Trump’s Business Approach

Here’s a surprise:  Congress is mired in disputes about the new legislation that is supposed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (or at least claims to do something to deal with the ongoing problems with President Obama’s signature legislation).  There was supposed to be a vote on the legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday, but the tally got postponed over concerns that the legislation might fail.

President Trump has been involved in the wrangling, and last night he weighed in with what the Washington Post described as an “ultimatum.”  According to the Post, Trump told the Republicans in the House to either pass the legislation on Friday, or reject it, in which case Trump will move on to other items on his agenda.  Trump apparently will leave it up to the Republicans in the House to figure out whether they can agree or not.

It’s an interesting approach, and I suspect that it comes from Trump’s years of working in the business world.  Corporations typically don’t engage in open-ended negotiations, allowing events to marinate and slowly come together — which often seems to be how Congress works (if you believe that Congress works at all).  Instead, because there’s a time value to money and limits to corporate resources that can be expended on potential deals that don’t materialize, corporations set establish priorities, set deadlines, and push.  Once a deadline gets set, it becomes another means of applying pressure to the parties to reach an agreement, and if the deal doesn’t get done by the deadline, typically that takes the transaction off the table, the corporation moves on, and there is no going back.

Trump’s approach to this legislative test is, obviously, also informed by political considerations; he wants to set a deadline so members of Congress are actually forced to do something concrete, and we don’t have the lingering story of “what’s going to happen to Obamacare” attracting all of the media attention and detracting from the other things he’s trying to accomplish.  It’s a gamble, because if the legislation Trump is backing doesn’t pass, he could be painted as a failure in the early months of his Administration, making it less likely that he’ll be able to obtain passage of other parts of his agenda, like tax reform.  We already knew that Trump is a gambler, of course — his whole campaign was a bizarre, otherworldly gamble that paid off.  Now he’s bringing some of that high-stakes, business world approach to the legislative political realm.

We shouldn’t be surprised, by now, that Trump is going to continue to gamble and continue to do things in confounding ways.  Today we’ll get another lesson in whether his approach can actually work in Washington, D.C., even on a short term basis.

Meanwhile, Back In The Real World

This week Aetna announced that it would be withdrawing from many of the states in which it offers health care plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.  Aetna participated in exchanges in 15 states, and it will be withdrawing from 11 of those 15.

It’s more bad news for “Obamacare,” which has seen other major insurers back away from offering plans, too.  Aetna says its decision is prompted by substantial losses it is experiencing on the exchanges, all of which arises from the fact that the pools of covered individuals has turned out to be sicker than was originally forecast — and therefore more likely to need expensive care.  If fewer insurers offer plans on the exchanges, there obviously will be less competition, and less choice.  As Aetna’s decision reflects, however, the effect will vary on a state by state basis.

In the meantime, premiums on the exchange plans are going up — and the “individual mandate” penalty for not having health insurance is ratcheting up, too.  In 2017, the average penalty will be $979 per household.  The question is whether the threat of having to pay a $1000 penalty will drive more people to enroll, and whether those currently uninsured people who do enroll will be healthier and therefore help to hold down the costs of the plans for the insurers who offer them, so more even insurers don’t exit the plans.  Ever since the Affordable Care Act was passed, the question has been whether the exchanges can avoid the “death spiral” in which enrollment shrinks, leaving only sick people in the plans, causing ever-greater losses and ever-increasing premiums that simply can’t be sustained.

The Affordable Care Act is unquestionably the signature domestic policy achievement of the Obama Administration.  It’s also another huge government program seeking to force behavioral changes that is anathema to both fiscal conservatives and social libertarians.  In any rational world, a presidential election would be a forum for discussing whether, and if so how well, “Obamacare” has worked — and what alternatives would be.

Of course, we don’t have such discussions about actual policy issues or the real-world performance of important initiatives like the Affordable Care Act in this election.  No, we’re too busy talking about Donald Trump’s latest idiotic foot-in-mouth-episode, or Hillary Clinton’s health issues, or other extraneous topics.  This is the most content-free presidential election in my memory.

We need to remember that the real world is still out there.

Meanwhile, Back At The Issues . . . .

While our easily distracted nation has been preoccupied with political horse races, insults on debate stages, and brawling at campaign rallies, some of the real issues facing the country plod on.  It’s just that no one is paying any attention to them.

Consider the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare.  It’s been up and operational for several years now.  So, how is it doing?

