Peggy Noonan Very Triumphant Now That Major Law To Help People Not Die From Treatable Illnesses Is In Trouble
What a glorious week this was in Peggy Noonan’s tastefully decorated fortress high above the teeming hordes dirtying up her beloved Manhattan. Every morning she sat down at her dining table, upon which her man-servant had placed a breakfast of half a grapefruit, a carafe of robust Mexican coffee spiked with opium purchased in the back-room gambling den of a Triad mobster in Chinatown, and the day’s edition of theWall Street Journal,because when Rupert Murdoch pays for your opium and Mexican coffee and grapefruit, you return the favor by never seeking any other source of commentary, ever. Peggy would unhinge the lower half of her jaw, swallow the grapefruit whole like Jane Badler swallowing a squirming guinea pig inV, and read with joy the latest pundit gang tackle of the mulatto president who had had the temerity to try bringing affordable health insurance to…some sort of people? Other citizens? Some of the commoners she nearly interacts with every weekend as she sallies from the front door of her building to the Lincoln Town Car that whisks her away to the private train car she rides down to Washington to appear on the Sunday gabfests? If she lived to be twice the age she is now, she would never understand why anyone would want to do such a thing, as the people she speaks to do not think it a politically winning issue.
Ah, but the president was a strange creature from an exotic land filled with dusky-hued riffraff. He cannot understand how Exceptional this country is at letting sick people get fucked six ways from Sunday by health insurance companies. How dare he try to change that! Peggy Noonan will tell him a thing or two about a thing or two.
Congress can delay (Obamacare), or pass a law mandating or allowing insurance companies to continue insuring everyone they just threw off coverage.
Second sentence in and she already betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on. Insurance companies already can continue – in fact have a mandate to – continue providing insurance to anyone who wants it. They are not throwing anyone off of coverage exactly, just cancelling old junk policies that did not conform to the standards mandated by the Affordable Care Act and offering new, more expensive but ACA-compliant ones. Many people are unhappy about this because they are only now paying attention to the effects of a nearly four-year-old law, but let’s at least make sure everyone understands exactly what and why the greedy, rapacious insurance company twats are doing what they are doing.
A great deal is possible because the people are coming around to the Republican point of view on the program: They do not like it, do not trust it, do not believe it will make things better.
Actually the people have in some polls shown they would like more extensive health insurance coverage than even the ACA calls for. That is not exactly the Republican position.
The president got caught—and it's amazing he did it, because he must have known he'd be caught when the program debuted—dissembling…
Yep, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan wrote the above sentence. We’ll give you all a minute to clean your exploded brains off your computer monitors.
The polls show less faith in the president, less trust…What a fall, and how richly deserved. The administration didn't care enough to make sure the people of their country were protected.
This is the section that got our teeth grinding until they were worn down to little nubbins.What a fall, and how richly deserved.Yes, a just punishment for trying to reform a health-insurance system that has been broken forever, spends more money for poorer results than any other First World nation and is alone among Western democracies in not offering some sort of single-payer or socialized or government-run program that protects its citizens from financial ruin if they get sick. Whatever the merits of the ACA, if at least attemptingsomethingto fix that system is not protecting the country’s people, then we are the King of California.
Also need we point out that it is a tiny percentage of health-insurance consumers that are being tossed off their junk plans? Apparently we do.
Some of them would have tried to read it, but it was 2,000 pages of impenetrable paragraphs—real word-clots, word-slabs—accompanied by long lines of swimming numbers. Comprehensive bills are never comprehensible ones—they are meant to lack clarity. Administrations get bills passed and then let administration regulators interpret them. That's why Nancy Pelosi said: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
The bill was too long! Let me take Pelosi’s famous quote out of context! Someone’s sure earning her wingnut brownie points this week, Pegs.
One thing about the progressives of Congress: They really drank the Kool-Aid. They really did think government could do anything. They were sincere! They really thought there were no limits.
I wonder if this will sober them up.
Yes,Peggy Noonanhopes everyone sobers up. Irony is officially deader than a cancer victim without insurance. The guy must have had political leaders protecting him from the horrors of affordable treatment.
[ WSJ ]
Yup. I have problems with the ACA, because it is insufficient. But it is a start, and arguably the best start we could expect, given the last five years of "Oh, no, a black President" obstructionfucking from the GOTP.
But this website -- this is a pretty well-known thing. There are, certainly, some serious security concerns, but, for fuck's sake, they had three years. This suggests that they spent two and a half years waving Powerpoint at each other, and then finally tried to write some code. This is a management failure. And because of the extraordinary political importance, it's a Presidential management failure.
And now, waffling like we have no idea what the point of the whole thing was.
Gah.
I replied to Lionel's reply to you, but now I'm going to reply to you, also, too.
If you review my comment history, I think you will find that I am generally supportive of the President, although I think he is center-right, and far less concerned about civil rights than he presents himself.
On the matter of the ACA website rollout: while you could argue that this is just a technical glitch, the fact is that the functionality of the site had a HUGE impact on public perception, and this was foreseeable years ago. I do not expect Pres O to have personally written the website code, but I do rather expect him to have made bloody clear to the people writing it that it had to be done on time and fucking well work. This does not seem to have happened. This is an extraordinarily serious management failure, because of the importance of the matter.
I fully agree that the ACA is not the website, and I expect that the eventual impact of the ACA will transcend these start-up glitches. But I'm not sure I agree that the criticism of the roll out has gone beyond legitimate. This was a fairly huge fuck up. Somebody -- or several levels of somebodies -- were not paying attention for THREE FUCKING YEARS. And, as a result, the pretty-vanilla ACA is now subject to bullshit attacks by morons.
HOW CAN YOU THINK THIS IS OKAY?