Via Hot Air comes this summary of a Congressional Research Service report on blown deadlines for the Affordable Care Act. As Forbes' Avik Roy has pointed out, the feds have missed about half of the legally imposed deadlines so far.
As Hot Air's Ed Morrissey writes, this isn't the product of Republican malingering. Only 9 percent of the tardiness can be attributed to lack of congressional appropriations. In fact, the problem with the program is the program itself, not knuckle-dragging, backstabbing GOPpers. Here's one example of what's going wrong:
…one of the big selling features of ObamaCare was that the law would force providers to work toward health outcomes rather than the traditional fee-for-service model that exists in … well, every service market, including health care. HHS was supposed to have built reporting models for private insurers to track progress to that goal "to improve health outcomes, prevent hospital readmission, ensure patient safety and reduce medical errors, and implement wellness and health promotion activities." It also required Kathleen Sebelius "to promulgate regulations that provide criteria for determining reimbursement structure to improve quality," in order to complete that transformation.
That was due on March 23, 2012, eighteen months ago this week. So far, HHS hasn't uttered or written one word about this statutory deadline, which means that insurers have no idea how HHS wants them to go about achieving the outcome-based reimbursement model. It's not even clear if HHS has any idea at all how to achieve that goal. In fact, it can be assumed at this point, 42 months after ObamaCare passed Congress, that the White House has no idea how to fulfill that pledge.
And read Avik Roy's post that inspired Morrissey's. It ends with this note:
The law isn't going to "collapse unto itself" or any such thing that conservatives appear to pine for. For every missed deadline or White House waiver, there are nine aspects of Obamacare that are being implemented as we speak.
Obamacare may fail at reducing insurance premiums, or at wisely using taxpayer funds. But the law is scheduled to spend $1.9 trillion over the next ten years. At that, it is unlikely to fail.
