Good Enough For Government Work

The Minneapolis Star Tribune committed a random act of journalism over the weekend, publishing an extensive post-mortem of the MNsure debacle.  The state’s newspaper of record published a detailed account of what went wrong and who did what in the rollout of Minnesota’s Obamacare health insurance exchange.  It is must reading for anyone interested in state government or health care.

One thing made clear by the Star Tribune’s reporting is that the senior members of state government—from Governor Mark Dayton on down—were aware that MNsure’s rollout would be a disaster, decided to press ahead anyway, and were indifferent, at best, to the ensuing carnage.

It’s the cliché “good enough for government work” come to life.  Having twice served as a government bureaucrat, I’ve always found the phrase to be mildly insulting.  Mark Dayton seems to wear the insult as a badge of honor.

Gov. Dayton gives away the game in this quote published by the Star Tribune,

“I don’t know of anybody who wasn’t operating with good intentions and trying their utmost to make this as good as possible.”

Hey, they tried their best and they meant well.  With Gov. Dayton, good intentions always trump actual results.  He’d rather have his people mean well, and fail, than succeed for the wrong reasons.

Which explains why Dayton has held no one—not the hapless Commissioner of Human Services nor the “hear no evil, see no evil” MNsure board of directors responsible for this debacle.