On the Third Hand: The doers

Of course, anyone who thinks hard about the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) exchange enrollment sites — or looks at the exchange implementation sites, with their position papers about inclusive gender descriptors and Old Sanskrit cultural linguistic competency — knows that House Republicans must be rank amateurs when it comes to hating the PPACA exchange program managers.

The House Republicans may not even actually hate either the exchanges or the program designers. For them, this is all about business. If Obama had set up a big new program for distributing pictures of cute babies, House Committees would now be organizing hearing after hearing probing the Obama administration’s strategy for identifying and photographing cute babies.

No, the people who truly hate the exchange program managers — hate, hate, hate, hate them, with more italics, and maybe boldface type, and some exclamation points — are the bright, over-educated, under-assertiveness-trained worker bees inside the project development teams who’ve actually been trying to get the exchange sites to work.

The practical, somewhat depressed people who were not actually good team players; who complained too much, who dared to say once too often that they lacked the tools, time and competent colleagues needed to accomplish Goal X by Date Y; who faced 25 completely conflicting “top priorities”; who were endlessly delegated to, but could not re-delegate to others, because there was no one with a clue to re-delegate to.

Chances are that these folks have about the same distribution of views about the idea of PPACA and the exchange program concept as members of the general project development population.