Democratic Health care Law

At best that’s a non-answer. The president’s promise wasn’t just written into law. It was also delivered verbally in unmistakably clear language on at least three dozen occasions. And what he said was: If you like your health plan, you can keep it, period. The law’s grandfathering provisions, meanwhile, were written narrowly and strictly—ensuring that few plans would actually be able to retain their protected status. Democrats were warned that the narrowness of the rules would result in people losing existing plans. They went ahead anyway. That’s part of the reason why people are upset.

That’s not the only administration deception that came up during yesterday’s hearing. And Republicans were the only ones to criticize the administration’s botched roll out of the exchanges.

Regarding the failure of the exchange portals, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) told Sebelius that there are “no words to even describe the frustration that all of us have.”

Sen. Max Baucus, one of the law’s Democratic authors, referencing his pre-launch warning that the exchanges could turn into a “train wreck” if the administration didn’t get a better handle on the particulars of the implementation process, chastised Sebelius for failing to acknowledge the project’s problems earlier—and for insisting that implementation was on track.

“Make no mistake, I believe in this law. I spent two years of my life working on the Affordable Care Act. There is nothing I want more to succeed,” he said, according to The Washington Post. “But months ago I warned that if implementation did not improve, the marketplace might struggle…We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case.”

Baucus walked back his original train wreck remarks after they were widely quoted by critics of the law. But here he’s making a charge that’s arguably even more severe: He’s not just accusing the administration of botching the rollout of the exchanges—he’s accusing them of deceiving, or at least failing to inform, senior elected officials in their own party regarding the status of the implementation process, including one of the law’s own chief legislative authors.

All Baucus wanted was reliable information. But that’s something he feels as if he hasn’t gotten. “You’ve got to tell us what the problems are,” he said. “The more you don’t tell us, the greater the problem is going to be.” In imploring Sebelius to start being straight with Democrats on the Hill, he was implicitly making the point that up until now that’s not what she and the rest of the administration had been doing.

That’s important—and revealing. Republicans and critics of the law have never trusted the administration on Obamacare. But they weren't the only ones the White House misled, misinformed, or simply kept in the dark throughout the implementation process. Even senior Democratic legislators, for example, were given no early hint that the law's employer mandate would be delayed; party leadership was reportedly given just 30 minutes notice before the announcement went public.

And now some Democratic legislators are openly frustrated, and skeptical, as well. They haven’t quite turned on the law yet. But they’re wary of the people in charge of implementing it.

To put it another way: They still like Obamacare, but they don’t quite trust the Obama administration. The problem, as the law's supporters are rapidly discovering, is that even with the best of reforms, bad implementation tends to make for bad law. Which means that if the administration doesn't start displaying some very basic technical and managerial competence, Democrats may increasingly find that they like the law in theory, but aren't so thrilled with it in practice.