No cure as the pain of Obamacare gets worse

UNDER Obamacare, costs are up for Americans and the website designed to help them has driven them away by the million.

A grim-faced US President Barack Obama speaks about the healthcare reform laws in Washington, DC / Picture: AFP

IN politics, leaders live and die by their promises. Julia Gillard effectively wrote her government into the history books when she went back on her assurance that "there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead".

In the US, President Barack Obama is in similar strife over an oft-repeated promise that under his plan to overhaul health care - the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare for short - Americans who liked their GPs and their health care plans would be able to keep seeing their GPs and using those same plans.

Or as he put it in various forms to the American public more than two dozen times: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

The only thing is, it turned out not to be true. Experts and skeptics warned that trying to bend the US healthcare sector - which were it a stand-alone economy would be as big as France, only with more bureaucracy and worse customer service - to the will of Washington bureaucrats would be a disaster. The predictions are now coming to pass.

Under Obamacare, costs are going up for millions of Americans and the website designed to navigate individuals through the insurance "exchanges" has driven users away by the million on ­account of its poor design, buggy nature, and lack of security.

Because what everyone wants when handing over sensitive fin-ancial and medical information to the government is a web portal as confidence-inspiring as a site ­devoted to Illuminati conspiracy theories or Ukrainian women who want to meet you now.

How poorly has the system performed?  By one estimate in the  first month of the program just 50,000 Americans had successfully  signed  up under the new ­program.

To put those numbers in perspective, that's about the same number of followers as The Daily Telegraph's Joe Hildebrand has on Twitter. Though in Joe's favour, the federal government is not compelling anyone to follow his feed.

Yet.

That 50,000 figure more than doubles if one uses some tricky ­accounting and includes, as the Obama administration does, plans put in electronic shopping carts but where the transaction has not been completed.

But even doubled this is still just a fraction of the estimated 4.2 million Americans who have so far received letters from their insurance providers telling them that their coverage no longer is permissible under Obamacare, and that to stay insured they will need to purchase far pricier plans featuring inclusions such as mat-ernity hospital coverage for single men  and  middle-aged women. To put it in Australian terms, imagine being told that your monthly private health premium would increase by several hundred dollars a month, that you were forced to pay for services you never wanted or could conceivably need, and that instead of ­potentially getting a tax credit you faced a fine from the ATO if you did not sign up to the new ­regime.

Serious questions are being asked about why Obama was so determined to push through his grand design and how he could have been so clueless about the consequences.

While government experts raised red flags about the site as early as March, by all accounts the White House did not realise there were problems until after it launched a few weeks ago, when they read about it in the papers.

This passive "who knew?" attitude was expressed by Obama himself during a recent interview on American TV when he blithely stated, "If we had to do it all over again ... there would have been a whole lot more questions that were asked."

No wonder Americans are angry and that the American president is now languishing in the polls and is sitting on disapproval numbers as ignominious as those of George W. Bush in his second term.

And in contrast to Bush, Obama has not started any unpopular major wars (the Nobel Peace Prize winner is more of a drone strike man), nor with some exceptions does he face an overwhelmingly hostile media.

Democrats in the US legislature, facing elections in just under a year and the danger of being associated with the president's broken promise, are increasingly skittish and warning of a "crisis of confidence" in the president.

When Republicans faced mid-term elections at the same stage of George W. Bush's presidency, Democrats swept the House and gained a commanding majority. Today, the polls are the same but the parties are reversed.

Hillary Clinton, by all accounts gearing up for a 2016 White House run, cannot be cheered by these facts.

Her husband Bill has already said publicly that Obama needs to re-write the law.

Because the US Constitution does not provide for Westminster-style circuit breakers like spills or no-confidence motions, Obama does not face an existential threat to his presidency, only his legacy. Whether this is enough for him to change course again remains to be seen.