Why Bureaucracy Could Doom Obamacare

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

 Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.

 James Boren (1925-2010)

 

Bureaucracy — the giant power wielded by pygmies.

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)

 

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989)

 

To get the attention of a large animal, be it an elephant or a bureaucracy, it helps to know what part of it feels pain. Be very sure, though, that you want its full attention

  Kelvin Throop, Science fiction character

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

 Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005)

Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.

 Javier Pascal Salcedo (1945-2007)

 

Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

 Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

 

If we could ever make red tape nutritional, we could feed the world

 Robert Schaeberle (1823-2011)

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Thomas Sowell, born 1930

 Quotes on Bureaucracy

In a May 10 WSJ piece,  Grace-Marie Turner, founder of the Galen Institute and  author of Why Obamacare Is Wrong for America,  joins a long list of notables and quotables bewailing bureaucracy.   Her article is titled “Applying for Obamacare – Still Not Simple,” with a subtitle of “President Obama Boasts That the Application for Government Health Care Has Become Easier to Fill Out . It Isn’t?”

The gist of the Grace-Marie Turner commentary is that application forms to qualify for subsidies in the health exchanges  are difficult for ordinary mortals,  especially those needing financially  help from government,, to understand , . much less fill out. That fact may drive them away from even applying.

 A sample question is,“Does your employer offer a health plan that meets the meets minimal value standards?"

 But  what, pray tell, qualifies as such a plan? 

That's easy: "An employer-sponsored health plan meets the 'minimum value standard' if the plan's share of the total allowed benefit costs covered by the plan is no less than 60 percent of such costs (Section 36B(c)(2)(C)(ii) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986)."

 It's a simple as that, if  you understand government gibberish or gobbledgook, which soon may be translated into googledegook.

Other questions are more complicated and  will require a bureaucratic army of “authorized representatives,”  versed in bureaucratese, to serve as Obamacare “navigators.”

The problemis: The number of people filling out these forms and qualifying for subsidies will be critical to the success of the exchanges and of Obamacare itself.  Otherwide, the exchanges may collapse as an unnecessay and dysfunctional bureaucraric appendage, a kind of an inflammed  appendix for the body politic

As Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005), the father of modern management and social philosopher, puts it.

“Government is a poor manager.  It is, of necessity, concerned with procedure, for its also, of necessity, large and cumbersome.  It must administer public funds and must account for every penny. It has no choice but to become ‘bureaucratic.’   Every government is, by definition, a ‘government  of forms’ This means high costs.  For ‘control’ of the last 10 percent of the phenomena  always costs more than control of the first 90 percent.”

Tweet:  Obamacare depends on millions of people applying for subsidies on health exchanges.  Applications are hard to decipher and fill out.