Patrick McKenzie

And no one at the time really had a plan for picking it up or didn't feel like it was incentive compatible for them specifically to pick it up right now.

It would be great if someone could do this, but just not me.

Well, folks, why don't we 27,000 words on this?

My article in Works in Progress called The Story of X and ACA goes into some of the nitty gritty.

Broadly, I think a matter of incentives more than matter of people choosing to do evil things.

Although I will say we did choose to do evil things and we can probe on that if you want to.

But if you look at the federal government specifically, the federal government institutionally learned one, I believe, wrong lesson, which has terrible consequences from the healthcare.gov rollout a number of years ago when Obamacare was first debuting.

And the thing which many actors in the federal government and the political parties came away from is that a president can doom their legacy of their signature initiative if those bleeping tech folks don't get their bleeping act together.

And so the United States has decided like there is virtually nothing.

up to and including like the potential of national annihilation that will cause us to actually like put our chips behind making a software problem.

That is somebody else who does not have to deal with an electoral mandate or getting called in front of Congress or et cetera, et cetera, somebody else's problem.

Unfortunately, software is eating the world and delivering competence in the modern world requires being competent at software and the United States, it will tell you differently.

And there are wonderful people in the, in the government who are attempting to change this, but unfortunately,

broad strokes on an institutional level, the United States federal government has abdicated software as a core responsibility of the government.

So I think we're memory holding a lot of things that happened in the pandemic.

And I wish we wouldn't partly because, you know,

of political incentives, and we're approaching an election year, and because of the quirky way that the American parties and the candidates bounce off each other, it's no one's real incentive to say, okay, like, I would like to relitigate the mask issue for a moment.

We told people that masks don't block airborne viruses, and we were quite confident of that, and the entire news media backed us up on it, and then we, like, 180'd a month later.

No one wants to relitigate that.

No one wants to relitigate California imposed redlining in the provision of medical care.