Believing your own hype Part XXIV
by digby
This is a pretty scathing indictment of the administration's handling of ACA implementation. The theme of the piece is that the White house was so frightened of GOP opposition and obstruction that they refused to do the things that needed to be done to make the program work (which sounds like an underlying theme of the first term to me.)
Obamacare was a massive undertaking and I'm sympathetic to the idea that it was always going to be glitchy and problematic in the rollout. And it's absolutely true that the Republicans starved it of money and did everything in their power to ensure that the thing couldn't work right, for purely political reasons. But it's something of a surprise to read that the neo-liberal technocrats of the Obama administration apparently just thought all this was going to come together without a certain set of skills and experience to make it happen. Experts tried to warn them.
One of my persistent gripes about the Obama team and its defenders was this sort of thing:
I get why it's so appealing, but it has expressed itself in a very destructive way. It's been a problem from the beginning.
