The ACA: A Dick Waving Exercise

Update: Contrary to what Mitch McConnell may be implying, the ACA is such a mess because it is a private industry initiative and not public. If anything, the ACA makes an even stronger case for Medicare for All or at least greater cost control measures on the health care industry.  In the ACA, we took all of the best practices of the best national healthcare policies in the world and totally ignored all of them.

I was listening recently to a book by Tami Hoag, Romance novelist turned mystery writer, where one of her characters described a tense courtroom hearing between two male attorneys as a “dick waving exercise”.  He observes that most people would be surprised to know how much of the interactions of everyday public business are conducted in an atmosphere of men waving their penises at each other and for little other purpose.

I’m not surprised.

In case you missed it, the Obama administration has waved the employer mandate until 2015.  How conveeeeeenient.  I suspect it’s because there were employers who were planning to cut back on hours in 2014 to make sure their employees didn’t qualify for “affordable” insurance.  That would have been a fricking monumental disaster at the polls for Democrats during midterm elections.  It may still be since the universal mandate is still in place so workers are still responsible for covering themselves but employers will now have no obligation to foot part of the bill.

The official line is that employers and their reporting systems are not ready yet.  Also not surprised.  The idiots in charge hired Accenture to run their technology.  The hiring managers should have come to former Pharma people for a performance evaluation of Accenture first but you know, workers are never asked to critique decisions like whether hiring Accenture to design information systems was a good idea.

Here’s how it works.  Accenture breezes into a company with their sharp suits and flashy presentations and completely bamboozles the management with promises of slick vaporware. Then they subcontract out to a couple of companies, who subcontract to India.  The Indian subcontractors do the best they can with limited information and the template code into which every business model must fit.  That gets passed back to the poor guy stateside who has to debug and rewrite everything.  The final result is, well, never final.  I’ve never known an Accenture job that actually completed on time, under budget and with all the bells and whistles that were initially promised.  The Pharma landscape is littered with systems that don’t work very well but have pushed aside the in-house programs they outbid to replace.  Meanwhile, the Accenture guys just move to another company.  Commence the parties and golf outings!

Biggest scam in IT.

But that’s besides the point.  I mean, that $330 million dollars is gone now.  There’s nothing you can do to get it back.  Of course, it does continue to reinforce my original theory that the Obama administration is comprised of a bunch of corporate shmoozer types who think they know what’s going on because they have the right academic pedigrees but who are really just scratching each others’ backs on their vicious climb to the top.  Screw the people who actually have to use those crappy interfaces.

I think it was Alexa over at Corrente who is getting to the core of the ACA:

With even some major authors of this piece of legislative “crap” predicting doom (Max Baucus comes to mind), Dems have decided not to chance allowing this boondoggle to go into effect until AFTER the midterm elections.

But the “cat’s out of the bag,” now. So any and all disruptions, implosions and fiascos (in general) can be easily laid at the door of the Democratic Party.

I have long held that this bill was passed for two reasons:

1) To relieve governments (local–city and county hospitals, state and federal) of “the burden” of providing healthcare to “the poor,”

and

2) To “spread the risks,” and therefore lower the cost of health insurance for the entrepreneurial class (specifically the wealthiest couple of percent) by raising the premiums significantly on the “regular Joe’s” who are mostly insured through their work group health plans, or various unions and/or trade associations.

It’s intent was never to help lower income Americans, IMO.

It was simply to make lower income Americans financially responsible for their medical bills.

Not surprising.  Wasn’t the ACA merely the old Heritage Foundation health plan dusted off for a new generation of suckers?

But if that’s true, then why was there a push to get it done so quickly in Obama’s first term? If it was good for Republicans, did we need to rush the sucker through?

Or was it because Obama was still in campaign mode, waving his dick at the other side?  No, not at John McCain.  He was waving his dick at Hillary.

Oh, sure, think about it.  Here was this new president breaking the color barrier, being fellated by the press every time he made an appearance.  And who was it who nominated him for a Nobel Prize?  I’m guessing the Norwegians are feeling pretty stupid about that these days but who put them up to it?  Was the media mojo that strong that it could persuade the Nobel committee thousands of miles away?  He had to be nominated by someone- over all of the more worthy candidates.  I’ve always thought that the Nobel was another smack at Hillary, the supposed “war hawk”, to make sure she knew she would never get any credit for anything she may have accomplished at State, even though we know now that Obama himself was micromanaging the diplomatic relations in Afghanistan and Iraq.  And how has that turned out?

So, maybe, the Heritage Foundation based ACA, with a heavy dose of personal lobbying for the hospitals by none other than Michelle Obama herself, was intended to be Obama’s signature “accomplishment” as a means to one up Hillary as well.  HE got it done.  {{waving dick in the air}}

I didn’t matter if the whole policy was unworkable and farmed off to some IT confidence men.  Some accomplishment.  We all lost.

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Busy today, peeps.  I have an interview.  Wish me luck.