From the comments...

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We're a little pressed for time but we found these comments on the always excellent Instapundit.com regarding the not-so-new healthcare law and decided to share them here:

If Obamacare were merely an IT project I wouldn’t think twice about it. I would take it in a heartbeat over what Obamacare actually is.

Obamacare is not about the exchanges and I’m stunned that you would say that it is. Obamacare is a five-fold reentrenchment of the insane health care payment system that we have somehow allowed to evolve from its origins as a wretched socialist mistake made in the 1940s by the wretched socialist FDR administration attempting to put price caps on salaries.

Obamacare is a giant leap forward on the path of more bureaucracy, less choice, worse quality, and higher cost. It continues removing decisions from consumers and providers and placing them with third parties. It makes health care decisions even more contingent upon rulings by the IRS (THE IRS!!!) than they already were – and the fact that our health care financing system is largely overseen by our tax collection agency should be absurd on its face, and yet Obamacare doubles down on this absurdity.

If it were all about the exchanges I’d be ECSTATIC. Write the specs then take bids from Amazon and IBM and Raytheon and call it a day. It’d be full of problems but it would work eventually.

What we have instead will never work, even if the exchanges someday do. What we have instead will only serve to make things worse.

And then this:

Glenn, first off, please do not use my name if you choose to mention anything I say in this email.

I work for one of the largest Telecom providers in the country. I’m an engineer who designs dedicated data links (DS3s, OC3s, etc…) for major companies across the US.

For background, some of these circuits can be put up fairly quickly, but not the ones that I work on. The ones I design can take up to 90 business days to install.

Anyways, a few weeks ago, we got deluged with orders for circuits that needed to be installed by October 1st. These were circuits to support Obamacare.

Needless to say, they aren’t going to make that deadline. Some of the circuits are being held up due to construction builds that won’t be complete until the end of November. The others won’t make the deadline due to the complexity and the number of various companies involved.

The customer is basically screaming and escalating but because they requested the orders so late, there isn’t much that can be done.

I can only imagine that this same scenario is playing out with other Telecom companies in the United States.

(italics, ours)


We try to convince ourselves that our minds can't be blown anymore than it already is when confronted with the staggering incompetence of these people but when you combine this unique form and degree of incompetence with somewhat byzantine federal acquisition regulations... well, you get more mind-blowing.



And... "... screaming and escalating..."?


We love "escalating" as a stand-alone verb and will from here on out employ it, hopefully, in context.