The unthinkable about ObamaCare may very well happen a lot sooner than you think it will happen.

I would not be surprised if a White House staffer "tweets" that ObamaCare has been put on hold until further notice.

The Friday Night Dump!

Why? Because ObamaCare faces two insormountable challenges, or two hurdles that will require a lot more than "happy statements" by Press Secretary Carney about letting technical people work overtime to fix things.

First, the technical problems, or the famous "glitches," are starting to look more and more like that old car that needs a new engine. In other words, it's not the radiator that needs to replaced. It's the whole engine! I recall from personal experience that new engines are a lot more expensive than radiators! I got rid of an old car when I heard that it needed an engine rather than a radiator!

Second, "sticker shock" is now a big issue, a credibility problem. You can't promote that people will have "affordable insurance" when the options are unaffordable.

This is what President Obama told an audience a few days before implementation:

"Starting on Tuesday, every American can visit HealthCare.gov to find out what's called the insurance marketplace for your state. Here in Maryland, I actually think it's called MarylandHealthConnection.gov. (Applause.) MarylandHealthConnection.gov. But if you go to HealthCare.gov, you can look and they'll tell you where to go. They'll link to your state. Now, this is real simple. It's a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans, side-by-side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak -- (laughter) -- same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on and you start looking, and here are all the options. It's buying insurance on the private market, but because now you're part of a big group plan -- everybody in Maryland is all logging in and taking a look at the prices -- you've got new choices. Now you've got new competition, because insurers want your business. And that means you will have cheaper prices. (Applause.) So you enter in some basic information about yourself, what level of coverage you're looking for. After that, you'll be presented with a list of quality, affordable plans that are available in your area. It will say clearly what each plan covers, what each plan costs. The price will be right there. It will be fully transparent."

It it not happening like President Obama said that it would.

Yuval Levin nailed it at NRO:

"The reaction of these individuals to what has happened in the last two weeks is the reaction of people who are coming to realize that their expectations and understanding of web development were mistaken. They believed (as I did too, I admit) that whatever technical problems the exchange sites encountered at first could be cleared up quickly and simply once things got going--that the contractors developing the websites could just respond to problems on the fly, as they became apparent. It is now increasingly obvious to them that this is simply not how things work, that building a website like this is a matter of exceedingly complex programming and not "design," and that the problems that plague the federal exchanges (and some state exchanges) are much more severe and fundamental than anything they imagined possible. That doesn't mean they can't be fixed, of course, and perhaps even fixed relatively quickly, but it means that at the very least the opening weeks (and quite possibly months) of the Obamacare exchanges will be very different from what either the administration or its critics expected."

The bottom line is that you can't sign up and the prices are higher than promised.

In the business world, we call that a disaster. Companies go out of business. Executives are fired. MBA courses are created to explain the debacle.

Can you say Edsel, as David Catron wrote. ("Bad ideas, worse rollouts, and unhappy customers")

ObamaCare is a disaster. I just hope that Valerie Jarrett "opens the gate" and tells the president!

P.S. You can hear my chat with Frank Burke, businessman and contributor to American Thinker here.



