One of the excuses for the technical incompetence of ObamaCare is that the president and his team were the victims of "sabotage" by congressional Republicans. Todd Purdum, a leftist longtime New York Times reporter, put forward this claim in a Politico op-ed last week, and yesterday the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, perhaps Obama's most effusive male admirer, echoed it, citing a deeply reported story by his Post colleagues Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin.
The idea that Republicans have "sabotaged" ObamaCare is ludicrous on its face. Sabotage entails destroying or damaging something by subverting it--by stealthily undermining it from within. Republican opposition to ObamaCare has been neither stealthy nor "within." Every Republican member of Congress has opposed ObamaCare consistently, openly and honorably.
But as the Goldstein-Eilperin piece demonstrates, there is some truth to the notion that Republican opposition has had a detrimental effect on ObamaCare's technical efforts, and there is some truth to the notion that those efforts were sabotaged. But the truth is more interesting than partisans like Purdum and Capehart are capable of seeing.
He's not a Republican. Getty Images/Imagezoo
The Goldstein-Eilperin piece is well worth reading in its entirety, but the bottom line is that "the project was hampered by the White House's political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law--sensitivity so intense that the president's aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition." Specifically:
In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services moved "the on-the-ground work of carrying out" from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's office to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS. "The move had a political rationale," Goldstein and Eilperin report. "Tucked within a large bureaucracy, some administration officials believed, the new Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight would be better insulated from the efforts of House Republicans, who were looking for ways to undermine the law."
As a result, "the work of designing the federal health exchange--and of helping states that wanted to build their own--became fragmented." Nobody was in charge of directing the program.
In the spring of 2011, CMS staffers "struggled . . . to persuade White House officials for permission to publish diagrams known as 'concepts of operation,' " which would have shown what a federal exchange would "look like." The White House balked for fear that "Republicans might reprise a tactic from the 1990s of then-Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who mockingly brandished intricate charts created by a task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton." Instead, the White House ordered CMS "to praise early work on those state exchanges that matched the hidden federal thinking."
At about the same time, some states were indicating that they intended to exercise their option under ObamaCare to opt out of starting their own exchanges. "The more states in the federal exchange, the more complex [would be] the task of building it," note Goldstein and Eilperin. But in bidding out the contract to create the federal exchange, the White House "would not let this fact be included in the specifications" because they were afraid "Republicans would seize on it as evidence of a feared federal takeover of the health-care system."

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Then, hoping (vainly, it appears) that "more [states] would become willing after the 2012 election," the White House ordered the technical work held up: " 'The dynamic was you'd have [CMS's leaders] going to the White House saying, "We've got to get this process going," ' one former official recalled. 'There would be pushback from the White House.' " Election Day 2012 was one year ago tomorrow, or less than 11 months before the ObamaCare website would have to go live.
"Meanwhile, the White House also slowed down important regulations that had been drafted within CMS months earlier, appearing to wait until just after Obama's reelection," Goldstein and Eilperin report. Rules governing mandated benefits and calculations of premiums weren't proposed until Thanksgiving and didn't become final until February. A former Medicare chief actuary describes the delay as "a singularly bad decision" taken "for short-term political gain."
Things got so bad that two months ago today, when "White House officials visited CMS for a final demonstration" of the website, "some staff members worried that it would fail right in front of the president's aides." What's more, "a few secretly rooted for it to fail." That was not because, like this columnist, they were hoping ObamaCare would die in its crib before it could kill too many Americans. Rather, it was because if the demo failed, "perhaps the White House would wait to open the exchange until it was ready. Yet on that day, using a simplified demonstration application, the Web site appeared to work just fine."
Mission accomplished.
The story Goldstein and Eilperin tell is one not of GOP sabotage but of Obama administration self-sabotage. The geniuses who were sure they were capable of running the entire medical industry were so unnerved by the prospect of political opposition that at every stage of the way they undermined the president's own signature "achievement."
This is in part a story of political incompetence and hubris. Obama and his allies in Congress were unable to win a single Republican vote--and it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that a monstrously complicated law enacted by a slender partisan majority might prove especially difficult to implement. As Obama himself admitted yesterday in a rare truthful statement: "Now, let's face it, a lot of us didn't realize that passing the law was the easy part."
That's what America gets for electing a president with charisma but no known skills apart (arguably) from delivering speeches.
We should note that this entire discussion has dealt only with the incompetent technical execution of ObamaCare, what we call Phase 1 of the disaster. Phases 2 and 3, respectively, are the exposure that ObamaCare is a massive consumer fraud and the economic inviability of the entire scheme.
The exposure of ObamaCare as a massive consumer fraud--and of Obama as the Bernie Madoff of politics--is well under way. The realization of ObamaCare's economic inviability is beginning to become clear. The Wall Street Journal, which reports that "early buyers of health coverage on the nation's troubled new websites are older than expected," meaning there aren't enough young suckers willing to bear the expense of their elders' price-controlled premiums. Actually, some of us have been expecting just that.