Tear It Down!

            As we approach the Promised Land of November 30th, we are told that the ObamaCare website might be only 80% ready, that the payment feature might not be ready at all, that glitches number in the hundreds and will need lots more Band Aids.  We won't know the full extent of the mess until the deadline is reached.  In the meantime, the sign-up disaster has given us a trove of words that reflect the richness of the English language.

            Some of the adjectives describing the failure of the website have been mild: elementary, dysfunctional, inexcusable, misbegotten, historic.  Some add a sense of doom: catastrophic, abysmal, stunning, astounding, disastrous.  Still more try to assign a dimension to the problem: colossal, epic, gargantuan, and galactic (my favorite).  The list goes on.
            The point is that we are at a loss for the one word that truly measures the impact of this government-engineered screw-up.  Some say that it dooms ObamaCare, because the young people counted on to sign up have been turned off by repeated failures to get on line or get answers to their questions; they hear that their information may not be secure and may expose them to the consequences of identity theft, and that their premiums and deductibles -- if only they could figure what they are --  will be prohibitively expensive.  As a result, few are enrolled and fewer still are actually making payments.
            Then we have the 5 million (or is it 8 million?) policy holders who have been notified that they are losing their coverage, not to mention the 50 million small business employees who may also soon be dumped unceremoniously onto the same uncovered snow bank.  In spite of the president's attempt -- legalities aside -- to apply a fix to this problem, there really is no fix possible without the cooperation of state insurance commissioners and the insurance companies themselves. Meanwhile, an increasingly incredulous public renders its opinion of our dissembling president with poll numbers that are sinking like a corpse with cement shoes.
            What even the left-leaning media is coming to realize is that this is a defining moment for progressives, maybe even for honestly compassionate liberals.  To borrow an image from the Reagan era, ObamaCare is becoming the Berlin Wall of American history.  The voices of the disillusioned and disenfranchised are only a rumble now, but they will soon erupt into a roar:  Tear It Down!