In an interview released yesterday, Bill Clinton opined that President Obama should put a stop to the Affordable Care Acts much-publicized insurance-policy cancellations, even though most policy experts agree that theyre necessary for the act to work. Is this just the Big Dog harmlessly shooting off his mouth? Or is the man whom Obama dubbed his Secretary of Explaining Stuff once again proving more liability than ally? With all due respect to the power of Bill Clinton to suck the air out of a 24-hour-news cycle and be the bull in any Democratic china shop, he is not the problem with the Affordable Care Act. The overriding problems are the ineptitude of the rollout and President Obama’s repeated iteration of a promise (that no one will be thrown off an existing policy) that was both false and in fact counter to the whole point of the law. In any case, Clinton’s quick fix would undermine the ACA further, but he’s not alone among Democrats proposing it or something like it: Dianne Feinstein has now embraced a similar notion, and she’s not some outlier but the senior senator of the biggest blue state in the country. None of this noise will make any permanent difference if the Obama administration fixes all the technical screw-ups, and not just the web portal, that have contaminated this law. And of course it will help, too, if the White House comes up with other temporary fixes on policy cancellations (as it seems to be groping for right now). But if the ACA isn’t up and running in a nearly efficient way as we head into the election year of 2014, the law may go down, particularly if a new Congress is swept in that has a shot at dismantling it.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 23:43:35 +0000
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