The Website That Didn’t Work

                                                                                                                             

Many people have offered explanations for why the Affordable Care Act’s website, HealthCare.gov, has not worked as planned. Some blame President Obama, as if he were the programmer responsible. Some blame “government” more generally, meaning that government cannot do anything well, certainly not as well as private enterprise. Some blame liberalism, linking the politics of health care with the technological implementation of signing up for insurance. Many of these explanations are openly partisan, created by conservatives who so badly want the ACA to fail that they shut down the whole government.

Certainly Obama must take some responsibility, as chief promoter of the legislation for which the website is supposed to act as gateway. Although he was far away from the details of constructing the website, he took political credit for winning the most ambitious transformation of American health care since the passage of Medicare in 1965. Because Republicans have attacked this legislation so vehemently since the day it was signed in 2010, the political significance attached to how it would work grew enormously. Obama must take blame for two sets of failures: the technical problems of the website and the massive cancellations of private insurance policies that contradict his oft-stated promise that those who liked their health care plans could keep them. These two failures have significantly damaged the Democrats, but more important, they have made life more difficult for millions of Americans.

Republicans cannot give away all of the blame, though. They decided well before the ACA came to a vote that they were going to oppose every element of health care reform. The possibility of reaching compromise ended already in July 2009, just six months after Obama took office, when Republican senators vowed to defeat any Democratic bill: minority leader Mitch McConnell said, “We’re doing everything we can to defeat it.”

That was just the beginning of Republican efforts to torpedo ACA, a story which is well known. At the federal level, House Republicans kept trying to repeal the bill. They refused to provide the funds requested by the Department of Health and Human Services to implement the ACA. At the state level, Republican-controlled states refused to work with the federal government to implement the insurance exchanges.

Is this just normal politics? Not if we look at the first version of Obamacare, which we could call Romneycare in Massachusetts. When Governor Mitt Romney exulted about passage of his most significant legislative achievement in 2006, he was flanked by Democrats. The Massachusetts health care bill was a bipartisan creation, written by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who is a Democrat, and Robert Moffit, from the conservative Heritage Foundation. After its passage, Democrats helped to implement it. Now it functions to increase the number of people with insurance and reduce the annual growth of insurance costs. That’s how government is supposed to work.

Here’s one more reason, perhaps the most important, why HealthCare.gov failed to work properly. Giant new computer systems usually fail. Other huge government IT projects have had similar results. Last year, the Air Force scrapped a software project that cost $1 billion over seven years. A spokesman said that the Expeditionary Combat Support System “has not yielded any significant military capability.”

In case anyone believes that government is the problem here, giant commercial IT projects also fail. Last year, Apple rolled out Apple Maps after two years of development as a competitor to Google Maps, but it made embarrassing errors, and CEO Tim Cook apologized publicly. A year later, however, Apple Maps is successfully taking customers away from Google. The 2010 merger of United Airlines and Continental caused massive foul-ups when the two reservation systems could not cooperate properly. In August, the Department of Transportation fined United because 9000 refund requests from customers were still delayed.

These are not isolated cases. One survey of thousands of big IT development projects estimated that over 40% failed and 52% were “challenged”, meaning over budget, behind schedule or not meeting user expectations. Even if those numbers are exaggerated, the likelihood of HealthCare.gov working on its first day, or even in its first month, was small.

That takes us back to the beginning – the responsibility of the Obama administration to integrate this knowledge into their planning. Because several different software development companies worked on different parts of the website, and its proper functioning required computer systems from many different government agencies and insurance companies to mesh smoothly, a long period of testing was necessary before the public rollout. That didn’t happen.

The Obama administration failed to deliver what it promised. Republican obstructionism contributed to the failure. But now more people who are eligible are enrolling for Medicaid. People who have signed up are already saving money on insurance. Eventually the website problems will be fixed. Only then will we be able to weigh the value of this singular reform of our health care system.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 19, 2013

Trust in Government

Tea Party adherents don’t trust government. They want less government, small government, maybe no government. For them, government can do no right. Everything that government bureaucrats do could be done better by private enterprise.

That’s the way most political commentary about the right wing goes these days. I think it’s partially wrong. Certainly Tea Party Republicans don’t trust our government: a Pew Research Center poll last month showed that only 3% trusted the federal government to “do what is right” most of the time. 55% of them said they were angry with the federal government, twice as many as among other Republicans or Democrats.

Conservatives talk a lot about shrinking government, but when they are in power they do no such thing. Federal spending increased in each year of the Reagan administration and each year of George Bush’s presidency. So did the federal deficit, which skyrocketed during both Republican presidencies. Rick Perry, Tea Party favorite and Governor of Texas since December 2000, has doubled his state’s spending since he took office.

Conservatives want government to stop doing some things and do much more of others. Their political targets for reduction represent liberal programs they don’t like. They hate that many of our state governments now allow marriage between homosexuals. They don’t want the federal government to prevent discrimination against homosexuals. When the Senate passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act last week, only 10 Republicans voted for it, and 32 against. Speaker John Boehner says he won’t even bring the bill for a vote in the House.

They don’t want the government to prevent companies from polluting the environment. Only 22% of Tea Party Republicans have a favorable view of the Environmental Protection Agency, while 58% of Independents and 77% of Democrats view the EPA favorably.

Conservatives don’t want the federal government to use tax dollars to help the poorest Americans get by. House Republicans want to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program over the next decade. But the huge subsidies for big agribusiness were left virtually untouched.

