This is a predictable result of letting government run businesses:

The most common complaint into the Call 12 for Action Center over the past three months has been problems with HealthSource RI – so Consumer Reporter Susan Hogan went straight to the source to try to get some answers.

Customers are getting angry with the state-run Obamacare marketplace, saying critical health decisions are being put on hold because they can’t get a straight answer.

It’s bad enough that the government spent nine figures (that means over $100 million) putting together an organization and Web site expecting to have to handle several times more customers and is still having trouble managing the fraction that it actually has.  The real travesty, however, is that anybody with authority thought it would be a good idea to begin with.

Lest we forget, the Affordable Care Act (ACA; ObamaCare) was pushed through  by President Obama and Congressional Democrats on a party-line vote on Christmas Eve using procedural gimmicks and without having been vetted by the legislators, let alone the public.  In Rhode Island, the exchange came into being not as legislation, by an executive order from ideological governor Lincoln Chafee, and without significant public debate, and the accompanying expansion of Medicaid, which is now a major budgetary problem for the state, was pretty much a bureaucratic decision without the visible input of elected officials, at all.

Read Hogan’s article.  These aren’t insurmountable business problems, but it isn’t clear how well government agents can or will surmount them.  In a private business setting, a company that was having such problems after a year of operation despite having many fewer customers than projected would have to fix them pronto or go out of business, but for HealthSource to go out of business it takes major political battles, legislation, and horse trades for other legislation and other political incentives that have nothing whatsoever to do with healthcare.

And HealthSource represents a relatively mild leap into lunacy compared with legislation that some elected officials would like to pass.  Take H5387, for example, with lead sponsors Aaron Regunberg (D, Providence), Teresa Tanzi (D, Narragansett and South Kingstown), Arthur Handy (D, Cranston), Shelby Maldonado (D, Central Falls), and Gregg Amore (D, East Providence).

The legislation would create a new agency that would automatically register Rhode Islanders in government healthcare and collect premiums from them, while forbidding private insurers from offering competing products and setting prices for all doctors and other healthcare providers.  Picture a mandatory HealthSource that wouldn’t even have to risk going back to elected officials to raise money, if it were failing.

If a bill like that were to pass, it would be devastating for the people of the state, and it’s an indication of just how dangerous it is to elect such people to office.