Commentary: The Difference Between Obamacare and Other Disasters
New Orlean's hurricane-ravaged Lower 9th Ward in 2005. Comparisons have been made between the launch of Healthcare.gov and the handling of Hurricane Katrina. Robert F. Bukaty/AP File Photo
Recent comparisons tend to leave out death tolls.
HealthCare.gov has been compared to just about every catastrophe in recent and not-so-recent history: the Iraq War, the Battle of Waterloo, the Challenger disaster, and Hurricane Katrina. You can read those very nuanced smart takes all over the Internet. Here however, we're going to focus on a very important statistic associated with all of these disasters that has been resoundingly ignored: how many people actually died.
The New York Times in a 1,000-plus-word story by Michael Shear compared Obamacare's botched rollout to Hurricane Katrina. One thing he leaves out: 1,833 people died during Hurricane Katrina.
Host David Gregory on NBC's Meet the Press compared it to Iraq. Key stat: that war resulted in more than 110,000 violent deaths.
Former White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley compared it to the sinking of the Titanic. That killed some 1,500 people.
Duke professor Henry Petroski, writing in the New York Daily News, compared it to the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. That killed seven.
Capitol Hill Blue's Callie Moran wondered whether the website rollout is Obama's Waterloo. Not sure if this affects the calculus, but more than 47,000 people died there.
To give those numbers some perspective: So far the biggest casualty of the catastrophic unmitigated government failure known as HealthCare.gov has been more than 106,000 people signing up for health insurance.
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