Well here we are about twenty days into this mess and it's really starting to get interesting.
And I mean "interesting" in the sense of the Chinese backhanded blessing, "May you live in interesting times."
The Democrats in DC had an interesting meeting today with their spiritual leader and demigod Big Cheese in which it is almost certain that he told his sycophants that none of this 404Care stuff is his fault. And that they had top men working on the problem.
Top.
Men.
It has been
reported that the Democrats emerged from the worship service and promptly declared that the Republicans needed to help them fix it. More on that* below.
Also announced this evening is a now 6 week delay in the individual mandate. Or a 6 week extension to the sign up process. Not sure which and, frankly, it probably doesn't matter because if you believe what the IT people are saying, this thing cannot be fixed and it will take a lot longer than six weeks to repair the damage. If it can be repaired which most do not believe it can be.
I would say that we are seeing tonight the first of perhaps several as-yet-to-be-announced delays in the implementation of DumbassCare.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans with individual health insurance plans have received notices that their policies have been cancelled as mandated by the DumbassCare law. Fancy that.
But, hey...let's say that somehow by some miracle of software engineering the DumbassCare website is fixed. Totally fixed.
That would be good, right?
Well, not really.
There is still the issue of the actual "plan" and the laws of economics which, unlike DumbassCare, don't lend themselves to human intervention. The "plan" is predicated on the notion (and that's what it is) that the young and healthy will sign up for outrageously expensive health insurance that they currently do not need.
And this is where things really get "interesting" in the sort of way that I was hinting at above. You see, not only does the plan require the young, healthy (and stupid) to want a health insurance policy but they also have to be able to afford it. But...if my memory serves, and I think that it does, the administration has just spent the last five years thoroughly and purposefully trashing the economy and this has resulted in record levels of unemployment. And those levels of unemployment (and impoverishment) have been especially harsh in the young person demographic. Hence...the very people that are needed to make DumbassCare work aren't working themselves.
And
that is a textbook case of being too clever by half.
I find it very hard to believe that there is any scenario where the "death spiral" does not occur. And once it starts...perhaps as early as another two or three weeks...it cannot be stopped. As more of the "wrong" sort of people sign up the price of everyone's policies will necessarily get higher. This means that fewer of the "right" sort of people will sign up because it is no longer "affordable" (as if it ever was). And since the "right" people are needed to make everything work, without them, it doesn't and it can't.
So there we are. The Masters of the Universe, wrapped in their heavy cloak of hubris, are about to do the ultimate face plant.
Someday perhaps we will discover the truth. Probably not since, after all this time, no one has ever come clean about what happened in the Clinton White House. The one thing that is almost certainly true is that the ferret-faced chief advisor, Valerie Jarret will be at the center of it all.
*Just imagine the nerve it takes to demand that Republicans help the Democrats out of this mess...
1. The Republicans were totally shut out of the crafting of DumbassCare. I honestly don't remember but it is almost certain that there were some RINOs that actually wanted in on it.
2. No Republicans voted for DumbassCare. Why should they help fix what they did not create?
3. Some of the Republicans did try to kill this mess and they were soundly rebuffed and insulted (by Democrats, the media and the establishment GOP) for their efforts.
4. Perhaps worst of all, as mentioned earlier, there isn't really a fix so why take a swing at the tar baby? Just smile and walk on by while the Democrats just get further bound up in it.
5. And the insults just keep coming...today Dick Durbin claimed that some Republican personally insulted King Putt during the supposed negotiations of the shutdown. Again, why should anyone in their right mind get involved with this scum?