It turns out that Obamacare is facing a number of challenges and is in what a recent Washington Post editorial describes as “an awkward place.”  The problem is that although people are still enrolling, they’re not doing so at the rates that were forecast when the new law’s financial viability was evaluated.  If there are fewer enrollments than were estimated, or the mix of new enrollees doesn’t include as many young and healthy people as was originally projected, then the Affordable Care Act could produce substantial premium price increases rather than what the statute’s name promises.

Another aspect of this complicated law is whether it is offering good insurance choices for people.  The Investor’s Business Daily recently published an article that focused on how the Affordable Care Act is working in Mississippi, which is one of the underinsured places that were a focus of the statute in the first place.  The IBD article found that enrollments of uninsured people in Mississippi were disappointing — just 38% of those eligible for subsidies — that the premium costs for the cheapest “bronze” plans are spiking, and that the increased expense may cause some people to opt for paying the uninsured, individual mandate tax rather than buying insurance as they are supposed to do.  Still other articles, from the New York Times and elsewhere, have reported that many people believe that while subsidies might be holding down premium costs in some states, high deductible amounts, which require the insured person to pay cash out of pocket before the insurance kicks in, are making some plans bought on the exchanges unaffordable and unusable.

The Affordable Care Act was a huge new governmental program, hotly debated and the subject of strong opposition from Republicans.  How is it working, really?  We deserve to know, and un any rational world, candidates of both parties would be debating that very important issue.  In this crazy year, however, the news media and the public have been distracted by the Trump phenomenon and all of its embarrassing nuttiness, so even in Republican debates the Affordable Care Act gets short shrift.  And does anyone really believe that, if Donald Trump somehow becomes the Republican nominee, he’ll work to understand the workings of this complex law, and be able to say anything other than that it is a “disaster” and he’ll “repeal and replace it with something much better”?

Obamacare’s First Birthday

It’s hard to believe, but it was only a year ago on October 1 that Obamacare, through that ill-fated healthcare.gov website, was born.  Parents will tell you that a newborn’s first year passes by in a blur — and it has, hasn’t it?  It sure seems like more than a year ago that we were hearing about wait times and website crashes, but ISIS beheadings and Ebola outbreaks and other assorted disasters have a way of telescoping the passage of time.

So, how is Obamacare doing on its first birthday?  Not surprisingly, given the superheated controversy surrounding the Affordable Care Act, it kind of depends who you ask.

The New York Post has done a review and gives Obamacare an overall grade of “F,” because it has cost a lot of money, hasn’t really made a huge dent in the mass of uninsured people, has messed with a lot of people’s plans, and is affecting full-time job creation by businesses because of the costs it imposes.  The Department of Health and Human Services, on the other hand, has released a report that says Obamacare has produced a significant reduction in uncompensated costs that have to be borne by hospitals, presumably because there are fewer uninsured people who can’t pay their hospital bills.  Yahoo Finance, in a survey article, found that some people like it and some people hate it, depending on whether Obamacare has raised or reduced their costs, helped them get insurance that they couldn’t have received otherwise, or eliminated plans they liked.

And — some things never change — the healthcare.gov website is back in the news again, because it has a “critical vulnerability” in the security area.  Basically, it appears that the government entity that manages the website hasn’t been using the basic available tools to monitor security issues and test for website vulnerabilities.  It’s not clear whether any people who have used the website — and entered in lots of highly personal information in their quest for insurance — have experienced any identity theft or similar problems.

Regardless of your political affiliation or your view of Obamacare, there is one finding that pretty much everyone should be happy to celebrate on Obamacare’s birthday.   A Washington Post review of congressional floor speeches found that, this month, members of Congress mentioned “Obamacare” only 27 times.  That 1/100th of the number of mentions Obamacare received in October 2013.  Isn’t it nice to not hear politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, yammering about Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare?

Politically, does that mean Obamacare is no longer the hot topic it once was, or does it just mean that Obamacare has been knocked off the front pages by other problems and issues?  Beats me, but my gut instinct is that the Republicans are wise to not beat the Obamacare drum incessantly.  People who hate Obamacare or feel they were screwed by it don’t need to be reminded over and over.  Focusing on ISIS, terrorism, the border, and other non-Obamacare topics make the Republicans seem like less of a one-trick pony.

