Jim Geraghty of National Review Online examines the likely political fallout for politicians who approved state-based Obamacare exchanges.
The states with the four worst-performing Obamacare state health-insurance exchanges — Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, and Oregon — all built them with the enthusiastic, loud backing of Democratic governors and state legislatures.
One year later, there is little sign that any of those Democratic governors, or their preferred successors and allies, will suffer at the ballot box for the millions wasted on exchanges that never or rarely functioned. On paper, this shouldn’t be a partisan issue; whether you think the Affordable Care Act is the greatest piece of legislation in a generation or Satan’s handiwork, there shouldn’t be much of a constituency backing massive expenditures for online insurance shopping and purchasing systems that don’t work.
And yet . . .
After recounting — state by state — the absence of a political backlash tied to the insurance exchanges’ failures, Geraghty offers this conclusion:
The lack of discernible voter anger over the exchanges in these states is an ominous indicator not merely for Republicans in these deep-blue states, but for those who hope to see good government. If a state is spending hundreds of millions of dollars for a piece-of-junk website and it doesn’t anger a voter, it’s unlikely much else will.
Perhaps the anger is mitigated by the perception that the money spent was federal money, from Washington — an illogical but comfortable conclusion that some other taxpayer somewhere else is picking up the check.
