Obamacare and Common Core: when technocrats stumble
Screen shot of Healthcare.gov
I’ve watched with real interest the last couple of months as the launch of the Affordable Care Act nationally and Common Core education standards here in New York careened through potholes and slammed into fire hydrants.
Schroon Lake school board president John Armstrong got it about right last week — and sparked rueful laughter — when he noted that “it appears now that the Common Core roll-out and healthcare roll-out have similar looks and feels.”
The painful muddle culminated in what amounted to “apology and we’ll get it right next time” tours by President Barack Obama and New York Education Commissioner John King.
Both men have acknowledged systemic shortcomings and missteps and they’ve asked for our patience.
There’s a painful irony here.
Barack Obama, a guy who lectured Republicans for driving the national car into the ditch at the beginning of his presidency, finds himself in the position of admitting that he himself has, at the very least, dinged the country’s fender.
John King, meanwhile, promised to continue revamping Common Core based on feedback from school districts and teachers, and he urged local leaders to use the flexibility built into the system to tailor new standards to their own community needs.
What do these two high-profile blunders say about the current state of American politics and policy-making? Let’s dive in.
It’s Hard To Be A Technocrat
For all the hype from the right about Barack Obama’s secret ideologies (Muslim, socialist, 60s radical, closeted gay, hater of white people, and so on) the guy appears to be, at heart, a tinkerer and not a revolutionary.
He believes in government’s power to help people’s lives and he wants to make it work well.
Which means creating things like a new insurance system that, in theory, will help more people gain access to health care without entirely tossing out the old, much-hated and dysfunctional system.
Same, too, goes for a new nationally-calibrated education system.
Critics have suggested that Common Core is everything from a secret effort to indoctrinate young people into the New World Order to a not-so-secret effort to produce mindless wage-slaves ready to enrich corporate America.
But really, a modern, integrated country like ours is long overdue for a baseline (and a fairly high baseline) of shared knowledge and skills. 
For all its increasingly obvious flaws, Common Core represents another baby step toward trying to realize this modest and hardly radical goal.
But in order to sell this kind of policy agenda, you have to get stuff right. Technocrats can’t rely on ideology or political rhetoric or bluster.
Instead, they have to bring the best and brightest into the room and they have to come up with whiz-bang ideas, and they have to execute them well.
If you’re an egghead, you have to show your math, and then you have to show results.
By contrast, George W. Bush could muck up the Katrina response and bumble us into a quagmire in Iraq and it didn’t shake the foundation of his core ideas, or his political identity — which, I think it’s fair to say, weren’t founded on the idea of competence.
But when technocrats fumble it’s not just a political crisis. It’s a shock to the core of their raison d’etre, an erosion of the foundation of their brand.
Mr. Obama, in particular, is living this erosion of trust right now. People voted for No Drama Obama. They didn’t vote for No Results Obama.
Mr. King, too, appears to be on thin ice. There’s evidence that Governor Andrew Cuomo, once a passionate supporter of education reform, is backing away from Common Core.
Governing In The Age of No
The second take-away from the Affordable Care Act and Common Core debacles is that governing against the headwind of a deeply angry, distrustful populist culture is going to be brutal.
It’s not just the tea party. You also have liberals and progressives on the left who view an initiative like Common Core as a cynical effort to transform cool, creative teachers and beautiful, natural children into mass-produced cogs in an industrial machine.
There is always a pool of rage somewhere just ready to be tapped. And in the new age of ideological journalism and blogs and 24/7 televised bitterness, there’s always someone ready to turn that tap into a fire-hose.
A generation ago, you could get away with introducing muddled if well-intentioned social programs and expect to get the details right later. But in modern America, the knives are out and they’re always sharpened.
We’ve known for years that Obamacare needed tweaking, refining, adjustments. But because the Republican Party demanded a full-scale dismantling, rather than reform, that proved impossible.
In like fashion, it’s unclear whether more progressive New Yorkers will be patient with Common Core, accepting the kind of steady, small corrections that Commissioner King is promising.
I’m not shifting the blame here. Team Obama and Team King have known for years that the roll-out of their signature accomplishments would have to be managed in the face of a full-court political press.
That should have motivated them to work harder and do better. Instead, they’ve made unforced error after unforced error.
The fact that Mr. King’s own children are in private school? The fact that his program’s teaching materials are flawed to the point of being laughable? The fact that the White House couldn’t even make a website function?
These freshman bungles have done real harm, not only to the mission of these programs — helping Americans be healthier and better educated — but to our sense of the value and capacity of government itself.
Take a deep breath.
