Obamacare Tower of Babble

As TV talking heads explain in cyberspeak the superglitches of the ACA rollout, the mind reels. We are back in a Biblical confusion of tongues, an inability to comprehend language that was visited on the builders of the Tower of Babel.

Republican true believers, of course, see this as just retribution for the blasphemy of Obamacare, but the less pious can only wonder at how the most tech-savvy White House ever blundered so badly on the introduction of its signature accomplishment.

People who sent me a million e-mails since I first expressed interest in Barack Obama seven years ago somehow expected the complicated rollout of a 2000-page law passed two years ago with all its moving parts to be accomplished in a few months, a mistake that passeth understanding and now has even Democrats calling for heads to roll.

What does it mean beyond another round of partisan acrimony now that the bitterness of the government shutdown is out of the news?

Everyone now agrees the White House should have started sooner, but more than hubris is involved. For those who wanted a more sensible single-payer system, a Medicare-for-All answer to the back-breaking problem of private insurers who rake off so many of the dollars spent on health care, the sight is heart-breaking.

In this political Tower of Babble in which we live now, is our political system capable of producing anything constructive, or are we doomed to creating only monstrosities and then fighting over how to make them humanly beneficial?

As the White House tweaks away, the ACA will surely eventually start to enroll the uninsured and slowly benefit American health care for those who have been shut out or overcharged. The bugs will go away, and the body politic will recover from the wounds.

But Americans have never been stupid, and they are better-educated and better-informed now than previous generations. Incompetence has never been the main problem, and it isn’t now. Until we get back to governing with relative sanity, mental health will continue to be the obvious national diagnosis.