Government Failure.gov

Headlining at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the president garnered huge laughs over the fact that he’s destroying the American healthcare sector and has failed to provide an alternative:

“Of course, we rolled out HealthCare.gov,” Obama said of his tough year in 2013. “That could have gone better.”

“In 2008, my slogan was ‘Yes we can.’ In 2013, my slogan was control-alt-delete,” Obama said.

Following the president, comedian and actor Joel McHale continued the theme:

The launch of HealthCare.gov was a disaster. It was so bad, I don’t even have an analogy because the website is now the thing people use to describe other bad things.

As we used to say, “That was so funny I forgot to laugh.”

For those of us actually subject to the actions of our rulers, life isn’t so funny. Millions received cancellation notices, face much higher premiums, or have lost benefits we used to take for granted.

So why do total incompetents gain more control over more aspects of our lives daily?

In the real world, we would have looked at the past record of Ms. Sebelius before putting her in charge of the creation of healthcare.gov. Her former colleagues in Kansas could have told the president about the several disastrous attempted computer system updates during her six years as governor there—including an attempted update of unemployment systems for the federal Department of Labor, and a failed state Department of Motor Vehicle system. As one state senator summarized:

We pretty much expected HealthCare.gov to fail, because she has a pattern of failing on these big initiatives. We thought that was why she was not nominated originally.

But the failure of government to deliver on its promises isn’t personal—it’s endemic.

Look at Oregon, where the state and Oracle have teamed up on the disastrous Cover Oregon healthcare exchange that is so bad the feds are now investigating whether it’s criminally bad. Of course, this being the government investigating itself, it’s not being pursued very aggressively:

Patrick Sheehan, a former Republican legislator from Clackamas County who says he relayed allegations of potential wrongdoing to the FBI in late 2012, says the agency contacted him two months ago to follow up, leading to a 90-minute meeting with a Portland-based FBI agent.

That’s a two-year lag in “following up.” Meanwhile, taxpayers are out $248 million, and Oregonians are—wait for it—now being redirected to Healthcare.gov.

Talk about out of the frying pan!

As noted in Kansans’ experience under Sebelius, technological incompetence isn’t limited to heath care sites. Over the past two weeks, the IRS has been sending out an unknown number of erroneous notices stating an “underpayment” of taxes equal to the total amount of taxes due (and paid). The IRS says it’s aware of the problem and is now sending out notices showing the corrected amount due of $0.00.

At what cost, and causing how much stress to those unfortunate recipients of the erroneous notices?

With the IRS and Obamacare teaming up, there’s surely much more “fun” in store.

To sum up:
The government is incompetent at everything—criminally so in many or most cases.
Investigative journalism is dead, replaced by media lapdogs who laugh at its criminality.
No government agency is going to investigate or hold it accountable.

As the 25th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall approaches, perhaps it’s time to realize we also have to do the tearing down ourselves—no one else is going to.