A key economic principle is the notion of opportunity cost — what you could have done with the time or money you spent doing something else. It applies to the political economy, too, and it illustrates why congressional Republicans chose the wrong course of action with the shutdown of the past two weeks.
Just last month, President Barack Obama was flailing because of the situation in Syria. He equivocated over the “red line” he’d drawn more than a year earlier. He tried all too transparently to pass the buck to Congress, to the United Nations, to anyone not named Barack Obama. Finally, he resorted to a fig leaf of a deal with Russia, just to make the story go away.
Not only that, but his administration was stubbornly steamrolling toward another calamity: the disastrous rollout of Obamacare’s online federal health-insurance exchange.
Anecdotes of the exchange’s shortcomings are legion. Now we are seeing some numbers.
A new analysis of the exchange’s first week by Kantar US Insights, reported by the Washington Post, indicates the rush of traffic to the website — which the administration blamed for the widespread failures of the site — soon fell off sharply. In the second week, analysts estimate, traffic was less than half of that of the first five days. Traffic on Day 13 was a whopping 88 percent lower than that on Day One.
Those who visited the site weren’t necessarily getting any closer to having health insurance. During the first five days the exchange was open, only about 36,000 Americans completed the enrollment process, less than four-tenths of 1 percent of the 9.47 million who visited the site.
That’s a long, long, long way from the numbers needed for the exchanges to be anything other than a financial disaster for taxpayers and insurers, and a shattered hope for millions of Americans who believed Obamacare would help them.
According to reports from the Post, the New York Times and other media outlets, these problems were apparent to the bureaucrats, insurance industry representatives and IT folks working on the exchanges. Some reports even before the rollout indicated big problems lay ahead.
And yet, the Obama administration refused to delay the Oct. 1 launch date.
Imagine if congressional Republicans had spent the week leading up to Oct. 1 staging the political theater of passing a budget bill without money for Obamacare. They could have made their point, forced red-state Senate Democrats vulnerable in next year’s midterm elections to defend Obamacare in all of its glory, and then conceded they had too few votes in the Senate to turn those proposals into law before a shutdown.
Rather than a shutdown and stories of divisions within the GOP, we would have seen Obamacare’s failures as the lead story of every newspaper and broadcast from Oct. 1 until … well, who knows how long those failures are going to last?
Instead, Republicans let the political theater become the substance. They played to their own base’s unrealistic hopes rather than pointing out how Obama and the Democrats, via Obamacare, were failing their own supporters.
Might the administration have eventually acknowledged the disaster the exchange had wrought, and sought at least a one-year delay of Obamacare’s individual mandate? Maybe. That would have been a gigantic political victory for Republicans, a victory of the magnitude they had to abandon after their leverage from the shutdown quickly gave out.
To accomplish things like repealing or defunding a law like Obamacare, you have to win elections. Republicans are not going to win elections by converting half the country to conservatism. They’re going to win elections by convincing half the country that conservative ideas and conservative governance are superior to the left-wing alternatives Democrats offer.
Between Syria and the exchanges, Obama and the Democrats would have been halfway toward making that argument for the Republicans. If only the GOP had let them.