Dr. John King in Schroon Lake (Photo: Ian lowe)
My final conclusion watching this latest round of turmoil is that we Americans — the citizens, the voters, the “we the people” part of government — are a growing part of the problem.
I know this is an unpopular idea.
Anger and distrust toward government are supposed to be viewed by the media as an eternally valid and validating force.
If people are shaking their fists, they must have a sound argument.
I’m not so sure. It’s perfectly fine to be wary of government and to demand that technocrats get stuff right. (See everything I’ve written above.)
But the level of impatience and the degree of vitriol strike me as arguably unwarranted and at times deeply problematic.
The fact that Mr. Obama and Mr. King appear to have mucked this up is worthy of a political response, and possibly a shift in direction.
But I would argue that it’s not worthy of hatred or scorn.
Again, I’ve yet to see a credible argument that either leader is trying to accomplish anything other than what they promised: improving healthcare and education.
That they’re doing so clumsily matters profoundly, but it’s not a war crime or an indication of anti-Americanness or evidence that either man is trying to Wal-Martize America.
It’s also important that the people criticizing the Affordable Care Act and Common Core acknowledge the difficulties of the tasks at hand — and be required by the rest of us to come up with coherent plans and ideas of their own.
As a journalist in America’s age of rage, I’ve grown skeptical of people who offer themselves up as critics and naysayers and obstructionists, without offering credible and thoughtful alternatives.
The truth is that protests are easy. It’s harder and a lot less fun to do the slow, steady, and politically risky work of solving America’s problems.
So yes, Mr. Obama and Mr. King have tried our collective patience — sorely, I would say — with their poor execution and sloppy detail-work.
But perhaps this is a moment for sharpened pencils and hard work and perhaps even a cautious amount of patience, rather than pitchforks and effigies?
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I don’t agree with everything you say here. However I do think you are on to something about individual freedom, government intrusion and what a nanny state does and how it thinks.
Hey JDM! Haven’t seen you here is a while. How’s things?
In the spirit of the holidays I want to reach out to the other side to see if we can find some areas of agreement – sort of like the US and Iran.
That Obama has messed up his health care rollout and lied to the American public about how they could keep lousy insurance plans! then he has the gall to pardon one stupid turkey for a dumb photo op when everyone knows that millions of turkey’s are going to their own personal death panel? What a waste!
Happy Thanksgiving!
it’s always instructive to have jdm commenting around here, since you get to see right up close how totally whacked a good chunk of the conservative movement in the u.s. has become.
he’s been going on about 15 million people losing insurance! (i’m sure you’re supposed to say it like dr. evil — fif-teen millllion people.) and he baldly states as fact that another 100 million with employer-provided insurance are about to follow!
except if you make even the slightest bit of effort to look things up, you realize that this is totally untethered from reality.
the entire individual insurance market in the u.s. consists of 15 million people. it really is true that that a lot of those people have gotten cancellation notices recently, but it’s nowhere close to all of them. it’s more like 5 million. and it’s not like those 5 million are going to be left high and dry. they’ll be able to get other policies. usually better ones! sometimes cheaper ones! it really is true that the roll-out of healtcare.gov has been a disaster, and the disaster is especially acute for those who have just had their policies canceled. but the website is continuing to get better. enrollments are accelerating. it looks like the kinks are getting worked out. and as a big part of the whole project, many many people who didn’t have access to health insurance before now do.
obviously obama has been far from perfect, but i think he’s been a pretty good president. he’s certainly been a huge upgrade from the guy who came before him.
Well, I had my policy cancelled but it doesn’t happen until the regular renewal and the insurance company said they would be following up with options for other policies. Honestly, the letter wasn’t a big deal. It was just a Joe the Plumber moment for those against Obamacare.
It’s always nice to have the low information crowd chime in.
Forbes and many other sources quote the president as saying it’s too bad that “5%” of the population will lose their insurance.
They know that the low information voters cannot figure out that 5% of 300 million Americans is, um, 15,000,000 people. (5% sounds so small)
khl: Things died down when Brian Mann took some time off from the inbox. I figured he was laying low while Obama was taking it on the chin.
34% approval in Ohio. Of course, Obama has a much higher rating among inboxers.
where’s the quote? if it’s in many sources then it should be no problem to find it.
but i just did a little more googling and i can’t find a quote where the president says that 5% of the population is going to lose its health insurance. i strongly suspect that’s because it doesn’t exist. i don’t think jdm is willfully lying, but he doesn’t look things up and therefore is prone to mistakes. if he doesn’t like that assessment, then all he has to do to prove me wrong is to provide a link.
