Obamacare Rollout Not Worse Than That Of Social Security

Pat Cunningham looked into the problems implementing one of the most popular government programs ever.

An “early crisis,” recalled the [Social Security] Bulletin, was the “John Doe” problem: “Many employers reported earnings without providing a worker’s name or SSN [Social Security number]. The first report from the Bureau of Internal Revenue did not contain SSNs for about 12 percent of the wage items—and this rapidly increased in subsequent reports”…

In other words, as the former Chair recounted later, “They said that millions of people would never get their benefits.”

None of that was borne out. The Social Security Board figured out new procedures to extract information from employers and cut down on the John Does.

The Grio adds:

In his Huffington Post article, “Obamacare Not the First New Program To Have Launch Problems,” Arthur Delaney reminds us of the many challenges social security experienced when it was first introduced…

Technical difficulties, as Delaney emphasizes in his article, are not unique to Obamacare. Social security’s difficulties seemed far more insurmountable at the time. “It wasn’t easy,” writes Delaney. “After Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935, a nascent Social Security Board faced a daunting task: enrolling 26 million industrial workers in less than a year, and another 2.5 million each year after that. One major problem: A lot of people had the same name.”

For many, that reality made Social Security impossible to implement. Alf Landon, the 1936 Republican presidential nominee whom F.D.R. defeated by a landslide, called social security a “cruel hoax” and “fraud on the workingman.” Eventually, as Nancy Altman documents in her 2005 book, The Battle for Social Security, that problem was solved by devising the numerical system that created Social Security numbers.

With that hurdle cleared, another one popped up. “But how to reach the workers?” writes Delaney. Altman, whose book he quotes, explains that “‘Letter carriers delivered applications for numbers, helped people fill out the forms, answered questions about the program, returned the forms to typing centers where the cards could be produced, delivered the cards to the workers, and transmitted the applications of workers together with their newly-assigned Social Security numbers to [headquarters in] Baltimore.’”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.