The two most important programs of any modern state are these: education and healthcare. There are reasons for this.
The educational function is the modern state's equivalent of the familial function and the the priestly function. The state substitutes a special caste of preachers, who are called teachers or instructors, to train future generations in the state's world-and-life view. Historically, this is always been done first by the family, and secondarily by the priests. The modern state insists that it alone is capable of providing this instruction, and therefore it has removed the authority of parents and priests from this crucial area of social order.
The second area is healthcare. Historically, families have been the primary agencies for providing health care for its members. This is a part of the insurance function. As backup agencies, churches and other religious institutions have also stepped in to provide healthcare. The state cannot claim sovereignty without appropriating the healthcare function.
The state has to claim the ability to provide healing. It wants a monopoly in this area. The medical care industry is a rival to the state. As an institution, the state has to be able to claim that it possesses the ability to provide healing, because if it surrenders this function to the free market, it loses the aura of divinity. The ultimate healer is God, and the state steadily appropriates this office. While the state is not able to predestine all things according to the standards of politicians, who act through permanent bureaucrats, this is a theoretical standard by which the state extends its control over the lives of all those under its authority.
The modern predestinating state, which in principle claims to replace God in history, needs the ability to provide healing, for that is what most religions attribute to God. The state therefore has a constant tendency to appropriate the healing function as part of the state's overall operations. It does whatever it can to establish standards of medical care and other healing arts, but this is only preliminary to a greater extension of state power over the healthcare industry. Ultimately, the state wants to be able to provide all sources of healing, to the extent that voters are willing to accept this claim of the state, and also accept the costs associated with implementing this claim.
This is why the failure of ObamaCare strikes at the very heart of the modern American planning state. The failure of the government's website is symptomatic, but it is representative. The ultimate failure is the initial claim of the state, namely, that it can safely be trusted with the authority to heal. The state wants monopoly in this area, but since it cannot plausibly claim this at the beginning of the process, it adopts a salami-slice approach to the extension of socialized medicine. Healing is a matter of state sovereignty, and it must be pursued as an inherent nature of the modern centrally planned state.
The public now has a sense of the inability of the state to substitute its authority for that of God, the family, the free-market, and churches. The collapse of the website is a distant early warning of the ultimate collapse of Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare specifically. The unfunded liabilities of these programs are such that they will bankrupt the government, unless the government abandons the programs. This is the ultimate collapse of the implicit assertion of divinity by the modern state.
When the lobbyists on K Street forgot to write into the Affordable Healthcare Act the authority of the federal government to provide subsidies for policies purchased through the federal government's program, as distinguished from state-run health insurance exchanges, they inserted a poison pill into the legislation. Now this poison pill is being challenged in a federal court. The whole sales pitch of ObamaCare was that the government was going to provide subsidies to middle-class buyers of health insurance, which would compensate for the dramatically increased premiums of the programs. Now it appears that the federal government is not legally authorized to provide the subsidies. If the judge so determines next February, then the government will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. But there, a 5 to 4 decision against the government seems likely.
In any case, the legality of the subsidies is now open to question. The public does not know this yet. The uninsured public will blithely purchase these dramatically more expensive policies, but only on the assumption that they will receive the subsidies. So, they will be owners of the policies, but if the subsidies end, they will be trapped. They will have to drop the policies. But thousands of them will find themselves uninsurable, because they got sick during the period of the transition out of ObamaCare, and they will not be eligible for their original policies after the subsidies fail to materialize.
This is going to create enormous confusion and consternation in the body politic. Even if the program survives the testing of the courts, and even after the programmers finally get the federal website functioning, the entire process will appear in retrospect to have been designed by idiots. ObamaCare has called into question the competence of the federal government, and on a scale not normally seen. It is because ObamaCare is associated with a vital aspect of family financial planning, namely, health insurance, that the fiasco is being played out in full public view. Normally, the public never sees this sort of thing, even though it is common. Now it sees, and now it must worry about the possibility that the entire system will backfire, like a gigantic exploding cigar. But this cigar is not humorous.
There is real hope today that this fiasco is going to tar and feather any future government programs of national redemption and healing. The money is running out, and only the Federal Reserve's willingness to counterfeit $1 trillion a year of new money is keeping it going. ObamaCare is the tip of the iceberg. Its failure, or near failure, will be in full public view. This makes it unique in recent legislation. The President has bet the farm on the program, as has the Democratic Party. Not a single Republican voted in favor of ObamaCare. It is a piece of legislation rivaled by no other piece of legislation in modern times for its partisanship. If it fails, the Democrats will feel the political pain of this for a long time. But that that is not what is most important. The real pain is going to be felt by the agents of messianic salvation. The public schools are eroding. Now, in full public view, the federal government's major move to establish socialized medicine is also failing.
Anti-government forces could not have planned this. It took the Democratic Party to plan this.
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