The Coming Obamacare Fiasco

The Tea Party Economist:  My GaryNorth.com site has forums. Yesterday, one of the site members posted this. You will appreciate it.
Our company is currently undergoing its annual health coverage renewal and massive increase (about 25% to the company and higher co-pay’s all around) fire drill. The insurance guy shared some complete horror stories with our HR guy.

It turns out that the government — I don’t know whether state or local but it essentially doesn’t matter — has essentially zero processing infrastructure to manage any of this silliness. It has no IT capability, no personnel, no help desk support, nothing. The insurance guy described how government agencies are supposedly inquiring about buying or renting some of these capabilities from existing insurance companies.

Here’s where it gets truly comical-to-absurd and way beyond: apparently some bureaucrat proposed buying or renting the IT system from an insurer for $15,000. You know, a system which probably cost millions to develop, is staffed with a crew of trained specialists who wouldn’t last ten minutes with these knuckleheads in charge, and is purpose-built to a specific workflow and product mix.

Additionally, the government has inquired about renting call centers, as if a roomful of 150 or so people could easily be repurposed to support a massive government program and that the insurance company making it available doesn’t still need these resources on its own. (I worked in a call center in the financial industry back in the day and have interacted with numerous aspects of customer and technical support in many areas since: it’s not always rocket science but there is some knowledge, insight, and workflow required to not make a hash of things on even the most basic level.)

Whatever they think may be coming on line in October, it’s going to take forever for much to really happen (beyond taking you’re money; the government is terrific at that) and compliance and enforcement will be a nightmare (compliance will doubtless trail efforts at enforcement).

It’s like the guy at the coin store told me a couple of years ago when they proposed/enacted a reporting requirement for cash transactions of $600 (to capture meaningful purchases of gold and silver, among other things): “They’ll never be able to make it happen, so don’t even worry about it.”

I’m guessing *something* is going to happen with Obummersnare, but it won’t be what anyone expects and I sure hope it quickly leads to a massive loss of legitimacy and disappointment.
At the very least there should be some quality entertainment value out of this horrendous tragedy.
To visualize the outcome, picture Nancy Pelosi as Oliver Hardy, with Obama as Stan Laurel. Nancy says: “Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.”