, he says, is capable of deciding what counts as "good" insurance. As a result, millions of consumers are getting cancellation notices telling them that the insurance they liked isn't adequate, and that the only policies they will be allowed to buy from now on will cost them a fortune. Facing an angry backlash, Obama now vaguely promises a fix. But the industry says that ObamaCare has already disrupted the market so much that it may not be possible or desirable for them to let these people keep their plans another year. This is just the beginning of the costly disruptions and distortions the bureaucratic and cumbersome government will impose on the nation's health care system if ObamaCare is allowed to stand. It may be too much to ask for Obama to make the connection. But perhaps it will dawn on the public at large that a government incapable of managing mundane tasks should never be in charge of one-sixth of the nation's economy. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
