|
News, commentary, opinion on politics, government, books, social trends, American life, travel, cycling, books, other stuff
|
|
|
If you ask the average person in the street, or driving her car or flying her plane, she will tell you Obamacare is a disaster or, at best, a mess. If you ask people in the red states like Texas, Mississippi and many far western states, they will tell you it is the worst thing that has happened in the world since communists took over Russia in 1917 or Hilter came to power in Germany in the 1930s. Or something. You know, really, really bad, like having your pants set on fire while trying to eat an ice cream cone. Bad, bad.
How do they know this? They’ve been told it a thousand times or maybe more like ten thousand times and counting and the news stories that broke when the ACA kicked off dovetailed very nicely with this narrative. You can successfully get most people to believe rocks have wings and can fly if you tell them often enough confidentially.
The fact is, the really smart people at the White House and throughout the government who support the ACA have been overwhelmed with negative propaganda from the get go. They have been buried. They didn’t know what was hitting them all along the line and they never caught up with, much less got ahead, of the attacks. The Obamas were playing one dimensional warfare when their opponents, the enemies of the ACA, were playing on every level and dimension imaginable. Then, the icing on the cake for the opponents, Obama’s repeated claim “If you like your insurance, you can keep it” was all that was needed to sink the ship, in the minds of millions.
This attempt to get more Americans, millions in fact, covered by comprehensive health insurance should have been accompanied by one of the biggest, mass based education, explanation and training sessions the nation has ever known. There should have been one million to five million people ready to explain the new law and how it would work. When the government’s healthcare.gov site was failing, there should have been dozens of sites that people could turn to for basic information (hand holding) until the official, main site was fixed. This whole thing should have been approached like an army planning and executing one of the biggest invasions in history and the volunteer workers should have been out there fighting off misinformation, one citizen client at a time.
Another huge mistake, as outlined by Steven Brill in his brilliant reporting in Time magazine, was to assign non-techies to oversee the launch of the healthcare.gov website. People were in charge who had led public relations and voter drives for Obama during the campaigns, not people who necessarily knew anything about the nit and grit of setting up websites.
It was a huge mistake to try to roll out the site all at once, nationwide. That ensure when there were problems, as there almost always are in complex technology applications, those problems would cascade into one another and the site would be tied in fits by trying to respond to the whole nation, all at once. Didn’t these people know that? It was perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of all, but there were plenty of others (you have to read Brill’s full report to get the whole picture).
Someone should always remember this: when you send “the smartest guys in the room” to address a problem, make sure they have some background, any background, in the nature of the problem. Duh. Just because someone has been a pretty good first baseman, would you send him to oversee weapons deployment in advance of a military campaign? Whoever was making the assignments at the White House didn’t understand that sending campaign workers, who had used computers, not set them up, was not really the best plan. What is further astounding, though it fits right in with ordinary human mistakes, is that the people sent to supervise didn’t understand and accept sooner that they couldn’t get the job done. No one, apparently, sent up smoke signals saying H-E-L-P.
Smart people do dumb things all the time. That is, actually, one of the underlying problems with “smart”: just because someone can do one thing very well, it does not follow that the person can do everything well. We all have a point where our abilities run out and our false hopes and over confidence kicks in.
|
