James Morrow
The Daily Telegraph
November 15, 2013 12:00AM
IN politics, leaders live and die by their promises. Julia Gillard
effectively wrote her government into the history books when she went
back on her assurance that "there will be no carbon tax under a
government I lead".
In the US, President Barack Obama is in similar strife over an
oft-repeated promise that under his plan to overhaul health care - the
Affordable Care Act or Obamacare for short - Americans who liked their
GPs and their health care plans would be able to keep seeing their GPs
and using those same plans. Or as he put it in various forms to
the American public more than two dozen times: "If you like your plan,
you can keep your plan."The only thing is, it turned out not to be true.
Experts and skeptics warned that trying to bend the US healthcare sector - which were it a stand-alone economy would be as big as France, only with more bureaucracy and worse customer service - to the will of Washington bureaucrats would be a disaster. The predictions are now coming to pass.
Under Obamacare, costs are going up for millions of Americans and the website designed to navigate individuals through the insurance "exchanges" has driven users away by the million on account of its poor design, buggy nature, and lack of security. . . .
How poorly has the system performed? By one estimate in the first month of the program just 50,000 Americans had successfully signed up under the new program. To put those numbers in perspective, that's about the same number of followers as The Daily Telegraph's Joe Hildebrand has on Twitter. Though in Joe's favour, the federal government is not compelling anyone to follow his feed.
Yet. . . .
While government experts raised red flags about the site as early as March, by all accounts the White House did not realise there were problems until after it launched a few weeks ago, when they read about it in the papers. This passive "who knew?" attitude was expressed by Obama himself during a recent interview on American TV when he blithely stated, "If we had to do it all over again ... there would have been a whole lot more questions that were asked."
No wonder Americans are angry and that the American president is now languishing in the polls and is sitting on disapproval numbers as ignominious as those of George W. Bush in his second term. And in contrast to Bush, Obama has not started any unpopular major wars (the Nobel Peace Prize winner is more of a drone strike man), nor with some exceptions does he face an overwhelmingly hostile media.
Democrats in the US legislature, facing elections in just under a year and the danger of being associated with the president's broken promise, are increasingly skittish and warning of a "crisis of confidence" in the president. When Republicans faced mid-term elections at the same stage of George W. Bush's presidency, Democrats swept the House and gained a commanding majority. Today, the polls are the same but the parties are reversed. . . .
Because the US Constitution does not provide for Westminster-style circuit breakers like spills or no-confidence motions, Obama does not face an existential threat to his presidency, only his legacy. Whether this is enough for him to change course again remains to be seen.
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