Conservatives don’t want any government to restrict a person’s ability to buy an automatic weapon. TeaParty.org says “Gun ownership is sacred,” which is a strange statement from people who tend to take the Bible literally.

They don’t like the National Labor Relations Board, which tries to make sure workers are treated fairly. Republicans in the Senate held up President Obama’s appointments to fill vacant seats on the NLRB.

Small government works well as a rallying cry, but it is designed to mislead. Listen to Tea Party politicians, and you’ll get an earful about bigger government. Preventing abortions. Regulating marriage. Building walls around our borders. Forcing schools to tell Biblical stories as science. Continuing the war on marijuana, which has forced an enormous expansion of our prison system. Reinforcing the Patriot Act and its global network of surveillance.

TeaParty.org lists as one of its core beliefs that “Intrusive government must be stopped.” But just a little further along on that list is “Traditional family values are encouraged.” That is code for imposing an evangelical religious agenda on American politics. A Tennessee Tea Party group says its mission is “Putting God back in our schools - on our money and in our lives to govern our country.” A New York Times article in 2011 said, “The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.”

Tea Party supporters say they don’t trust government. If they had power, I believe they would use government to make their intrusive agenda into law. Suddenly the power of the state would be their friend. I don’t trust Tea Party politicians to shrink government.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 12, 2013

The Beauty of the Liberal Arts

Some critical comments about Illinois College have appeared recently on the online Open Line in our newspaper. While much of what is said on Open Line is not worth discussing, those comments reveal a much wider issue.

The comments began on October 25: “A student cannot speak up in a classroom that is run by a left-wing radical. There is no freedom of speech with radicals.” There was escalation the next day: “If Illinois College actually discourages open discourse and debate, then it’s really not a college at all. It’s more like the re-education/indoctrination camps of the former Soviet Union.” The next day these claims were generalized: “Freedom of speech doesn’t apply to the college campus. Students are indoctrinated with socialist ideology.” Finally, on October 29: “It is the left-wing liberals at the liberal arts colleges that do not tolerate a difference in opinion.”

We don’t know who wrote these comments, or if it’s all the same person. Although there is nothing to prevent a commenter from signing their name, these critical voices always hide behind anonymity. It’s clear that they have never been in an Illinois College classroom. Their fears about what happens on campuses come from somewhere else: right-wing fears of liberal arts colleges.

Liberal arts colleges compare favorably with business organizations. Colleges are less hierarchical, with power being distributed horizontally: faculty, even newly hired professors, have extraordinary control over what they do every day. Colleges are more democratic in their decision-making, as students and faculty enjoy unusual powers of self-government through egalitarian institutions. Colleges offer more protection against arbitrary firing of employees. Colleges are less likely to engage in corrupt financial practices, which is clear from the comparative histories of higher education and big business. Perhaps most important, colleges emphasize learning for its own sake, pay attention to the progress of individual students, and constantly seek to improve the delivery of knowledge.

Colleges are partnerships among trustees, administrators and faculty, who each play a crucial role in creating a safe place where students can mature, question, and discover themselves. Trustees bring financial experience and fiscal responsibility; administrators develop the mechanisms which ensure that the enterprise runs smoothly; faculty provide specialized expertise in every possible subject.

Liberal arts colleges are remarkable islands of discovery and democracy in American society. Young adults grasp responsibility for the first time – they organize their own education, they create and run organizations of the most varied kinds, they vote for and lead their own governing bodies, they publish their own newspapers.

So why does the right wing hate institutions of higher education? One reason is that many courses deal with subjects that make extreme conservatives uncomfortable. Biologists teach evolution, not creationism. Scientists believe that global warming is caused by human action. Men and women are treated equally in the content of our courses.

Topics like race, class, and gender upset conservatives. Dealing with those subjects inevitably means discussing our history of slavery and segregation, and of the dispossession of Native Americans. It means studying how women have been subordinated by law and custom until very recently. It means looking critically at the darker sides of our history, alongside the idealism of the American revolutionaries and the triumph of democracy, addressing both the good and the bad.

I admit to having taken particular positions on race in my own teaching. In the course on the 1960s which I team-taught with another professor, we were clear that we thought that segregation was wrong, morally and constitutionally, and that the civil rights movement was justified. Should we be teaching our students something different than that?

Here’s an example of the “indoctrination” that occurs at Illinois College. In a classroom used for political science courses hang several posters urging our students to vote. During the Presidential election, students were encouraged to see the primary debates, the Party conventions, and the election night reporting. I have never heard any professor tell any student how to vote.

In fact, the right wing is not against indoctrination, it is against institutions that do not indoctrinate students with their own ideas. William F. Buckley, Jr., argued in his 1951 book, “God and Man at Yale”, that higher education in America was hopelessly liberal, and then turned around and suggested “banishing from the classroom” all professors who did not advocate the ideas of Adam Smith.

Conservatives, according to their own words, prefer colleges which stress political indoctrination: Young America’s Foundation (motto: “The Conservative Movement Starts Here”) only approves institutions which “emphasize principles including smaller government, strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values”, which “proclaim, through their mission and programs, a dedication to discovering, maintaining, and strengthening the conservative values of their students.”

The Open Line writers imagine that everybody believes in substituting persuasion for teaching. I invite anyone who thinks that open discourse is discouraged at Illinois College to attend a class and see for themselves. We don’t try to strengthen either the liberal or conservative values of our students. We try to help them think about what their values are, test those values against the widest variety of human experiences, and realize that other good people have other values.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 5, 2013