Obamacare: The roots of failure

Zeke Emanuel Reveals Obamacare's Original Sin
All problems with Heathcare.gov flowed from one bad decision, he said.

"The one thing that didn't happen isand I've said this before," Emanuel continued, "is we needed a CEO who understood, who's a really great manager understood the health sideespecially health insurance, because after all, what's the website, what's the exchanges if not health insuranceand understood how to make sure that... the e-commerce aspects were going to run well."

"No one ever got appointed to really do that of sufficient stature," said Emanuel. "You don't hand this to [the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services]. This isn't in their wheelhouse. This isn't something they can do.

Mary Katharine Ham

The ignorant omniscience of President Obama

He knows everything. And yet he seems to know nothing. He’s passionate about the details of domestic policy but wasn’t privy to the details of his own legacy law. He’s an academic with a command of every issue at once but seemingly only finds out what his administration is doing in news reports. He’s so brilliant every normal endeavor he’s tried has bored him, but he couldn’t bother to entertain himself with more than one monthly meeting on the make-or-break program of his presidency. He’s the captain of the Culture of Competency who has overseen the most incompetent rollout of an entitlement program in history.

I was struck by a moment in President Obama’s press conference today where this paradox was on full display. The president floated, throughout the press conference, from profession of utter ignorance to confident declaration and directive. Allahpundit noted that Obama distanced himself from the website’s problems by saying he was never informed of its problems. He knew nothing.

Bryan Preston:

Obama Either Knew that Healthcare.gov Wouldn’t Work or He Is Keeping Incompetent Liars On His Payroll

So Chao, the project manager, was worried about Obamacare crashing on October 1. He had been worried about that for months. Obama said he had not been told “directly” of these fears. Carney said today that Obama was “briefed regularly” on the site’s progress and issues.

How do we resolve this? What was in those briefings? Did Obama pay any attention to them?

It may be that Obama was not actually being briefed regularly at all. We know that he skips other duties such as attending his Daily Intelligence Briefing. You can lead a horse to water, and all that. Or maybe David Axelrod was right when he said earlier today that Obama has surrounded himself with yes-men who just tell him what he wants to hear. They knew there were problems but they lied to Obama because they knew he couldn’t handle or didn’t want the truth.

If the MSM is surprised by the Obamacare fiasco, then they suck at pattern recognition and suffer from acute memory limitations.

Vide:

A pattern of abuse and incompetence

How we live now: The rule of the inept experts

Is it possible that David Brooks was wrong?

Benghazi: The high price of rampant knowingness

Have to admit it: Paul Krugman has a point