The Healthcare Exchanges-- A Historical Perspective

I've noted many times that history repeats itself time and again. There's no way a reasonable person can put the current political noise over the 'Affordable Healthcare Act' into perspective without garnering a little bit of wisdom from history.

Been there. Done That
Way back on August 14th, 1935 when FDR signed Social Security into law all hell broke loose. Drew Pearson (a syndicated columnist) relentlessly published weekly on how Social Security cannot possibly work and how it would end up a utter failure. He insisted the promised SS benefits for millions of Americans would never materialize.

Indeed the implementation of Social Security was a logistical nightmare Keep in mind no one at the time had a SS number. There were thousands of names that were the same. There were no computers. Federal employees had to weed through some 3 million applicants. There were calls for firing many of those involved in it's roll-out. The Social Security program was even tested before the Supreme Court. Others called for scrapping idea altogether because it was too complicated to work.

Is this refrain not sounding all too familiar with what's happening today?
The story is a long an complicated one. Too long and complicated to discuss here. Folks who want dig into all the details can check out this information at SSA.gov. It comes from the perspective of John Corson III who was it's director off and on again from March 1938 to May 1944.

Today's detractors against the ACA have insisted this legislation is too large and complicated to ever work. Do they not realize today's Social Security contains over 2,728 rules along with thousands of pages explaining them? They can all be found within the Program Operating Manual System (POMS) online. Anyone who has dealt with Social Security can attest to it's competence despite it's complexity.


COMMENTARYImpatience: Off With Their Heads--
Hundreds of experimenters tried to build a flying machine and failed. Early in our space program there were many failed rocket launches. Some satellites failed to reach orbit or failed to initialize. We've been searching for and failing to find many of the medical cures for ages. These and many hundreds of things man has attempted to do failed to happen as expected. The light bulb, telephone, computer and so forth. Had we taken our marbles and gone home, none of these things would be around today.

Had today's quitters been around in those early days and blown off Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, Charles Goodyear, Dr. Jonas Salk, the Wright Brothers and countless others for failing in their initial attempts we'd still be riding horses in the dark with a crippling case of Polio.

Let's face reality. Whenever we try to do something that's never been done before, things aren't going to come out-of-the-box 100% ready to go. There will be those who insist these exchanges should have been tried, tested and 100% ready to go before the public was ever exposed. Could that not be also said of the Hindenburg, Titanic or all the boiler explosions (both factory and steam train) here and elsewhere. Relax. Take A Chill Pill-- Nobody's going to directly die because these online sign-up exchanges are off to a rough start.

The Blame Game--
Should we fire HHR secretary Kathleen Sebelius? Fire the software contractor and/or 300 or so programmers? How about officials in the 36 states which failed to set up their own exchanges as they were requested to do? Before we start lobbing heads off, how about we start by looking at what went wrong and how we're going to fix it?

If people are so hot on firing I suggest they not look at the people who are trying to do their job and make things work. Instead focus on people that are trying to make things not work. You know, like people in Congress. The ones who are all too eager to point the finger (with their congressional oversight committee investigations) when they themselves had failed to do their own job by failing to come up with a working one year budget for the last five years. Have not come up with meaningful campaign reform, an immigration bill, tax reform, legislative action concerning voter ID laws, nor provided oversight to reign in the NSA/Homeland Security overreach or the failed military aide policy for Afghanistan .

The exchanges have only been online for a little over three weeks. The Congress, under Obama, has been around for five years and still hasn't gotten it's act together. If there are firings to be done let's make them in the proper order of priority.

Strategy for their own shortcomings is to go on offense rather then defense. These birds hope if they scream loud enough about the ACA's shortcomings people won't be paying attention to Congress's own incompetence.

Is the ACA all it can be? Not at this time.
When we get a new car and it gets a flat tire or needs repairs, we fix it. We don't throw it out. If a zeppelin blows up or a ship sinks we don't give up on flying or sailing. We try to make the very best improvements we can to them. This is no different from that.

SEE ALSO: 5 other botched rollouts of government programs

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
~Aldous Huxley~

He only is exempt from failures who makes no efforts."
~Richard Whately~