Government incompetence is no mystery. It’s very similar to government competence: throw enough money at a problem and something will happen.
It may not be what you want, or what you expected, but something will indeed happen.
The ObamaCare rollout is a grand example of governmental hubris and incompetence, as I explained this weekend at Townhall.com.
But the story has a more amusing twist. Three young professional website technicians saw the fiasco of healthcare.gov and decided to try a different approach, cooking up a website in their spare time.
They found enough information and access to information buried in the multi-million dollar contractors’ code, and reconfigured everything.
Their insight? The main ObamaCare website had it all backwards. People want to be able to start shopping immediately. So that’s what they allow visitors to do, start shopping without sign-up.
On e-commerce websites, you can sign up at almost any point.
The young men’s TheHealthSherpa.com is up and running, allowing people not served by a state-led marketplace to check out the “competition,” select the policy that’s right for them, and go directly to the company offering the service.
So how could three guys working pro bono do a better job than the inside-the-beltway “Internet” professionals who were paid millions?
The well-connected insiders were thinking as insiders do. Instead of seeing that their job was to entice customers, they tried corralling citizens, requiring people to first “sign up.”
Of course, the real and enduring problems of ObamaCare are on the “back end,” behind the websites, where the regulations and taxes and mandates (and pride and hubris and incompetence) will do the most damage.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.