On the Third Hand: Blaming the Victim

Now the committee Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., the chairman of the committee, and Rep. Joseph Pitts, R-Pa. the chairman of the committee’s health subcommittee, have sent Marilyn Tavenner, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a letter complaining about delays in PPACA implementation.

Upton and Pitts sent the letter a few days after we published a fine article by Mark  E. Ruquet — a reporter for a sister website, PropertyCasualty360.com –on state regulators’ concerns about delays in getting PPACA implementation regulations and guidance from HHS.

On the one hand: If Upton and Pitts sent the letter to Tavenner because they read Mark’s article: Yay!! Thank you for reading.

On the other hand: Who knows whether HHS officials even like PPACA. Maybe Tavenner hates PPACA more than typical members of the National Association of Health Underwriters. Maybe she has a voodoo doll named “Ppacka” and sticks pins in it every night and every morning. But her job is implement PPACA, and the House Republicans have hauling her in for hearing after hearing, doing everything they can to reduce PPACA implementation funding, and, in general, treating her as if she were the Ppacka vodoo doll. Except that, instead of sticking pins in her, they’ve been focusing on tying her up in miles of legislative rope. It seems really unfair of them to wonder whether the regulations and guidance are when they’ve done their best to tie her up.

On the third hand: One of the lessons of the story of Harry Houdini, the escape artist, is that, the longer the rope is, the more likely it is loose and the knots poorly tied. Maybe, by attacking HHS and PPACA so often, from so many different angles, PPACA opponents have actually used too much rope and accidentally given the Obama administration more freedom to implement PPACA how it wants than if the opponents had waited quietly and unenthusiastically to see how the law will work (or fail to work).