The CDC And The Mass Breakdown Of Governmental Competence

For years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was one federal agency that seemed to be a model of governmental efficiency and capability.  Like NASA in the glory days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, the CDC was a little agency with an important mission and dedicated employees who helped to guide the national responses to epidemics and infectious diseases.

That’s why the recent stories about some appalling security lapses at the CDC are so troubling.  In one instance, poor handling of anthrax — a disease that the CDC’s own website cautions can cause serious illness and death — potentially exposed a number of employees to the bacteria.  In another incident, CDC employees improperly shipped a deadly strain of bird flu to a Department of Agriculture poultry research lab.  The breakdowns are especially disturbing because the CDC also is supposed to ensure that other laboratories follow federal safety standards.  The CDC is investigating these breaches and developing new procedures to address the “potential for hubris” in an agency that may have grown too comfortable with working with dangerous spores, bacteria, and infectious agents.

Given the CDC’s public health mission, any security breakdown that could expose people to a deadly infectious disease could be catastrophic.  But the CDC’s problems seem to be symptomatic of a larger, equally concerning issue:  a broad-scale series of failures in federal agencies.  In the past year, we have witnessed a colossal failure in an attempt by the Department of Health and Human Services to build a functioning health insurance exchange website, mass failures by the Veterans Administration to provide adequate care for veterans, a stunning security breach that allowed Edward Snowden to spirit away enormous amounts of highly classified data, and a southern border so porous that thousands of unaccompanied minors have been able to cross into our country.  And those are just a few of the stories.

For years, there has been a divide in this country between those who want the government to assume a more significant role in regulating our affairs and those who resist that approach because they believe a larger government role means less freedom and fewer individual liberties.  The recent dismal performance of our federal agencies suggests that a new factor should enter into the equation:  is the federal government even competent to do what we are asking it to do?  In view of the many recent breakdowns in governmental performance, that is a very fair question. 

Adding Up The Obamacare Tab

When the Affordable Care Act was passed, its drafters contemplated that states would design their own health care exchanges, with the federal healthcare.gov website serving as a kind of backstop.  That turned out to be a miscalculation.  More than 60 percent of the states — 36 out of 50 — elected not to create their own health care exchanges.

At the time, some critics argued that the decisions of states with Republican governors to refrain from building their own websites was politically motivated.  In retrospect, however, the decisions to eschew developing state-specific health care exchanges seem more like a wise recognition of the limitations of state capabilities, because the experiences of states that did attempt their own websites have been decidedly mixed.

Six of the 14 states that chose to create their own exchanges — Masschusetts, Oregon, Nevada, Maryland, Minnesota, and Hawaii — have had severe functionality problems and have become tremendous cash drains and political albatrosses.  In Massachusetts, Oregon, Nevada, and Maryland alone, the federal government has paid at least $474 million to support the establishment of non-functional exchanges, and that cost total seems certain to increase significantly.  In those states, Democratic politicians are blaming the website contractors and threatening litigation, and Republicans are saying that the states never should have attempted to build the exchanges in the first place.

Obamacare has become such a political football that every fact and development gets spun to death — but if we can’t learn from the current reality, and recognize that mistakes were made in the legislation and its conception, then we are just compounding our problems.  In all, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about $5 billion in federal funds that have been shelled out to states to allow them to assess whether to create state-specific exchanges and then, in some cases, to support their creation.  That’s an enormous sum of money, and it is becoming clear that a significant part of it has been wasted.  Whatever happens with Obamacare, let’s at least hope that in the future we refrain from enacting statutes that require states to develop large-scale, complicated technological systems, on their own, with the federal government picking up the tab.  As the mounting Obamacare costs demonstrate, that approach is fraught with peril.

The Obamacare Deadline Arrives

Today is March 31. It’s the “Obamacare” deadline that we’ve been hearing about for months, the end of the open enrollment period on the health care exchanges — although the federal government has extended the deadline for a week, to allow people who claim to be in the midst of applying to complete the process.

How is the process going? We know for sure that a lot of money and effort has been spent in encouraging people to apply by the deadline. The federal government has spent millions on TV ads and social media banners, alerting people to the deadline and encouraging people to “get covered.” President Obama himself has led the charge. Over the past few weeks, you couldn’t go to a website or social media outlet without seeing an ad. It’s been, by far, the largest, most visible, and probably most expensive government-sponsored ad campaign in my lifetime. It’s blown the “click it or ticket” and anti-drunk driving campaigns out of the water.

