Submitted by F.F.Wiley of Cyniconomics blog [7],
This may be a little after-the-fact, but I’ve been thinking about the ACA mess this weekend and keep coming back to President Obama’s November 7 interview [8] with Chuck Todd.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news [9], world news [10], and news about the economy [11]
Or more precisely, Ann Althouse’s post [12] on the interview. (I admit to not watching the full interview – Althouse’s excerpts were enough to stick in my head like an annoying song.)
Speaking about why his campaign website worked so well compared to the ACA site, Obama said:
You know, one of the lessons - learned from this whole process on the website - is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. …
Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I’m not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right?
He later added that:
When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn’t work or it ends up being way over cost.
BO, aren’t you kind of acknowledging that your ideological opponents are right? Yet, you claim that these fundamental inefficiencies are easily fixed?
As Althouse notes: [12]
we've been told we must buy a product, and things have been set up so we can only go through the government's market (the "exchange"), and the government has already demonstrated that its market doesn't work. But you can't walk away, you're forced to buy, and there's nowhere else to go. And yet, he wants us to feel bad about the cumbersome bureaucracy the government encountered trying to procure the wherewithal to set up the market it had already decided we would all need to use.
Check out the Althouse post [12] for appropriate commentary and YouTube clips.
(h/t David Henderson [13])