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Economy
The Smartest Guy in the Room Crashed the Rollout of O'care
2013-11-03
In May 2010, two months after the Affordable Care Act squeaked through Congress, Obama's top economic aides were getting worried. The director of the White House's National Economic Council, and the head of the Office of Management and Budget, had just received a pointed four-page memo from a trusted outside health adviser. It warned that no one in the administration was "up to the task" of overseeing the construction of an insurance exchange and other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page statute into reality.
The author was a Harvard professor, but not as smart as The One, as we shall see!
The Directors and their staffs agreed. For weeks that spring, a tug of war played out inside the White House, according to five people familiar with the episode. On one side, members of the economic team and an Obama health-care adviser lobbied for the president to appoint an outside health reform "czar" with expertise in business, insurance and technology.
Run out of room in the Czar Palace, did we?
On the other, the president's top health aides -- who had shepherded the legislation through its tortuous path on Capitol Hill and knew its every detail -- argued that they could handle the job.
We are the Ones You Have Been Waiting For!
So they were the only ones who actually read the bill, and they couldn't translate it into action...
In the end, the economic team never had a chance: The president had already made up his mind, according to a White House official. Obama wanted his health policy team -- led by Nancy-Ann De­Parle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform -- to be in charge of the law's arduous implementation. Since the day the bill became law, the official said, the president believed that "if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann."

Three and a half years later, such insularity -- in that decision and others that would follow -- has emerged as a central factor in the disastrous rollout of the new federal health insurance marketplace, casting doubt even at the WaPo on the administration's capacity to carry out such a complex undertaking.
Not to mention the somewhat simpler task of running a government and an economy, as opposed to a campaign.
"They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn't have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business," said a Harvard professor and health adviser to Obama's 2008 campaign, who confirmed he was the author of the memo [cited in the first paragraph]. "It's very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills."
Not for The Genius Elite! Nobody better than Nancy-Ann!
Posted by:Bobby

#9  AKA: Asshole Supreme. I wanted to punch him thru my TV screen
Posted by: Frank G   2013-11-03 19:06  

#8  Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel's brother has been making the rounds of the Sunday talk show programs. The design of ObamaCare has been attributed to him although this is doubtful. This Donk albatross has been on the shelf for a long time before being dusted off. Emanuel is brash, rude, interrupts constantly (seems to be a liberal inbred trait) and acts like his opinion is the only viable opinion on anything.
Posted by: JohnQC   2013-11-03 17:51  

#7  Both titles work for me. One can pass the WaPo editor's scrutiny, one can't...
Posted by: Steve White   2013-11-03 15:25  

#6  What, you don't like my title, Al? ;)
Posted by: Bobby   2013-11-03 12:26  

#5  The Wapo article's title is:

"How political fear was pitted against technical needs"

Political fear wins every time. Especially in this administration.
Posted by: Frozen Al   2013-11-03 12:20  

#4  ...link to an interesting 8-min video analysis...:

ObamaCare: What YouÂ’re Not Being Told
Posted by: Uncle Phester   2013-11-03 12:20  

#3   In a speech in Boston on Wednesday, President Obama addressed criticism that he had broken his pledge that Americans would be able to keep their health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act.

So, lied again.

Come on now you should expect a lie, it fits his meme.
Posted by: Redneck Jim   2013-11-03 10:26  

#2  Using only O's and 1's in the coding process is so, I dunno, binary and implicitly racist. It was important to allow the other digits to participate equally in the coding process. Hey wait, why is this thing not working?
Posted by: Matt   2013-11-03 09:28  

#1  Nancy Ann attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where her senior thesis was entitled "Uncle Sam, Hirohito, and Resegregation: The Tule Lake Segregation Center, 1943-1946." She was awarded a B.A. degree with highest honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and selected as a Phi Kappa Phi scholar. She was the first female president of the University of Tennessee student body and was a member of Delta Gamma. In 1978 Glamour magazine named her one of the year's top ten college women.

After graduating from Tennessee she enrolled in Harvard Law School, but interrupted her studies there when she was awarded a Rhodes scholarship. As a Rhodes scholar, she received a B.A. from Oxford in 1981. After returning to Harvard, she earned a J.D. degree in 1983.

She is married to Jason DeParle, a reporter for The New York Times.


[Unexpectedly!] DeParle has drawn criticism for her lucrative service on corporate boards after her tenure in the Clinton administration. Msnbc.com reported that she was paid more than $6 million, and served as a director of half a dozen companies that faced federal investigations, whistleblower lawsuits and other regulatory actions. Many of these companies have a stake in the health care reform that she led.
Posted by: Bobby   2013-11-03 08:22  

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