The vision that Progressives / incremental socialists is that we should be overjoyed to have technocrats run an “ordered” society – where all of us would know our place in society and that things would be ever so “efficient” under the wise gaze of of absolutely non-partisan bureaucrats who only care about “good” outcomes regardless of ideology. Well, that last part has been blown out the door with the IRS scandel where citizens were targeted multiple ways simply because they disagreed with the current Administration and advocated for, well, a more limited government. Thus, we saw the retaliation by these same folks that Progressives said we were to trust!
Not only that, we were to trust that their policies AND their procedures, having been created and deployed by EXPERTS!. Umm, haven’t we heard this before with respect to Obamacare?
It’s worth revisiting some of the assurances from administration officials over the summer that the technology to support the federal health-care exchanges would be ready for the October rollout:
Despite concerns that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are behind schedule in preparing to implement the Affordable Care Act, leaders from CMS and the Internal Revenue Service testified before Congress on July 17 that their technologies will be ready for the data-sharing that will commence Oct. 1.
“The ACA designates HHS as the conduit for information being shared with the marketplace,” said Daniel Werfel, the principal deputy commissioner of the IRS. “The taxpayer data supplied by the IRS will be transmitted over secure, encrypted channels to the HHS data hub, which was developed to facilitate these data transfers.”
Werfel was emphatic: “We are on target to have these systems ready when open enrollment in the marketplace starts on October 1 of this year.”
Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the HHS agency tasked with running the exchanges, also testified before the congressional committe:
I want to assure that you October 1, 2013, the health insurance marketplace will be open for business. Consumers will be able to log on to healthcare.gov, fill out an application and find out what coverage and benefits they qualify for. I also want to assure you and all Americans that when they fill out their marketplace applications, they can trust that the information they’re providing is protected through the highest privacy standards and the technology underlying this application process has been tested and is secure.
I don’t care if you are Right or you are Left – these last two weeks with the Exchange roll-out proves only a couple of things:
- Experts still put on their pants the same as the rest of us
- They put their ideology, again, front and center
- Even with “Government experts” running stuff, they aren’t that much better than private IT folks
- The Progressive promise of “don’t worry, we know what we’re doing” is now a laughingstock
I can’t WAIT for the identity thefts to start kicking in (given that the interface sucks, the database is already corrupted, and the linkages from the various systems are in continual “broken” mode). Such a “gift” to us all at a price of over $600 million. What we are seeing, in real time, is Government in the process crowding out the private marketplace. Simply by dint of having more money than the private sector (irony: some of that raised by taxing companies that Government is now competing against).
Worst of all, THEY LIED TO US! All of them, every single one of them. And not one person, that we know of, has been held responsible (hey, the medical equivalent of Fast & Furious? The IRS Scandal? The National Park Service Scandal? The Dept. of Justice Scandals?…..).
When Progressives rule, which is where they are headed, we can expect more of the same.