Has the ad campaign worked? According to information provided by the government, enrollments surged as the deadline neared. By mid-March, the government reported that 5 million had enrolled, then 6 million a few days ago. Some people hold out hope that enrollments might hit 7 million. The 7 million figure has some significance, because the Congressional Budget Office initially forecast that 7 million enrollments were needed during the open enrollment period, although the CBO later revised that forecast to 6 million.

It’s not entirely clear what these numbers represent. There are supposed to be 48 million residents in the United States who do not have health insurance; 7 million is only a small fraction of the uninsured whole. What do we do about the remaining millions of uninsured people? Moreover, it’s not clear how many of the people who have enrolled through the exchanges were formerly uninsured, either. Many of the users of the health exchange websites apparently were people who were insured but whose policies were terminated because they lacked mandatory provisions required by the Affordable Care Act. There are also valid questions about how many of the enrollees have actually paid premiums and therefore have coverage.

There will be a lot of information coming our way over the next few days and weeks about Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act is such a hot-button issue — and the impending elections in November will keep it so — that supporters and opponents of the law are sure to massage and select the data to favor their positions. The average voter would do well to apply skepticism to the messaging from both sides of the Obamacare debate.

If you’re someone who bought a new policy through healthcare.gov, the ultimate question about your fellow enrollees is: who are these people, and how sick are they? Insurance fundamentally involves a pooling of risk, and the cost of health insurance is directly tied to who else is in your pool. If you’re in a group with lots of young, healthy people who don’t need much health care, your premiums will be lower than if you’re in a group with a preponderance of sick people who regularly need expensive medical attention. We won’t know the true actuarial makeup of the new plans until the people who are covered begin to make claims, the claims get processed and paid, and the insurance companies look at the results and decide whether the pricing of the plans needs to be adjusted — and if so by how much. If health care costs increase dramatically, few people are going to consider Obamacare a success no matter how many people have enrolled.

It will be nice to see some new ads once the March 31 deadline passes, but everyone needs to take a deep breath. This initial deadline is just one step in a very long process, and we won’t know the outcome until we are much farther down the road.

Our Cutting-Edge Government

On Saturday the Washington Post published a stunning news article — one of those pieces that make you shake your head in wonder and disgust.

The story, by reporter David Fahrenthold, is about how the Office of Personnel Management — the main agency charged with human resources function for federal employees — processes the retirement paperwork of those federal employees. And “paperwork” is apt, because even though it is March 2014, the process is done almost entirely by hand and almost entirely on paper. Imagine! And to make it even weirder, it all happens underground, in a remote abandoned mine in Pennsylvania that received paper forms by the truckload and is filled with filing cabinets. That’s right — filing cabinets.

Using its antiquated process, it takes 61 days for the Office of Personnel Management to complete the retirement process. By contrast it takes Texas two days.

Does any large private company still process personnel actions on paper and by hand? Do any still maintain filing cabinets of sensitive personnel documents?

No wonder these guys botched the job of designing a functioning website!

Reading The Special Election Tea Leaves

Political reporters love special elections for congressional seats. Because the elections are one-off affairs held at odd times, they command far more attention than normal congressional races do. And the question always is: is there a lesson to be learned from the results that tells us how the national political winds are blowing?

Yesterday one of those special elections was held in Florida’s 13th House district. Democrat Alex Sink and Republican David Jolly were vying to replace a longtime Republican incumbent who died of cancer in October. Both sides poured money into the race, with Sink and her allies slightly outspending the Republican side.

The Republicans tried to make the race a referendum on Obamacare. Jolly favors outright repeal; Sink says the law should be “fixed” without saying much about how, precisely, to do that. Her position is the one that Democrats are being urged to voice in November, on the theory that voters are pragmatic and would rather see repair than repeal.

Jolly won by a 2% margin. Does that tell us that Obamacare will be political poison for Democrats nationally in November, or does it just mean that, on this occasion in one district in Florida, voters narrowly opted for one candidate over another? Already Democrats are noting that Sink got a larger percentage of the vote than had Democratic challengers to the longtime Republican incumbent — which seems like pretty meaningless spin to me.

I’m not inclined to read too much into the results, because I think many voters vote on the basis of candidates rather than issues. I also think, however, that Democrats need to sharpen their message and give voters some details on what, precisely, they propose to do with this law that has affected so many people. There are a lot of credibility issues swirling around Obamacare, and in that atmosphere vague promises of future fixes aren’t going to have much resonance with voters.