… and not to ruin the suspense of waiting for jdm’s non-link, but here’s what actually happened. this 5% business isn’t coming out of thin air. what obama said is that “we’re talking about 5% of the population, who are in what’s called the individual market.” maybe it wasn’t crystal clear in his interview itself, but it was clear enough from context, and subsequently reinforced by administration officials (at least if you bother to look into it in the first place), that all he’s saying is that the cancellations are going to be consigned to the individual market, and that the entire individual market is 5% of the entire population.
he certainly wasn’t saying that all 15 million of them are going to lose their insurance. jdm is just plain wrong.
brian recently wrote a great post about the need for due diligence before engaging in social media or online commenting.
jdm would do well to read the post a second time.
??? This was pretty easy to find. To keep the low information voters calm, Carney didn’t say “losing their insurance”. He referred it as a “disruption issue”. You will have to read the entire article for context. It means that their policies are being canceled due to Obamacare.
On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney attempted to minimize the disruption issue, arguing that it only affected people who buy insurance on their own. “That’s the universe we’re talking about, 5 percent of the population,” said Carney. “In some of the coverage of this issue in the last several days, you would think that you were talking about 75 percent or 80 percent or 60 percent of the American population.” (5 percent of the population happens to be 15 million people, no small number, but let’s leave that aside.)
The second article, by Lisa Myers and Hanna Rappleye of NBC News, unearthed the aforementioned commentary in the Federal Register, and cited “four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act” as saying that “50 to 75 percent” of people who buy coverage on their own are likely to receive cancellation notices due to Obamacare.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/31/obama-officials-in-2010-93-million-americans-will-be-unable-to-keep-their-health-plans-under-obamacare/
The above article refers only to those who buy their own policies.
Next year, when the employer-provided policies will be canceled, the number of Americans losing their insurance will be north of 100 million.
That’s why Obama pushed that date (for employer-provided only) to be initiated after the elections next year. (he did this yesterday while the low information voters were traveling and not paying attention).
He knows what it coming, so he is delaying it until after the Nov 2014 elections.
Meanwhile, his approval is down to about the population of low information voters (about 1/3 of the country).
JDM, my wife was one of those who received a cancellation notice. Her new policy, purchased from the same company, will cost us less than a third of what the cancelled policy cost. It is slightly less generous in benefits, but we’re going to save a huge amount.
From comments I’m seeing around the web, there seem to be at least as many people who are better off under their new policies as people who will pay more.
So, now we’re down to arguing about exactly how many people will lose their health insurance and how many constitutes a meaningful number? Nobody should lose anything, especially after the President said they would not. The point is that under this misbegotten scheme, people are being forced to participate in a system they want no part of and that they were lied to about. All the smarmy carping about links, quotes and how many does not change the fact that we have been, and continue to be, lied to in order to make Obamacare happen. After all, who would worry about something that doesn’t affect them? We should all be worried.
JDM, Brian Mann isn’t “laying low” because of Obama. Brian Mann went to prison.
khl: I’m sorry. I can’t figure out if you are being literal, figurative, or what. Can you explain? The only association of Brian Mann and prison that I see is some reporting that he did. Is he trying to get the inside scoop or something?
i’m glad to see that you’re putting your cards on the table, jdm.
i came across roy’s article in forbes while i was googling last night, but it makes my point, not yours. carney isn’t saying that fully 5% of the population is going to face a “disruption issue” (which is roy’s term, not carney’s). he’s just saying that the entire individual market is 5% of the population, and that the “disruption issue” is going to be relegated within that 5% slice. this point is further underscored by the second paragraph you’ve quoted, which projects that 50-75% of people on the individual market — not the full 100% — will face cancellation notices. (and it should be pointed out that all of these people will be able to get other policies.) (it should also be pointed out that the number of cancellations that have gone out hasn’t actually gotten that high yet. the most current figure i found was in the ballpark of 5 million.)
you’ve misread your own link, jdm. and you actually have the gall to call others “low information.”
larry is right about one thing. obama really did screw up by saying “you can keep your plan.” i have a hard time believing he didn’t know better at the time, and i’m sure lots of people in the administration knew better, and he never should have said it. bad on him.
but aside from that, this idea that “Nobody should lose anything” — no i don’t agree. our health care system sucks! any time you change the status quo, there are going to be winners and losers. i remain very optimistic that obamacare is going to give us far more winners and losers, and that the gains for the winners will far outstrip the setbacks for the losers. maybe i’ll be wrong, but time will tell.
Insurance is already heavily regulated, policies come and go and the industry responds to the regulatory structure and the market.
