A Chaos-Driven Path to Single Payer?

Those who have resisted the idea that the HealthCare.gov web site and Obamacare in general may have been intentionally designed to create confusion and chaos as a means for imposing a single-payer healthcare system on a currently unwilling populace are going to have a tough time explaining away yet another recently discovered “quirk.”

To be clear, I’m not claiming, as some have inferred from previous columns, that there is a widely orchestrated chaos-creation plan, or that any attempt to capitalize on the current bedlam to impose single-payer is destined to succeed. What I am saying is that the evidence supporting the idea that certain of Obamacare’s key players are determined to try continues to mount.

The latest “nobody’s this stupid and incompetent” revelation is that Obamacare’s enrollment system “lacks a way for consumers to quickly and easily update their coverage for the birth of a baby and other common life changes.”

Press reports indicate that it’s literally impossible to add a new child to an existing health plan once a person or household has enrolled. That’s not all. HealthCare.gov also cannot handle “marriage and divorce, a death in the family, a new job or a change in income, (or) even moving to a different community.”

No one should try to verify the existence of these problems on their own. That’s because the web site is such a security nightmare that outside IT experts have publicly stated that it’s too dangerous for a user concerned about the privacy of their personal data (i.e., anyone with a brain) to use. As if that’s not enough, in late September, the chief information security officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “told congressional interviewers that she explicitly recommended denial of the website’s Authority to Operate.” She “was overruled by her superiors.”

As red flags for true intentions go, Obamacare’s inability to accommodate common life changes is an even stronger indicator than the failures previously identified.

As to security, I suppose it’s possible for designers to be so ignorant that they believe it’s something they can layer in later instead of following currently accepted protocols which call for baking it in from the outset. As to the lack of progress in building a system to process billions of dollars in subsidy payments to insurers, it’s theoretically but barely conceivable that the administration is telling the truth when it insists, in essence, that “we just haven’t been able to get to that.”

But HealthCare.gov’s life changes bust takes things to a whole new level. Has anyone, anywhere, ever built an interactive database which is unable to interact, i.e., to handle fundamental changes in key information once it has been entered? Who would even think of doing this? It’s overwhelmingly likely that a programming team would have to deliberately decide to exclude the ability to carry out such basic functions during the initial design process.
There is already a precedent showing that Obama’s people are not averse to removing key features from a system’s normal design. In 2008, his presidential campaign deliberately chose to “manually disable the safeguards … in place to verify a person’s address and zip code with the cardholder’s bank.” This enabled unidentifed and unidentifiable small-dollar contributions from all over the world to pour into the campaign, likely to the tune of millions of dollars. From all appearances, as the press slept, the 2012 campaign did the same thing.

As the mountain of evidence supporting deliberately induced chaos piles up, the obvious question is: What’s their end game? I wish I knew, but what follows seems plausible.

Readers who follow the British press may have caught the news that patients have been turned away from emergency rooms in Northern Virginia, while others who arrived for treatment of possibly serious medical conditions chose to walk away when presented with a requirement to pay or promise to pay several thousand dollars out of pocket because of uncertainties about the status of their coverage. (Unfortunately most of the U.S. establishment press appears to be so intimidated by this administration that it won’t dare relay such important developments.)

It’s reasonable to believe that situations such as these are occurring throughout the nation. The only question is their frequency.

It won’t be long before a few patients who have tried and failed to get treatment die or suffer serious, debilitating complications. Who will get blamed when this happens?

In cases where the unresponsive government is at fault — which I believe will be most of them — bureaucrats will bury or destroy the damning details and count on their reliable press apparatchiks and captive hospitals, other medical providers, and insurance companies to look the other way.

I suspect that the administration is lying in wait for high-visibility opportunities to pounce on any providers who fail to provide care to duly enrolled patients, and to pillory insurers who erroneously refuse to pay for customers’ life-saving treatments. Particularly tragic circumstances would give the single-payer crowd openings to say, “See? They can’t be trusted. Keeping the private sector involved was a mistake. The government has to control healthcare, or it won’t work.”

A large portion of a populace conditioned by a half-century or more of “business is evil, government is good” in the education system might buy it.