“Obamacare” And The Coming Elections

In 2014, every seat in the United States House of Representatives and 36 seats in the Senate — 21 held by Democrats and 15 by Republicans — will be up for election. Non-presidential election years are always unpredictable. In 2010, Democrats lost six seats in the Senate and 63 seats, and their majority, in the House of Representatives. Could 2014 see similarly significant swings in the makeup of Congress?

The wild card seems to be the Affordable Care Act, which everyone now seems to call “Obamacare.” In the past year, Obamacare has moved from concept to reality. The rollout of the law and its signature website have been beset by problems that have been well documented. The website hasn’t worked. Many of the deadlines have been delayed by executive orders that have angered conservatives who feel President Obama and administrators are bypassing the constitutional legislative process. Some individuals have been affected by the cancellation of their insurance policies or significantly increased premiums and other out-of-pocket costs. There is tremendous uncertainty about how, and when, and whether, other parts of the law may work.

As a result, Obamacare is not very popular with the public. According to the Real Clear Politics average of polling data, more than 50 percent of respondents oppose the law. Obviously, that’s not good news for Democrats who voted for the law. How will they respond?

According to a recent article in the National Journal, the plan for vulnerable Democrats is to distance themselves from President Obama, acknowledge difficulties with the law, but present themselves as working to fix its problems while Republicans just cross their arms and insist on a full-blown repeal. (Modern politics being what it is, I’m confident that the Democratic incumbents will be attacking their Republican challengers on a host of other issues, too, of course.) The National Journal article expresses some skepticism about whether the Democratic strategy is viable, and there is a special election for a House seat in Florida in March that may provide some clues about which way the electoral winds are blowing.

I think it’s still too early to draw hard and fast conclusions about “Obamacare” and its potential impact on the coming elections, because there are still pieces that have yet to fall into place. The deadline for individual enrollment is March 31, so we don’t know how many of the uninsured at whom the law was aimed will eventually sign up. We also don’t know how many people who have coverage under new health insurance plans purchased on the exchanges will fare as they seek health care at hospitals and with doctors, or whether a significant number of businesses might change their health care plans, or employee contribution requirements, in response to developments with the law.

I do agree with one point made by the National Journal article, however: messaging can only carry politicians so far. I think there is a broad understanding on the part of Americans of all political stripes that the rollout of the law and its website has been less than ideal — but by November 2014 the initial rollout problems will be many months old and the attention of the American electorate will likely be on more recent matters. Americans tend to be practical. If there haven’t been substantial new problems, the website crashes and error messages will seem like old news, and arguments that the President is governing by improper executive orders aren’t likely to gain much traction.

The broad awareness of “Obamacare” problems, however, has created a climate where many people are skeptical of the law and therefore receptive to more news about its problems. If the ultimate enrollment figures are well below what was forecast, if people start reporting that under their new plans they can’t get the health care they got before, and if the broad number of people who are covered by group plans through their employers start to see large increases in their premiums, deductibles, and co-payment obligations, no slick ad campaign is going to cure the sense that the law was a disastrous mistake. Carefully messaged TV commercials just won’t hold up if Americans are hearing about real Obamacare-related problems and costs from worried family members, neighbors, and friends.

Getting Out Of The Way

To the astonishment of many, Republicans in Congress did not make much of a fuss about raising the debt ceiling this past week. The leadership in the House let a “clean” bill — i.e., one that dealt solely with the debt limit — come to the floor, where it passed. In the Senate, Republicans cooperated in allowing the debt increase to be addressed by majority vote, rather than requiring a 60-vote threshold.

I’m not surprised. Many people are saying that House Speaker John Boehner is in trouble with conservative members of the Republican caucus for not insisting that the debt ceiling increase be coupled with debt reduction measures or other initiatives that are near and dear to tea party hearts — but I think, deep down, even conservative politicians are still politicians. And politicians know that one of the oldest rules in politics is that if your opponent is struggling and dropping in the polls, you don’t do anything that might interfere with that process.

The reality is that President Obama is struggling right now. Every week brings bad news for him — about problems with the Affordable Care Act, about his liberal and increasingly criticized use of executive orders rather than following the legislative process, about domestic spying, and about countless other foreign and domestic issues. The Real Clear Politics average of polling data shows the clear negative trend in presidential approval ratings. Why would Republicans want to pick a fight over the debt ceiling increase, threaten another governmental shutdown, and risk inviting that they receive some of the voter disapproval that is now being directed at the President?