It’s not much of a joke if you have to explain the punch line.
Our health care system does not suck, at least not for the majority of Amercans. Do we have an obligation to help the “losers ” ? We certainly do, but exchanging the current group of “losers” for a new group is hardly the way to go about it. How come the current winner/loser equation doesn’t work? I think the “losers” want to change places with the “winners” and then it will be OK to have winners and losers.
Get ready America!
Here is a story of kid in Texas with cancer whose family lost their health insurance due to Obamacare.
They were met with an impersonal crew of paper-shufflers who lost papers, passed the buck, you name it.
Wooo hooo. This is the great Obamacare we’ve been waiting for.
I feel bad for this kid, but the rest of us had better wake up.
Death panels, here we come!
http://www.wnd.com/2013/11/boy-with-cancer-loses-coverage-after-obamacare-launch/
JDM, WND?
Even Ann coulter calls the publisher of WND a “publicity whore” and a “swine”.
http://o.dailycaller.com/thedailycaller/#!/entry/ann-coulters-email-to-the-daily-caller-about-worldnetdaily,51abeb36da27f5d9d0d3beb1/2
It depends how you define “sucks”.
I think if we look at health outcomes and costs per unit of service, it does not perform well. It works great as long as you are healthy of course. But we get a low value per dollar spent compared to other countries.
We as a country currently spend a LOT on health care, we as a country are not very healthy, we die younger, our babies have more complications, our drugs are very expensive, we don’t seem to be able to do preventive care very well.
This is not just a problem for the very low income or the uninsured. Medical bills are still the number one cause of bankruptcy in our country. Its sucking our economy dry, its sucking our government dry. So it is a beast which must be tamed. I am not sure what model is the best one and I am not sure Obama knows what he is doing to address the problem. However it needs to be addressed.
Now if people think the government is not needed to do this and the current system is fine, I suggest you pass on Medicare and go and try to buy health insurance in the private market when you are 70, see how far you get.
The problem with American health care is its cost and its current status as a profit center. This drives care away from rural areas, poor people and the uninsured. Obamacare is about insurance and even if it could work, it would only perpetuate the current state of affairs. Cost control should be the goal, but I don’t think it’s being adequately addressed. When money is the prime motivator, nothing works. That’s why taxes continue to rise and the quality of education continues to decline. Health care costs are out of control and fewer and fewer people have access to the care.
khl:
That’s right. There’s no problem with Obamacare. It’s just those pesky websites.
All is well.
The website to sign up only cost 3/4 of a billion dollars and three years and is a disaster.
But, that’s just propaganda.
I can’t wait to see how people love Obamacare when they’re having a heart attack and the person can’t find their record.
“Excuse me, how do spell your last name”
“Our records show that you made $1,000 too much this year”.
“You will not be able to a doctor at this hospital”
“Try another city”
“Oh, your’re dead”
“Next patient”
“How do you spell your last name”
JDM, you seem to have forgotten about the Medicare Part D rollout problems under your buddy GWB. Same issues, time passes, issues fade, program works.
“I can’t wait to see how people love Obamacare when they’re having a heart attack and the person can’t find their record.”
You also seem to be confusing Obamacare with government-provided insurance. It’s not. It is a set of regulations governing insurance provided by private insurance companies. Once you’re signed up for it, the government has nothing to do with it, other than making sure your company is playing by the rules.
Nice try at scaring people. It’s bogus.
if people want to hammer away at healthcare.gov, then by all means have at it. it really has been a disaster. there’s no excuse for it.
but it’s important to keep a couple other things in mind.
the website doesn’t prove that obamacare is unworkable. some states that have set up their own exchanges (and as part of that, their own websites) have been doing just fine. it’s an implementation problem, and a solvable problem at that, not a fundamental issue with the law.
i have no idea how much healthcare.gov cost (and with jdm’s track record, i don’t see why anyone should trust him), but i’m sure it was expensive, and for however much it was, it should have been a million times better. but it’s not like the money that paid for it was lit on fire or sucked into a black hole. it’s not like the website is a lost cause. no, it’s already gotten a lot better, and it’s going to continue to improve. the kinks are getting worked out. the future is always uncertain, but it’s looking more and more like when the history of obamacare is written, the disastrous rollout of the website will amount to a little hiccup that no one is going to remember — like walker says, just like the rollout of medicare part d.
finally, there’s a lot more to obamacare than a website. i’m not like jdm, so i’m not going to make clownish declarations like mitt romney is going to win the election or the biggest story in the news this week is people lining up to buy sandwiches at chick-fil-a. but one of the biggest problems faced by our health care system is that it’s spectacularly inefficient. we spend way more than other countries for the same treatment. and one of the biggest goals of obamacare is bring to that under heel — to “bend the curve.” take it away, paul krugman:
krugman goes on to say there are important caveats to that. we don’t know for sure why the curve is bending. we don’t know if we’re only seeing a temporary reprieve in cost growth. the economy is really complicated and it’s always hard to attribute this or that phenomenon to this or that policy. it’s way too early to attribute any of the good news with any kind of certainty to obamacare.
but nevertheless, the news is good! it’s certainly consistent with obamacare making a real positive impact. everyone should go read the whole column.
