09 November 2013
Playing Your Advantage
If Megan McCardle means that the Democrats were foolish to take advantage of their victory in 2008 by adopting ObamaCare (“Obamacare Shouldn’t Have Been Managed Like a Campaign,” Bloomberg.com, November 5, 2013), my question is, What are Campaigns for? Universal healthcare has long been a goal of liberals, and their victory under the banner of Barack Obama was taken by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as the golden opportunity finally to push it through.
What the Democrats failed to protect against, however, was the vulnerability of such an accomplishment to potential gaping holes, like over-dependence on a weak Internet website. The opposition was able take advantage of that when they came into sufficient power in a subsequent election. A possibly fatal error in judgment—hubris. Now President Obama is forced to apologize (not necessarily a bad thing) and hope that his administration can prove that universal healthcare is a good program even if it does not demonstrate mastery of the wonders of information technology.
Medical science has struggled with the use of information technology in matters as basic as record-keeping, diagnosis-sharing, and even drug-prescriptions. Tradition makes change difficult. What we can be sure of is that our society is wealthy enough to attend to the widespread health of our population. Arranging smooth access to it through the Internet will have to come later.
If Megan McCardle means that the Democrats were foolish to take advantage of their victory in 2008 by adopting ObamaCare (“Obamacare Shouldn’t Have Been Managed Like a Campaign,” Bloomberg.com, November 5, 2013), my question is, What are Campaigns for? Universal healthcare has long been a goal of liberals, and their victory under the banner of Barack Obama was taken by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as the golden opportunity finally to push it through.
What the Democrats failed to protect against, however, was the vulnerability of such an accomplishment to potential gaping holes, like over-dependence on a weak Internet website. The opposition was able take advantage of that when they came into sufficient power in a subsequent election. A possibly fatal error in judgment—hubris. Now President Obama is forced to apologize (not necessarily a bad thing) and hope that his administration can prove that universal healthcare is a good program even if it does not demonstrate mastery of the wonders of information technology.
Medical science has struggled with the use of information technology in matters as basic as record-keeping, diagnosis-sharing, and even drug-prescriptions. Tradition makes change difficult. What we can be sure of is that our society is wealthy enough to attend to the widespread health of our population. Arranging smooth access to it through the Internet will have to come later.
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