from the Editors of National Review-  Core Incompetency:

The Department of Health and Human Services blames “inadequate management oversight and coordination” — in a word, leadership— for these problems. Whose “inadequate management oversight”? HHS does not seem to want to dwell too long on that embarrassing question. The administration simply could not bring itself to admit that the problem of health insurance is more complex than it let on with its facile campaign promises of expert management and technocratic competence. So, for purely political reasons — which is to say, for reasons of unadulterated self-interest — it brought onto the market a product that is defective, destructive, dangerous, and incomplete, without adequate testing and zero in the way of quality control. If this were a pharmaceutical company, the responsible parties would be prison-bound. If this were a hospital, it would have been shut down before it was opened. If a physician had the same error rate asHealthCare.gov, he’d be sued out of practice and into penury.

There is something critical to be learned here. The New York Times writes that the effort to rehabilitate HealthCare.gov is in truth part of a broader project, “a frantic effort aimed at rescuing not only the insurance portal and Mr. Obama’s credibility, but also the Democratic philosophy that an activist government can solve big, complex social problems.” We’ve been having that debate for a long time, and, while it may not yet be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, we have answered the narrower question of whether this administration can solve big, complex social problems: It can’t even solve its own website.

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