My must read of the day is "How President Obama can stop the bleeding on Obamacare," in the Washington Post:
Given all of that, you should circle Nov. 30 as Obama’s best, near-term chance of ending the political damage done by the events of the last six weeks. Why? That’s the self-imposed deadline the Obama administration has set for all of the problems with HealthCare.gov to be solved — one that it will apparently be hard-pressed to meet.
While the political problems related to the law go beyond the website — Obama’s "if you like it, you keep it" statement has undermined him as a credible messenger on the issue — the failure of the website to properly launch has become the most memorable symbol of these struggles. The split screens of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifying on Capitol Hill about the Web site’s problems and the Web site actually not working are devastating to the administration’s credibility on the matter.
Fixing it on time, then, is critical to beginning to rebuild that credibility and repairing the political damage.
Already, there is an effort afoot in Congress that would force Obama to allow those who like their healthcare plans to keep them. If that Nov. 30 deadline isn’t met, what has been a trickle of swing-state Democrats supporting such a move would turn into a flood. So, too, would be efforts by those same Democrats to distance themselves from Obama, a move that would further isolate the president as the 2014 election — and the likely end of his political sway — crept ever closer.
If the website is not truly fixed by Nov. 30, the president will have zero credibility when it comes to this law.
Nov. 30 was always a political deadline, not a practical one. When Kathleen Sebelius testified the website would be fixed by the end of the month, when the president promised it, no one ever gave a timeline as to how or why the fixes would be achieved by that date. It was an arbitrary date, but the credibility of the administration rests on it.
The most rudimentary indication of success for this legislation would have been for it to meet the minimum goals the administration laid out for it on its own.
The first month’s enrollment numbers won’t be close to 500,000 goal, the website already failed its Oct. 1 deadline, and the administration’s only hope is the self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline for fixing Healthcare.gov. And that appears to be a pipe dream.
The most important thing for the administration, Democrats, and Obamacare isn’t finding success stories of people who have benefited from the new health insurance. It’s fixing the website. And they have 17 days to do it.