ObamaCare author Tom Harkin: ObamaCare is a complicated train wreck

By Robert Laurie —— Bio and Archives December 3, 2014

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Last week, Chuck Schumer found himself in hot water with his own party after he announced his belief that passing ObamaCare had been a "mistake." He claimed that the Democrats squandered their 2008 mandate by doing something that no one really wanted them to do. As always, Dems were outraged that one of their own had dared step out of line.

Now, outgoing Iowa Senator Tom Harkin (soon to be replaced by Joni Ernst) has joined Schumer in labeling ObamaCare a fiasco - though his reasons are somewhat different. As The Hill reports:

[Harkin] wonders in hindsight whether the law was made overly complicated to satisfy the political concerns of a few Democratic centrists who have since left Congress. "We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn't do it," Harkin told The Hill. "So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all. "What we did is we muddle through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and still rewards the insurance companies extensively," he added.

See? The law was just too conservative. A non-existent cadre of "centrist Democrats" ruined everything! Of course, this is all theater. We've always known that ObamaCare was designed to fail. As both Harry Reid and Barney Frank famously said, the ACA is just a "stepping stone" on the road to single payer. ....And Harkin probably agrees.

"We had the votes in '09. We had a huge majority in the House, we had 60 votes in the Senate," he said. He believes Congress should have enacted "single-payer right from the get go or at least put a public option would have simplified a lot." "We had the votes to do that and we blew it," he said.

Make no mistake. None of these people are truly seeing the flaws in their big-government boondoggle. What they're really doing is letting you know that they wish they'd been able to make government even bigger. The disastrous ACA is, as it was all along, part of the plan. As we head for 2016, you can expect to see more Democrats making similar proclamations. Hillary Clinton's early '90's HillaryCare was the progenitor of the modern single payer movement and - despite her ugly performance so far - she's still the presumptive Presidential nominee. Her party members will continue to speak out against the failings of ObamaCare in an effort to distance themselves from their failed President, shore up Hillary's inbound single payer "solution" to the ACA meltdown, and set the stage for her White House run. In the process, the administration will do everything in its power to make matters worse, but hey. They're more than happy to let the American people can twist in the ObamaCare wind if it helps them fabricate a 2016 campaign narrative.