George W. Bush never fully recovered from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Now it seems that President Obama will be crippled just as badly in the wake of the health reform mess.

But this goes way beyond Obama’s personal standing. By sowing fresh doubts about the competence of the public sector, he is undercutting the core idea of an activist government. This is a disaster for progressive causes across the board.

The computer glitches are the least of it. If those can be ironed out by the end of this month, as promised, that snafu will be forgotten.

It is harder to forgive the president’s broken promise, made over and over, that his reform would do nothing to disrupt the coverage of those who wished to keep their existing plans. That was a core argument in favor of this reform, and it was not true.

So was Obama lying? That’s hard to believe, given that the truth would inevitably reveal itself. More likely this is a case of breathtaking incompetence.

The basic idea behind Obama’s reform is that the private insurance markets work well only if everyone buys coverage. If healthy people opt out, insurers are left with a smaller and sicker group to cover their costs.

That pushes up premiums, and gives insurers incentive to weed out the most costly cases. That’s why they denied coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and placed caps on total coverage.

Under Obama’s reform, those practices are made illegal. But the math can’t work unless everyone, or nearly everyone, buys a legitimate insurance policy. The principle is that all Americans should carry a fair share of the costs, that no one should get a free ride and rely on charity care in a hospital emergency room in the event of illness.

All that is reasonable. The problem is that millions of Americans today have flimsy policies that don’t cover basics, like hospitalization and prescription drug costs. The Obama reform sets a minimum standard, and these plans don’t meet it.

The mystery is why the president promised that people could keep those policies. His own team drafted regulations that foresaw this problem. They exempted people who had sub-standard coverage at the time the law was enacted from the new higher standards. They saw that Massachusetts grappled with this same problem when its reform went into effect. And they were warned about this problem by insurers months ago.

The talk now is about an “administrative fix” of some sort. But if that allows millions of people to keep their sub-standard plans, it will undermine the reform and drive up prices for everyone else.

Our own view is that Obama reform is a complex mouse-trap, and that this isn’t the last nasty surprise it will provide. A single-payer system like Canada’s, supported by a progressive tax increase, would make far more sense. Canadians pay much less, enjoy better health, and report greater satisfaction with their care.

But that die has been cast. What’s needed now is transparency and competence. The question is whether Obama has it in him.

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