Pimping The CBO

The Congressional Budget Office is supposed to be an independent analyst — one of the few nonpartisan entities still operating in our national politics. So, when the CBO comes out with a report, it possesses a certain inherent credibility . . . and the partisans who read the report as favoring their positions will tout the CBO’s nonpartisan status and try to use the report as sword and shield to further their partisan objectives.

Recently the CBO came out with a report estimating the impact of the Affordable Care Act on the job market, and both sides of the debate predictably tried to use the report to support their positions. The CBO report estimated that, by 2017, American participation in the workforce will drop by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs and that there will be a slower rate of growth in compensation and employment over the next decade.

Some Republicans leaped on the report to buttress their arguments that “Obamacare” is costing jobs. Democrats responded, however, that the CBO doesn’t really forecast an impact on the supply of jobs, but rather on the demand for work hours — a matter of individual choice. The CBO report predicts that the health law would cause some workers to voluntarily forgo working more hours in order to protect the subsidies that they will receive from the federal government to pay for health insurance and related costs. Of course, conservatives bemoan the CBO’s conclusion that a federal law will encourage able-bodied people to sit at home and receive subsidies rather than go out, work, and earn money on their own.

It’s hard for me to get worked up about CBO reports about the impact of the Affordable Care Act, because I just don’t believe they have any credibility. The CBO earlier forecast that the Affordable Care Act would produce a net loss of the equivalent of 800,000 full-time jobs by 2021, now it says a loss of the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs by 2024. What’s changed? Who knows — but why should the CBO’s current estimate be any more valid than their earlier estimate?

Recently a member of Congress asked the CBO whether it ever goes back and checks on the eventual accuracy of its estimates. The CBO website contains a response where the CBO explained why that was impossible in many cases, looks at a few instances where a comparison could be made, and finds that the CBO estimates were reasonably accurate in some instances and not in others. Trying to predict the impact of a law like the Affordable Care Act on the job market, however, is a far more daunting assignment than, for example, trying to estimate the impact of the 2009 “stimulus” legislation on federal spending and revenues. There are simply too many moving parts — individual decisions by millions of large companies and small businesses, individual decisions by millions of workers, the impact of outsourcing and overseas job markets, and decisions by federal regulators, among countless others — to make the “Obamacare” estimates meaningful.

So, let the CBO make its future forecasts and let the partisans on each side pimp the CBO conclusions that they think support their positions. I’d rather focus on the tangible reality of how the Affordable Care Act is performing right now.

The Politics Of Whining

Yesterday the Sunday news shows were largely focused on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and his staff’s decision to shut down lanes of the George Washington Bridge in order to exact some kind of political retribution on a New Jersey mayor.

Some conservatives reacted by counting how many minutes the shows devoted to the New Jersey story or by comparing how much air time and how many column inches have been devoted to “Bridgegate” as opposed to incidents like the Benghazi killings or the IRS targeting conservative organizations. They contend that the news media is biased and that Republican scandals always get more attention than Democratic scandals do.

This kind of reaction is just whining, and it’s neither attractive nor convincing. Both parties do it. When the news media was reporting every day on the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov, Democrats were doing the same thing and arguing that the media was ignoring the positive things accomplished by the Affordable Care Act. It’s a juvenile response to the news media doing its job.

The amount of coverage a story receives is largely a function of factors that have nothing to do with politics. The George Washington bridge incident has all the elements of a great story — a powerful politician, venal and misbehaving staff members, an initial cover-up, and average Americans being inconvenienced by some crass political power play. There is footage of traffic jams to be shown, angry and easy-to-find people to be interviewed, and a contrite governor’s press conference to cover. The same is true with the Obamacare website story: there are good visuals, lots of individual stories to tell, and obvious story lines to follow, like how did this happen and how much did it cost and who screwed up. Ask yourself which story is easier to cover — the New Jersey bridge closure or the shootings in faraway and dangerous Libya — and you’ll get a good sense of which story will in fact get more coverage.

Modern politicians always seem to have an excuse and always look for someone else to blame. Whining about news coverage apparently is part of the playbook, but I can’t believe it works. Whining is pathetic, not persuasive.

Barack Obama And George W. Bush

New York magazine has an interesting article with a headline no one thought they would see after President Obama’s triumph in the 2008 presidential election.  The headline is:  Barack Obama Is Not George W. Bush.

