Health Site Woes Undermine Obama’s Vow on Government

From The New York Times:

The implicit promise of Barack Obama’s presidency, delivered during the 2008 campaign and again repeatedly since then, was that government would not face a debacle like the recent malfunction of the technology behind the president’s new health care marketplaces.

In his biggest and most important speeches, the president often talks with passion about a “smarter, more effective government.” He has called on Congress to embrace and pay for a “21st century government that’s open and competent.” And he has vowed to work to “rebuild people’s faith in the institution of government.”

But in the pursuit of that lofty goal, Mr. Obama faces determined opposition from conservatives who view government as the problem, not the solution. And to succeed, he must win over an increasingly skeptical public whose trust in government has eroded over decades. A survey last week by the Pew Research Center found that just 19 percent of Americans trust government to do what is right just about always or most of the time.

 

The breakdown of the federal HealthCare.gov Web site could emerge as a test of Mr. Obama’s philosophy, with potentially serious implications for an agenda that relies heavily on the belief in a can-do bureaucracy. Michael Dimock, the Pew center’s director, said that the longer the problems persist, the more they could bolster what he called the “almost American value that government is inefficient.”
 

“There is a lingering kind of effect,” he said. “It matters not only because the public may have an inherent skepticism. It puts the ball on the tee for your critics and the late-night comics.”

 

The president is said to be immensely frustrated with the rollout of what is a central part of his most important domestic policy. A stickler for detail and discipline, Mr. Obama has directed his senior White House staff to take charge of a vigorous effort to correct the problem, and to provide him detailed updates every evening.
 

But he may be too late to contain the damage, at least in the short term.
 

Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs magazine and a conservative opponent of the health law, said the government’s inability to get the Web site working raises broader questions about how well the rest of the health care law will be implemented in the next several years.
 

“The promise of the administrative state becomes harder to believe in when it fails in practice,” Mr. Levin said. He added that it was easy to overstate the impact of a Web site that would get fixed eventually. But he said that “there’s a sense that in trying to do too much, the government creates questions about whether it can do anything at all.”
 

For Mr. Obama, the answer to that question has always been an enthusiastic yes. In the 2008 campaign, he said he believed “that part of my job is to make government cool again.” His campaign sometimes talked about creating an “iPod government” that is user-friendly and efficient.
 

And when it came time to write his State of the Union addresses as president, aides said, Mr. Obama routinely reinstated language about making government more efficient after speechwriters had taken it out, deeming it boring. In his 2011 address, Mr. Obama said: “We shouldn’t just give our people a government that’s more affordable. We should give them a government that’s more competent and more efficient. We can’t win the future with a government of the past.”
 

And so the question for his administration now is how badly the problems with the health care Web site shake the confidence of the American people in the government’s ability to work.
 

When President George W. Bush rolled out the now extremely popular prescription medication benefit for older people in 2006, the program was met with headlines that echo today’s: “Glitches Mar Launch of Medicare Drug Plan” and “Medicare Program’s First Week ‘a Mess.’ ”