On Obamacare: The Administration is Now Measuring the Program’s Success Not by Whether It Meets It's Goals, But By Whether It Survives At All

Did I Tell You The One About The Seas Rising?

From Megan McArdle:

The administration has given up on success, as it might once have defined it. The object is no longer 7 million people signed up through the exchanges, with 2.7 million of them young and healthy, and the health-care cost curve bending back toward the earth. It is to keep the program alive until 2015. 

The administration's priorities are, first, to keep Democrats from undoing the individual mandate or otherwise crippling the law; second, to keep insurers from raising premiums or exiting the marketplace; third, to tamp down loose talk about the failures on the exchanges; and, only fourth, to get to the place where it used to think it would be this year, with lots of people signed up for affordable insurance. 

It is now measuring the program’s success not by whether it meets its goals, but by whether it survives at all. 

And all of its choices are oriented toward this new priority. You can see this in the decisions the administration made about fixing HealthCare.gov: 

It focused on the part that voters can see, even though the part that accurately transmits data to insurers is arguably more important -- is it better, or actually worse, to “sign up” a bunch of people when you can’t get that information to the insurers who need to write the actual policies? 

You can see it in the strategic delays, particularly the delay of the open enrollment deadline until after the 2014 elections.... 

From the administration's perspective, this makes a lot of sense. A program that survives until 2015 can hopefully be fixed. A program that is fatally damaged by Democratic or insurer defections definitely can’t. 

The question is whether the public will embrace this new way of measuring the program’s success … and what happens if it doesn't.

Ace comments:

A frequent guest on Megyn Kelly's show, Chris Stirewalt (I believe), has explained all of Obama's moves: Buy time. It's that simple. Everything he does (and, in fact, virtually everything he's ever done as President) is about buying time. Putting off hard decisions. Telling the public lies which will hold for a news cycle and hope that the ultimate price to be paid for determined serial deception will be minimal. 

All of these dilatory tactics are common among failures, criminals, and liars. They don't want to pay the price for their actions; and, rationally speaking, who could blame them? 

People who put off difficult decisions are hoping, in the end, that some Miracle intervenes between the present moment and the Day of Accounting to spare them that accounting entirely. 

I'm not certain what miracle Obama thinks is on the way.