| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty September 27, 2013 Is Obamacare Doomed to Collapse No Matter What Congress Does? Either everything we're hearing about Obamacare from the people implementing it is wrong, or it's going to be an unmanageable disaster. We may someday look back and think Ted Cruz and his like-minded Republicans worked tooth and nail to save Democrats from one of their biggest policy mistakes in decades. Dan Henninger: Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe. Big labor unions and smaller franchise restaurant owners want out. UPS dropped coverage for employed spouses. Corporations such as Walgreens and IBM are transferring employees or retirees into private insurance exchanges. Because of ObamaCare, the Cleveland Clinic has announced early retirements for staff and possible layoffs. The federal government this week made public its estimate of premium costs for the federal health-care exchanges. It is a morass, revealing the law's underappreciated operational complexity. But ObamaCare's Achilles' heel is technology. The software glitches are going to drive people insane. Creating really large software for institutions is hard. Creating big software that can communicate across unrelated institutions is unimaginably hard. ObamaCare's software has to communicate—accurately—across a mind-boggling array of institutions: HHS, the IRS, Medicare, the state-run exchanges, and a whole galaxy of private insurers' and employers' software systems. Recalling Rep. Thomas's 1999 remark about Medicare setting prices for 3,000 counties, there is already mispricing of ObamaCare's insurance policies inside the exchanges set up in the states. The odds of ObamaCare's eventual self-collapse look stronger every day. After that happens, then what? Try truly universal health insurance? Not bloody likely if the aghast U.S. public has any say. Allahpundit: The D.C. exchange was promoted by the media as ahead of the curve relative to other exchanges, and yet they still couldn't get the subsidies calculations right in time for launch day — with three years to prepare. If that's the shape that a comparatively well-run exchange was in, when would the more poorly-run exchanges start postponing elements of the rollout? Well, here you go. It took less than 24 hours. Exit question: At this point, would the White House rather meet Boehner's demand for a one-year delay of all of ObamaCare or Manchin's demand for a one-year delay of the individual mandate specifically? I think there's more political risk to the latter than the former, no? If you delay the whole law, you buy yourself time to work out all the bugs before trying again at a rollout next year. It'll be hugely embarrassing to the White House to postpone things when they're this close to launch, and there are doubtless lots of congressional Democrats who don't want O-Care becoming a key issue right before the midterms, but that's survivable. What's potentially not survivable is rolling out the exchanges now minus the individual mandate, which means lots of young adults will face no legal compulsion to buy in. If (as Bill Clinton noted two days ago) healthy uninsured people refuse to fork over their money, then insurers suddenly don't have a pool of revenue to cover all the people with preexisting conditions who are signing up, and then the whole scheme starts to collapse. There'll be no delays after that; if insurers start crumbling, we'll be in post-ObamaCare mode as a country. Better, then, to hit pause on the whole thing if you're O to prevent that sort of collapse, right? Our New 'Nummy' Culture Ace, describing a rant by Adam Carolla, and lamenting the 'numminess' of America: "Mochachino." That's cute, isn't it? And what adults had historically done, he said, was embrace adult tastes. Cigars taste good to an adult cigar smoker because he has cultivated that taste. Oysters don't taste good to a kid; oysters taste good to an adult who has cultivated a taste for oysters. Cognac isn't good because it's sweet. Cognac is good because we have embraced adulthood and trained ourselves to embrace more sophisticated tastes. …A mochachino, topped with lots of nummy whipped cream, is not a sophisticated taste. We emerge from the womb craving the sweetness of sugar, after all. Again, it's one thing to indulge in a treat. But it's another thing to decide to simply revert to one's childhood self… But looking at the White House's new "Adorable Care Act" Cute Overload animal pictures, and the continued rise of BuzzFeed, despite, you know, everyone knowing it's a bit of a joke, I now appreciate there was a deeper level to his rant about the problem of Numminess in America. We are indeed becoming a more childlike people. We are more and more shirking the expected obligations of adulthood, such as marriage and procreation, and even more basically, we're rejecting the obligation of adults to actually think, in terms of numbers, and of best outcomes, and so forth. The national mode of thinking is now Nummy. "We—and by we I mean Americans, not "we" meaning us here right now—increasingly think in terms of cute, and easy, and glib, and dumb, and fun. A quick point: The Buzzfeed-style gifs and pictures work. You can see it on Campaign Spot. Posts with gifs and pictures and videos generally get more Facebook likes and Tweets than ones that are just text. I'm not saying I'm glad the world is this way, only that those of us who want to communicate in it have to adapt to it. Besides, it's not like pandas and ducklings are the only animals that can remind the public of Obamacare. Yesterday I Tweeted out a few alternatives: REACH OUT AND GRAB ONE NOW! HEALTH INSURANCE MARKETPLACES OPEN SOON! 
KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN FOR THE HEALTH INSURANCE MARKETPLACES! THEY'RE READY TO SPRING! 
THE OBAMACARE HEALTH INSURANCE EXCHANGES CAN'T WAIT TO MEET YOU! 
What, not "nummy" enough for you? Jon Gabriel and the folks at FreedomWorks have others posted at BuzzFeed. Dick Durbin, Not Doing His Homework Before Confronting Ted Cruz From John Podhoretz's column earlier this week . . . why am I only hearing about this exchange now? In the last hour, even as he said he grew "weary" as his time arguing against ObamaCare was coming to a close, he found himself in a debate with the able and smart Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin on the Congress's generous health-care plan. Durbin complained that Cruz wanted to deny health care to the uninsured; did he not, Durbin asked, enjoy the benefits of the generous congressional health-care package himself? Cruz said he wouldn't answer Durbin until Durbin first replied to three questions Cruz had posed. Durbin, with an "a-ha" gesture, responded by saying it was clear Cruz was simply refusing to answer his embarrassing question. He'd walked into Cruz's trap. For then Cruz said, no, Senator, I'm eligible for the congressional plan—but I'm not enrolled in it. Durbin thought he had Cruz cornered by bringing up his reliance on the absurdly generous health package for Congress. But since Cruz doesn't rely on it, Durbin humiliated himself in what was supposed to be his gotcha moment. Despite his marathon of speaking and standing and arguing, after nearly a day on his feet, Cruz—there is no other term for it—squashed Durbin like a bug. Don't experienced lawyers say that in court, you should never ask a question you don't know the answer to? ADDENDA: This Sunday, I'll appear on Howard Kurtz's new show on Fox News Channel, Media Buzz, which airs at 11.
NRO Digest — September 27, 2013 Today on National Review Online . . . To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com
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