You have to wonder if the Commander-in-Chief is in full command of his faculties after this week. I have no idea what President Obama thought he would accomplish with his Mea Culpa press conference, but it boiled down to apologizing for his huge lies 0n keeping current health plans (and prices) by announcing another false promise to keep cancelled plans available.

Mark Steyn skewered the President best on this mind boggling political ‘move’:

On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered.

After which, the President threatened to veto any bill that would make his illegal decree … legal!

The same president who had unilaterally commanded that people be allowed to keep their health plans indignantly threatened to veto any such law to that effect: It only counts if he does it — geddit? As his court eunuchs at the Associated Press obligingly put it: “Obama Will Allow Old Plans.” It’s Barry’s world; we just live in it.

The Democrats are now rightfully in full panic. Their leader is off the rails, along with the health plans of millions of people.  John Hindraker nailed it when he pointed the problem with Obamacare on ignorant do-gooders on the left:

One obvious lesson is that liberalism fails to appreciate the complexity of the world. The hubris required by the Democrats’ attempt to reorder not just a large sector of the economy, but an important part of the lives of millions of strangers, is breathtaking. Recognizing, at least dimly, the difficulty of the task, the Democrats responded by trying to draft a law whose complexity would match that of the reality that it tried to control. That made the situation worse, not better: the more convoluted the statute became, the more unworkable it was. Friedrich Hayek, call your office!

Obamacare also illustrates the inordinate faith that many liberals have in the power of words. Various aspects of reality are not as liberals would like them to be. What is the solution? The magical power of words: reams and reams of paper covered with sections and subsections, commands and requirements. If they can only get the words right, reality will certainly fall into line, just as liberals want it to be!

Obamacare was a Herculean task. I have concluded the entire disaster has shown how what Hindraker calls hubris (and I call the nexus of ignorance and arrogance) has finally plumbed the depths of Big Government Limitations. We have seen the enemy and it is busy-body, do-good liberals who don’t understand the complexity of what they want to try and fix.

In my view, the Achilles’ Heel of the entire Healthcare.gov effort was its naive attempt to integrate existing large, complex data systems in a manner no one has ever even thought to budget and plan. This magic IT system is called the Federal Data Hub, Data Services Hub, or just the HUB.

It is and was an effort that should have taken decades to to attempt in a sane manner (by phasing in each federal and state data system), but was rushed and under funded by HSS/CMS because they had this shallow vision of reality touched with an overblown view of their skills. From one of my earlier posts:

I pointed to this chart of the core information traffic cop (the Federal Services Data Hub) as a clear sign CMS was blissfully naive of the sheer complexity of what they were attempting: [click to enlarge]

This simpleton concept diagram completely glosses over the challenges in design and testing needed to make Healthcare.gov work. Screw this up and nothing can fix the problems without a complete restart. What I exposed previously was the technical truth hidden behind the child-like simplicity of this chart:

When I see diagrams like this I see a technical project in serious denial and headed for a crack up. As I noted before, the right side is really something like 50 state Medicaid/CHIP systems and the left is the 24 State Based Exchanges. The right side also has all those Federal systems the HUB has to query for each individual [applicant].  The Hub uses a mush of messages, emails and files to interact with these entities, adding to the impossible complexity. And it translates a lot of unstructured data between all these outside systems.

…They show 6 entities, but the reality is 26 SBEs on the left, 60+state and federal systems on the right, and millions of transactions coming in to build a file for each of the 17 million applicants.

This information highway would be the Holy Grail of government rule. In one place, all the federal records on any individual in the country could be accessed.

And abused. If you think having the IRS on your tail is bad based on your paychecks, wait until they get access to every record government has (state and federal). From another prior post, here are how your records will now be integrated in one place for federal (and political) purposes:

There is a reason the Data Hub is NEVER the cause why Healthcare.gov cannot function. The website has issues getting all this data right, getting it to the insurance companies and states, etc. But it is NEVER the fault of the Data Hub. This Holy Grail of government “insight” is the real reason Obamacare cannot be repealed. Without this, how could the elite ruling class rule?

In my opinion, Congress needs to investigate this element of Obamacare, especially the lack of security surrounding this massive and unprecedented collection of individual personal data.

But I digress.

President Obama came out this week and promised to let people keep their current policies – again.

Just like he promised the new insurance would be better (it is not, and for too many is not even accessible) and the new insurance would be affordable (it is not, the price of everything is going up – unless you are poor).

Why would anyone be daft enough to believe this man again? Apparently many at the state level aren’t biting:

Mike Kreidler has served as insurance commissioner in Washington state since 2000. Kreidler, an optometrist by training, also served one term in the House of Representatives and 16 years in the state legislature.

On Thursday, Kreidler was the first insurance commissioner to reject President Obama’s proposal that would give insurers and extra year to sell plans that do not comply with the Affordable Care Act. He said, in a statement, that he was acting “in the interest of keeping the consumer protections we have enacted and ensuring that we keep health insurance costs down for all consumers.”

There is no way for anyone to do what President Obama illegally dictated. There is no way to know which policies can be kept and not kept. The law is still the law:

Does this make the renewal of non-compliant policies legal? No. The legal requirement remains on the books so the relevant health insurance plans remain illegal under federal law. The President’s decision does not change relevant state laws either.  So insurers will still need to obtain approval from state insurance commissioners. This typically requires submitting rates and plan specifications for approval. This can take some time, and is disruptive because most insurance companies have already set their offerings for the next year. It’s no wonder that some insurance commissioners have already indicated they have no plans to approve non-compliant plans.

H/T Adam Baldwin. So we get one more failed promise from a failed President who has only able to succeed in demonstrating how incompetent Big Government has become. Incompetent primarily (but not solely) due to the fact bureaucrats over simplify problems into crude caricatures their minds can grasp – thus setting up for certain failure because they can’t see the extent of what they are trying to take on.

President Obama may have actually found the limits to liberal progressive government. Or, he may spend the next 3 years trying to outdo himself.

AllahPundit at Hot Air as collated a masterful listing of quotes and links on how bad it really is for Obamacare and the Democrats. It is worth the read. I especially liked this one:

 This is a tale of misfortune and woe so Shakespearean that only history’s greatest bards could have ever dreamed it. So many liberals sacrificed so much to bring this creation to life. As it has become clear that their creation is a monster, they are struggling against the increasingly inescapable realization that they may have to kill it in order to save themselves, and their party, from an age in the wilderness.

The GOP will come out of this looking damn good.  The Tea Party will be stronger, because they and they alone had the backbone to try and stop this before it really hurt people. They even shut down the government to try and warn people this was a historically bad move. They took on political risk to try and aver the now rolling health care disaster.

Very few will be questioning their intentions again – thanks to Obamacare