Monday, October 28, 2013

I bet not even this blatant, arrogant example of government cronyism will resonate with the Obama Zombies who think that their leader is still the Messiah...

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The Magnificent Failure of www.Healthcare.Gov

Gary North - October 28, 2013


The federal government is coercive and incompetent. The public vaguely understands this, although only in theory.

People have a difficult time imagining just how incompetent the federal government is, because it is too big to understand. It spends over $3.5 trillion a year. People can understand crony favoritism when we are talking about a few million dollars. This is comprehensible. But crony favoritism on a scale that the federal government is capable of, and is constantly implementing, is beyond anyone's power of comprehension.

It is just too large, too complex, and too difficult to trace.

In order to get across to people just how rigged the system is, we need representative examples. They have to be clear-cut. They have to be striking. Most of all, they have to gain public attention. They cannot be concealed, or least once they have become public knowledge, there is no way for the government to conceal them.

Those of us who believe staunchly in the inherent corruption of big government, long for poster child examples of this corruption. We long for cases so blatantly against the public interest that we can make them examples of the system that operates in Washington, D.C.

In what is one of the greatest examples of crony capitalism of my adult life, the main company that produced the incomparable failure known as www.healthcare.gov turns out to have gained its share of the $678 million contract without facing competitive bids. That's right. There were other companies that submitted bids, but those bids were not considered, or so initial reports indicate. Why no bids? We are not told.

This kind of thing goes on all the time, but usually it is never discovered. But the website was rolled out as the prime example of President Obama's signature program, which bears his name unofficially: ObamaCare. This program was going to be the deliverance long awaited for by 15 million Americans who did not have healthcare coverage.

It went online, and it was dead on arrival: a corpse of government medicine. It died so spectacularly that it became front-page news around the world. It is such a total failure that there is a kind of magnificence about it. Millions of people tried to get in. Millions of people could not get in.

Now Congress is conducting an investigation of how this happened, and it turns out, that it happened because it was a sweetheart deal from the get-go.

The man who is in charge of the company became an Obama supporter in 2012, I can hardly blame him.

His ship came in.

Unfortunately, the ship has just sunk in full public view. It is like the capsized cruise ship on its side off the coast of an Italian island in 2012. The site is there, dead in the water, for the whole world to see.

It even turns out that a senior executive with the company used to be a classmate at Princeton of Michelle Obama. This may just be a coincidence, but it is to big a coincidence to ignore. So, it got into the headline on Drudge Report.

The website that pursued the story contacted the company, and the company stonewalled the reporter. Some low-level PR flak in the company did not understand just how big this story is, and just how dangerous it is to stonewall a reporter. The pathetic flak issued this statement: there would be "nothing coming out of CGI for the record or otherwise today."

Any sensible firm would have hired a million-dollar PR firm to deal with damage control. But not CGI. CGI lets a low-level flak issue an inept statement that was guaranteed to get wide coverage. Drudge ran this story as the lead story: the kiss of public relations death. CGI got Lewinskied.

From start to finish, or in this case, a non-finish, this story is breathtaking. It will stand as a kind of monument to the crony deals of this government. It will stand as a legendary example of total incompetence. The initial cost $678 million was just the beginning. The repairs may cost more, and still may not work well -- surely not in one month, as promised by the repairman called in to fix it.

A story like this only comes along once or twice in a generation. Savor it. Feast on it. It belongs in the textbooks. Let's hope that he gets into the case law curriculum of the Harvard Business School.

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