Lanny Davis, former special counsel to Bill Clinton, is urging House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to apologize to the American people for Obamacare screw ups.
I’m sure Pelosi will do that about the time that Davis gets around to apologizing for Bill Clinton’s serial adultery.
No matter. Davis wants the Democrats to go through a 12 step program, where the party fully acknowledges problems with Obamacare, apologizes to the American people, and then tries to make amends for screwing up so badly.
It may be easier to quit heroin cold turkey.
A top Democratic strategist on Friday said his party needs to admit they “screwed up” on ObamaCare.
In an interview on Fox News’ “The Kelly File,” Lanny Davis, White House special counsel to former President Clinton, said Democrats — including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) — should take ownership of their mistakes on the healthcare law.
“Nancy Pelosi should say that — we messed up…We have to take ownership,” Davis said, indicating that admitting fault is the first step to fixing the Affordable Care Act.
He added that the private sector should have had more of a role in developing HealthCare.Gov, which debuted Oct. 1 with significant glitches.
“We screwed up,” Davis said, advising Pelosi that she should admit that Democrats relied too heavily on the government to set up ObamaCare.
Really? Ed Morrissey points out that the opposite is true:
Actually, the problem wasn’t that there was too little involvement from the private sector; it’s that it didn’t belong in the federal government in the first place. But even apart from that, the site was built by the private sector, with the full cooperation of private insurers who hoped to score big off of a historic government mandate that forced Americans to participate in a command economy. The problem was that the people who command that economy are singularly unqualified for the job, as most if not all of them have done little but public-sector work for the majority of their lives. The incompetent management of this system began in the bid process and escalated throughout the project-management phase, and was obvious by the increasingly arbitrary ways in which regulations and statutes were applied and enforced.
That’s what is painful to Davis, who cheers government-controlled universal health care as the appetizer to his advice to Pelosi. Davis says it could have been accomplished through distributed authority in the private sector, but that’s never been the point of Democratic health-care policy. It’s always been about control and power, and dictating outcomes to insurers, providers, and consumers. We tried it, and now we see why the public sector should be limited to appropriate regulatory functions and law enforcement, and private economies left to voluntary association and the private sector.
Ed makes a marvelous point that should be stapled to the forehead of every GOP politician; Obamacare is living, breathing proof that big government should be limited in its power. The bigger government gets, the greater the harm its actions can cause. Lanny Davis misses the point. A better website would not fix what ails Obamacare. The massive overreach of the law — the way it seeks to control private individuals and public companies alike — doomed the ACA from the moment it was signed.
Pelosi will never apologize for Obamacare because she can’t blame it on Republicans. Besides, she’s too busy putting lipstick on a pig on national TV — extolling the virtues of Obamacare on John Stewart’s show — to contemplate the responsibility of Democrats for messing up the health insurance industry so completely.
Maybe Pelosi will apologize for Obamacare about the time that Lanny Davis can think of one, single accomplishment by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state.
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