Health
Related: About this forumHealthCare.gov: How political fear was pitted against technical needs
In May 2010, two months after the Affordable Care Act squeaked through Congress, President Obamas top economic aides were getting worried. Larry Summers, director of the White Houses National Economic Council, and Peter Orzag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, had just received a pointed four-page memo from a trusted outside health adviser. It warned that no one in the administration was up to the task of overseeing the construction of an insurance exchange and other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page statute into reality.
Summers, Orzag and their staffs agreed. For weeks that spring, a tug of war played out inside the White House, according to five people familiar with the episode. On one side, members of the economic team and Obama health-care adviser Zeke Emanuel lobbied for the president to appoint an outside health reform czar with expertise in business, insurance and technology. On the other, the presidents top health aides who had shepherded the legislation through its tortuous path on Capitol Hill and knew its every detail argued that they could handle the job.
In the end, the economic team never had a chance: The president had already made up his mind, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid. Obama wanted his health policy team led by Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform to be in charge of the laws arduous implementation. Since the day the bill became law, the official said, the president believed that if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.
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They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didnt have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business, said David Cutler, a Harvard professor and health adviser to Obamas 2008 campaign, who was not the individual who provided the memo to The Washington Post but confirmed he was the author. Its very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills.
Read the rest at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/challenges-have-dogged-obamas-health-plan-since-2010/2013/11/02/453fba42-426b-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_print.html
MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)And Cutler... Ben Franklin said it best: "There is no greater blockhead than a learned blockhead."
BlueStreak
(8,377 posts)So why should anybody be surprised that these douchebags were trying to cut in on money and power?
In fact healthcare.gov is going to be OK. It was a real mess on Oct 1, but show me one large military project that came in on time and on budget? The only differences between this procurement and the military ones are:
- the department couldn't fake the test results
- the department couldn't approve unlimited over-runs and delays
Other than the days the site has been down altogether, I haven't had any problems using it in the past week. Why should I think that Rahm Emanuel's mafia would have done any better than this?