Obama’s “Administrative Fix” is All About ControlI'm not so sure about that last sentence.
1. Obama is getting out in front of panicking Democrats to make it seem like he’s leading. He’s not. He’s trying to head off a panicked stampede.
2. The fix is not about protecting consumers. It’s about protecting Democratic senators who voted for ObamaCare. And it took a lot of arm twisting to get that far. Which means you’ve got till 2014 and then Obama no longer has to worry about the impact of any further elections and he’ll get even worse than he is already.
3. Like everything Obama does, this is about retaining his one-man imperial control over everything. Even if he has to scratch the paint on his shiny new law, he would rather do it himself, since it makes it easier for him to control it, and it keeps Congress in an even weaker state.
4. The combination of insurer unreadiness and Blue State sabotage from elected liberals, of the kind we’re already seeing in Washington (the state, not the city) will create new targets for blame. The media will point out that Obama “did everything he could”. Now it’s the fault of the states and the insurers.
5. The insurers have been made into the bad guys. I have no sympathy for them. Collaborators get what they deserve. And it may be a lesson for them about how quickly they go under the bus when they collaborate in Socialist schemes.
6. This won’t protect Obama the way he thinks it will. If he had gotten out in front of it much earlier, before the sense that he had lied took root, things might have been different. But people are still going to be dealing with most of the same problems and while the media will urge them to blame insurers, the use of ObamaCare is going to pass the buck back up to the top.
It’s hard to blame insurers when everyone knows the only reason their policies vanished is because of ObamaCare. And after the Dems, including Obama, spent weeks defending the cancellations as a good thing, while lying that the plans were bad, the fix isn’t going to make that much of a difference. It will help some people, but those people already had to deal with stress, worry and confusion.
None of that will make them more likely to vote Dem in 2014.