Spinning ObamaCare’s failures as blips or mere bumps in the road is no easy task for the administration and its defenders in the media. But it pales in comparison to the mountain Politico seeks to climb today: assigning blame to Republicans because they were right all along. To say the Politico piece goes off the rails would be inaccurate, because it would require the piece to have been on the rails to begin with.
The headline itself is something of a wonder: “GOP’s Obamacare fears come true.” The article is actually about the fact that the state health exchanges created under ObamaCare are failing at a disturbing rate and are being abandoned to the government, which is taking on their responsibilities and simply expanding the federal structure. In other words, the article is about the GOP’s ObamaCare predictions coming true. But the article’s more serious offense is its attempt to pin a fair share of the blame on Republicans.
Here’s Politico:
Liberals wanted a national enrollment system under Obamacare.
They might just get it.
Right now, 36 states rely on HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange, to enroll people in health coverage. At least two more states are opting in next year, with a few others likely to follow. Only two states are trying to get out.
That’s precisely the opposite of the Affordable Care Act’s original intent: 50 exchanges run by 50 states.
So what happened? Here’s the brief explanation from the authors leading into the article’s broader discussion of policy (my emphasis):
The federal option was supposed to be a limited and temporary fallback. But a shift to a bigger, more permanent Washington-controlled system is instead underway — without preparation, funding or even public discussion about what a national exchange covering millions of Americans means for the future of U.S. health care. It’s coming about because intransigent Republicans shunned state exchanges, and ambitious Democrats bungled them.
There are more such phrases attempting to blame Republicans, though if you stick around and read through, you’ll actually find out what really happened:
In theory, states can still tap into virtually unlimited funding to create exchanges. But a number of state officials say the administration has signaled that it doesn’t want to keep pouring millions into broken state systems. …
Nevada in mid-May became the latest to scrap its system and opt into HealthCare.gov. A few days earlier, Oregon had bailed on its $250 million exchange. Massachusetts is still trying to salvage its exchange, but it’s also laying the groundwork to join HealthCare.gov.
Hawaii and Minnesota both insist they are moving ahead with their underperforming exchanges; skeptics predict they’ll have to jettison them and join the federal system sooner rather than later. And some small states with high-performing exchanges may have trouble keeping them over the long haul as federal financial support ends.
There it is: Democrats massively bungled the exchanges and the federal government abandoned them–or at least signaled its intention to do so. ObamaCare was a poorly designed system of diktats from Washington. It is really quite inane to imply that the state exchanges were somehow imposing significant limits on federal control of health care. They weren’t. They were simply ways for the Obama administration to saddle what they hoped would be a bipartisan group of governors with a share of the costs and headaches of the federal program.
Republicans were too smart for that, but Democrats were either unquestioningly loyal to the administration or didn’t really understand how health care works (the latter is probably true of most of them, as it is surely true of the White House). Republicans argued, correctly, that the federal government was still in the process of adding rules and regulations to ObamaCare and that it would be irresponsible and not especially honest of them to devote their resources to enabling arbitrary government.
They argued, correctly, that the Obama administration’s handling of the health-care reform law was setting the state exchanges up for failure. They argued, correctly, that the state exchanges were “state exchanges” largely in name only. And they argued, correctly, that the federal government could not be trusted to provide unlimited funds going forward, and that the price tag for keeping the state exchanges would be higher than anticipated.
What has happened is not really either side’s fears coming true. For the right, it’s the confirmation of what ObamaCare always was and would be. For the left, it’s an unanticipated series of disasters because Democrats ignored all the evidence and information that didn’t fit their narrative. The Politico article adopts the canard that Republicans are partly to blame for not sharing in the Democrats’ failures or saving the left from its own ignorance. It’s no more persuasive today than when Democrats first began trying to fool the press into echoing their panicked talking points.