Worse Than You Think--Obama Has Missed 56% of All Obamacare Deadlines

Dr. Waldman: “This creature of yours should be kept under guard. Mark my words. He will prove dangerous.”
Dr. Henry Frankenstein: Dangerous! Poor old Waldman. Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous?….
Dr. Waldman: You’re young, my friend. Your success has intoxicated you. Wake up and look facts in the face! Here we have a fiend whose brain…
Dr. Henry Frankenstein: “The brain must be given time to develop. It’s a perfectly good brain, doctor. You ought to know. It came from your own laboratory.”
Dr. Waldman (shocked): “You used the brain in my laboratory! But you’ve mistakenly implanted a criminal brain in this creature.” –”Frankenstein” (1931)

A .440 life-time batting average would make one a hall-of-fame player if one was playing major league baseball. But Obamacare "aint' baseball and meeting only 44% of your own deadlines is pretty poor when one considers this is the Obama's signature legislation.

In a study never released to the public--according and published by Avik Roy in Forbes,  the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS)  the Obama Administration had only completed 32 of 82 deadlines for implementing this intrusion into America's healthcare. Nine of those missed deadlines reported by the CRS were due to lack of congressional funding, so to be fair the President's record is 32 out of 73 or 44%. Twenty-three percent were completed late, and another third weren't completed by the time this report was released on June 5th.

As of May 31, 2013, when the CRS analysis was completed, the White House had yet to meet 9 of 12 deadlines from the first year after the Affordable Care Act was enacted. It failed to meet 22 of 53 deadlines in the second year; another 8 became moot after Congress did not appropriate funds to complete the assigned tasks. In year three, the administration missed 10 out of 17 deadlines. That’s a total of 41 out of 82 deadlines missed.

In analyzing the CRS report, I erred on the side of generosity. If the administration missed a particular statutory deadline by a week or less, I counted it in their favor as a “met” deadline. In any case where there was ambiguity in the CRS report, I assumed that the administration had met the deadline. So these 50-56 percent missed deadline figures should be seen as slightly conservative.

Most of the deadlines are for bureaucratic busywork

Most of these deadlines aren’t for mission-critical features of the law, and the document reads like a kind of caricature of bureaucratic busywork. For example, Section 10407(d) mandates that by March 23, 2012, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is required to “submit to Congress a report on the appropriate level of diabetes medical education.” To date, the report has not been located. Also on that date, the Secretary is required to “implement a 5-year national public education campaign on oral health care prevention and education.” She missed that one too.

Harry Reid will tell you that the reasons for the missed deadlines is the GOP opposition to the bill, but that would only account for the nine deadlines missed due to lack of funding. The truth is, Obamacare is a monster, one so big that even its creators can't control it.

Even an administration with competent management skills would find it hard to implement this government takeover of our heath system. For the Obama Administration (and for the people) Obamacare is a disaster.

In the end the only way to control this monster is to "kill it." Despite what some pundits think, Obamacare will not kill itself, it will not collapse under its own weight. A bureaucracy is being built  to support it and as long as the Democrats own the Senate and the White House, the "monster" of Obamacare will continue to be fed, despite the errors and delays in implementation.