The comparison is being made by some because President Obama’s approval ratings have dropped to levels at or below the levels for President Bush at the same point in the second term his presidency.  The article argues that although the approval ratings are similar, the reality of the two presidents is much different:  President Bush had bipartisan support and lost it, and President Obama never had bipartisan support to begin with.  The article contends that President Obama’s dropping ratings are due to diehard, unending opposition that has been adopted as a tactical matter by Republican leaders.

I’m not convinced by that contention, which strikes me as a bit of a dodge.  The implication is that President Obama’s policies have nothing to do with his falling popularity, or with the opposition to his initiatives — the Republican tactics are wholly responsible because they have made the President look “partisan.”  In reality, I think, the opposition to many of the President’s proposals, such as the Affordable Care Act, is due to disagreement with the merits of those proposals:  Republicans and many independents thought they were bad ideas, and nothing that has happened since the recent rollout of healthcare.gov and the insurance exchanges has caused them to change their minds.  The mismanagement of the “Obamacare” rollout, and the President’s claimed unawareness of governmental actions like the NSA’s surveillance programs, also have caused people to question the President’s competence.  Those are self-inflicted wounds, not the product of stalwart opposition.

One other aspect of the New York piece is troubling.  It forecasts that the remainder of the President’s term will focus on executive action, where the President simply announces decisions without having to win approval from Congress.  We are already seeing that with some of the recent decisions to waive enforcement of various provisions of the Affordable Care Act.  That process is troubling in and of itself, but even more troubling is that the political focus has shifted from Congress to the federal judiciary — specifically, the federal court of appeals for the District of Columbia, which hears appeals of many administrative decisions.  The New York article states that Republicans have had a “functional majority” on the D.C. Circuit, and argues that the recent changes to the filibuster rules will allow President Obama and Senate Democrats to approve nominees to that court who will approve the President’s expanded use of “executive powers.”

This kind of frank assessment of the politics of a federal court should be disturbing to everyone.  Our government has been increasingly politicized in recent decades, and it hasn’t exactly worked well for our country.  If the judicial branch — which, with its lifetime tenure, is supposed to be immune from base political considerations — becomes explicitly politicized, it will not be a good development for the United States of America.

The Perils Of Pajama Boy

The Obama Administration is running an ad campaign designed to get people to sign up for health insurance.  Many of the ads target young people — the so-called “Young Invincibles” who are healthy and whose participation in the health insurance exchanges is viewed as crucial to the successful implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

One of the ads geared toward young people has provoked a lot of comment.  It features a 20-something guy sitting on a coach.  He’s wearing one-piece red and black plaid flannel pajamas and drinking a cup of cocoa — likely with a few marshmallows tossed in.  He’s also got a distinctive, raised eyebrow and smirk look on his face.  The ad’s tag line says:  “Wear pajamas.  Drink hot chocolate.  Talk about getting health insurance.  #GetTalking barackobama.com/talk”

It’s the kind of ad that immediately provokes questions and cries out for invention of a back story.  Seriously, do young men really wear one-piece plaid pjs these days?  (And by the way, do those pajamas have feet?)  It’s not a good look, frankly, and most guys know it.  Even Ralphie on A Christmas Story refused to don the pink bunny suit pjs until his Mom put her foot down — did Pajama Boy put on the checked pjs willingly?  Did he get them as a gift from Great Aunt Claire, or, god forbid, did he go out and buy them himself?

Where is Pajama Boy supposed to be?  Does he live with his parents?  Did he get the cup of cocoa from Mom, or does he regularly lounge around his own place in plaid pjs drinking hot chocolate?  Who is he talking to?  He looks like an insufferable know-it-all — could he be lecturing his parents about how they should foot the bill for him to get covered by one of those costly “gold” plans?  Or, is the raised eyebrow his sad approximation of a “come hither” look?  Does this pathetic, misguided wretch actually think a pajama-clad discussion of health insurance over hot chocolate might help him get lucky in the romantic area?

The first goal of any ad campaign is to get people to remember the ad, and the next goal is to get people talking about it.  The Pajama Boy ad obviously has accomplished both of those goals.  (Google “pajama boy” if you don’t believe me.)  Maybe the Pajama Boy ad is supposed to be one of those ironic commentaries that will have laser-like appeal for the Young Invincibles.  Maybe . . . but I doubt it.  I’m guessing that more people will think there’s something sad and bizarre and off-putting about the whole ad.