Topic: Decline of the West
Here’s a question for you: Who’s in charge of Obamacare? Stumped for an answer? Don’t feel badly.
If anyone were to ask you who runs, say, Amazon, Facebook or John Deere, you might not know the answer off the top of your head. But it’s no more than a quick Google search away, right? So how about Obamacare? You might finger the President of the United States…but no. President Obama was clueless concerning the unreadiness of healthcare.gov. And as his media claque insisted, he can’t be blamed for that. It’s just impossible, the claque sighed, for a president to be aware of everything that’s happening in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy.
Well then, how about the Secretary of Health and Human Services? Surely that official is the logical nominee for the position of Obamacare CEO. Well, no. Kathleen Sebelius, currently clearing her desk, seems not to have had much knowledge of or responsibility for the management of the president’s signature initiative. Certainly she’s never accepted the blame for Obamacare’s manifest failure to launch. And again, the media claque is at hand with a laundry list of perfectly logical excuses for Sebelius’ incompetence. How can a political appointee be expected to grapple with the complex of highly technical question surrounding a massive initiative like Obamacare?
And here’s the thing: The claque’s excuses are perfectly logical. Of course a president cannot possibly know what’s going on in every nook and cranny of the bureaucracy. Of course a political appointee cannot possibly manage the launch of a technical and regulatory Titanic like Obamacare. But having exonerated Obama and Sebelius, the claque fails to ask the next, the obvious, question: If the President and the Secretary of HHS aren’t in charge—who is?
No one, that’s who.
Obamacare has been described as a train wreck, and that’s a particularly apt simile because nobody’s driving the train. In dozens and hundreds of offices all over the federal bureaucracy, the regulation-writers are indefatigably at work—and no one is coordinating their efforts. In the tens and hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and regulations that these worker bees are generating, there are innumerable glitches, goofs, contradictions and plain stupidities that will adversely affect the lives of millions of Americans in ways large and small. Yet this process is not being managed and, given the crazy-quilt complexity of the original law and its spawn, it can’t be managed in any meaningful sense of the word.
And what’s true of Obamacare is true of the federal government as a whole. The old Progressive ideal—the triumph of expertise and administration over democratic accountability—has reached its logical conclusion. The rule of Leviathan has come round at last—and that rough beast, as it turns out, is not only gigantic but brainless.