HT, does Krugman pay you or are you a family member?
goodness me, larry, is that sarcasm? i thought you tried to tell us before that there’s no room in conversation or debate for ridicule, insults or mockery even if you think you’re right.
(of course on the merits i have no problem with your comment — it’s a good joke! — except that krugman has an excellent track record and it’s extremely lame to dismiss what he writes out of hand.)
One of the problems with Obamacare is that no one will know what their costs will be.
It is so contrived and dependent on one’s income that anyone with variable income will not be able to budget their health care costs.
It will go from very little, to very high, to very high plus very high deductible, all within a very narrow window of income.
The article I referenced showed that the child lost his coverage because the dad made $173 too much for that year.
No arguing the government. They are mind-numbed droids when it comes to this.
If it comes down to $173 or my son dies, the government employee will coldly say, “$173, you lose”.
No scare tactics here. Just reality in Obamacareland.
JDM, WND? (Per KHL)
Or to be a bit more substantive, you don’t think that there are tens of thousands of similar stories that could be told about our health insurance system pre-Obamacare?
No, HT, not sarcasm, which implies a bitter intent to wound; more like irony or tongue-in-cheek commentary, I think. Either way, I thought it a gentle enough comment that I did not expect to have my own words thrown back at me, unless of course, your skin is thinner than I thought. If we’re done mincing words, I would like to add a comment about Professor Krugman: I certainly don’t “dismiss what he writes out of hand”, I always read what he writes carefully before I dismiss it. Irony aside, the last time I checked, he was an Op-Ed columnist, not the Pope. Even true believers like yourself should recognize an opinion when they see one.
I’m happy to report, as many of you must know, that Healthcare.gov is “up” and working well. That’s a mixed blessing, however, as I also discovered that replicating my currrent health insurance coverage will cost more than three times what I pay now. But I have employer-sponsored insurance so I guess I don’t have to worry about being forced out of my current plan, do I?
don’t worry, larry, my skin isn’t that thin, which you can tell because i wrote “on the merits i have no problem with your comment” (by which i meant to convey that i think it’s perfectly in bounds) and “it’s a good joke!” i was just pointing out the inconsistency in the standards you have for yourself and for others, or at least prompting you to explain them more, since they seem to be quite intricate.
as for krugman, it goes without saying that his opinions are opinions, but thanks for saying it all the same. if you want to dismiss him, it would be great if you could explain why. engage with the argument.
to have a really meaningful comparison between your current health plan and what you can get on the individual market, it would be helpful to know what you’d be able to get in the absence of obamacare. not that this is something anyone can look up at this point, but just saying.
In all seriousness, I don’t understand your question about what insurance I could get on the individual market. It’s a moot point as I have employer-provided insurance. Barring a catastrophic failure of the company that provides it or an Obamacare-influenced cancellation, I’ll always have it. Should the latter be the case, my cost would triple.
I’ve been buying health insurance for years on the open market. you’d think that people who have never had to go through that process would give some thought to what I have to say about it.
larry, maybe i was reading something into what you wrote that wasn’t there. with your talk of a “mixed blessing,” i took your point about your employer-sponsored insurance vs. insurance on the open market as something intended to cast obamacare in a negative light. my point is that there’s a crucial piece of context missing, which is how much your insurance on the open market would cost in a world without obamacare (it might be even more than three times what you’re playing now). sorry if i misread what you were getting at.
I certainly meant to cast Obamacare in a negative light. How much my insurance might cost on the open market isn’t relevant because it is not an open market product. My concern is that I might be forced out of this plan. That ‘s the context of my comment. Should that happen, the Obamacare alternative is three times more costly.
Larry, the point is that buying health insurance as an individual in NY state was incredibly expensive before the ACA. My wife’s policy was costing us $1350 a month. There were a few cheaper plans, but they had terrible claims records. Next year, we’ll be paying $440.
Walker,
That’s your point, to which you are surely entitled. Will I be able to keep the policy I have? That’s my point.