Posted on 10/22/2013 6:16:35 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The disastrous rollout of ObamaCare’s insurance exchanges has brought into sharp focus the GOP charge that President Obama is better at campaigning than governing.
Republicans have long needled the president as unable to convert adoring crowds and electoral momentum into inside-the-Beltway success, and the failures of the ObamaCare website has given them new ammunition.
“It’s very clear that the president is much better at talking the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk of governing, he falls short,” said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean.
Obama ran as a candidate who would bring professionalism back to Washington after former President George W. Bush’s perceived bungling, but he now runs the risk of being remembered as an expert campaigner who had trouble managing the government.
Obama sought to get control of the debate over the exchanges with a Rose Garden event on Monday, where he said: “Nobody is madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should.”
The White House packed the audience with people identified as benefiting from the Affordable Care Act. At the campaign-style event, their friends and families cheered as the president reeled off the new benefits available under the law and promised that he would get to the bottom of its problems.
It made for good political images on television, but critics said Obama did not lay out any timeline or solution for fixing the ObamaCare website’s problems.
“If the president is frustrated by the mounting failures of his healthcare law, it wasn’t apparent today,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement released shortly after the president concluded his remarks.
“Americans are looking for accountability, but what the president offered today was little more than self-congratulation,” he continued. “Instead of answers, we got well-worn talking points. Instead of explanations, we got excuses.
“Either the president doesn’t grasp the scale of the law’s failures or he doesn’t believe Americans deserve straight answers.”
Boehner and Republicans are eager to turn attention to the troubled rollout of the ObamaCare insurance exchanges after taking a political beating in the shutdown fight. GOP leaders think the shutdown battle largely drowned out coverage of people struggling to enroll in ObamaCare, but believe the public will now tune in.
They are bringing in Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to testify at a House panel next week on the rollout, an event likely to dominate headlines.
White House press secretary Jay Carney sought on Monday to emphasize that half a million Americans have already applied for coverage on the exchanges.
In his own comments, Obama argued that his signature law is more than a website, and that it is already having a positive effect in driving down healthcare costs.
“The point is, the essence of the law, the health insurance that’s available to people, is working just fine,” Obama said. “In some cases, actually, it’s exceeding expectations — the prices are lower than we expected, the choice is greater than we expected.”
Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, says that the problems with the website could undermine Obama’s legacy.
Obama’s early promise in the 2008 campaign “was about running a modern administration in the 21st century,” Jillson said.
He campaigned as someone who would be a capable administrator of the government in sharp contrast to Bush, who had been criticized for mismanaging the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina.
Already favored to beat Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the general election, polls definitely swung in Obama’s direction after McCain suggested the campaign be suspended to deal with the financial crisis. Obama’s rejection of that request, and his overall handling of the crisis, got favorable reviews.
Obama himself has said that governing is more difficult than campaigning by comparing the former to prose and the latter to poetry.
Luckily for the White House, polls indicate the president still has not fully exhausted his opportunity to sell the American public on the law that bears his name.
While 53 percent disapprove of the way the president has handled implementation, according to a Washington Post poll released Monday, only a third support repealing ObamaCare.
Moreover, experts say, Obama has the benefit of his recent victory in the shutdown fight.
“Obama is extremely fortunate in his opponents because the last three weeks has ... given him a cushion of time,” said Jillson.
While 53 percent disapprove of the way the president has handled implementation, according to a Washington Post poll released Monday, only a third support repealing ObamaCare.
Moreover, experts say, Obama has the benefit of his recent victory in the shutdown fight.
“Obama is extremely fortunate in his opponents because the last three weeks has ... given him a cushion of time,” said Jillson.
Spin.
And, for that, we should be eternally thankful.
You see Holocaust II designed, in my opinion, with the same intentions as Hitler including power over everyone’s life and death.
Where is all the money going to go?
All these HIGH cost policies with $6000 plus deductibles for most people mean they never get to use a penny of their policy. So where is all that money going? I don't see the government/Democrats/Obama allowing the profit to go to insurance companies.
Follow the money, where is all the unspent money going?
Where are the financials on Obamacare?
Bullets before cattle cars.
Honestly, I doubt Obama had a clue what was going on. The problem is that he has a problem now and his way of dealing with it is to focus on deflecting blame from him.
And the lapdog media is unable to spin this debacle to make Republicans look bad. I’ve been watching my liberal friends and they act like everything is fine. They even fabricate stories to say the site works.
If the president had a shred of graciousness and humility, he would never, ever say “Obamacare.” He would always say ACA. But he is not a gracious man at all.
A review of internal architectural diagrams obtained by the AP revealed the system's complexity. Insurance applicants have a host of personal information verified, including income and immigration status. The system connects to other federal computer networks, including ones at the Social Security Administration, IRS, Veterans Administration, Office of Personnel Management and the Peace Corps.".......... Insiders who worked on US health website describe high stress, complaints about major problems
All those calls to other systems were a recipe for disaster.
And in the three years that HHS was working on this, Secretary Sebelius never discussed the status at Obama's Cabinet meetings? He was clueless of the status all this time?
Oh, yeah... Obama doesn't have Cabinet meetings.
-PJ
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