PR 101

So it’s the signature effort of your campaign. You’re trying to get everyone’s buy-in -- literally, in this case. And your website fails. What are people going to remember about your product?

It’s very sad that the Obama administration can spend billions on something and then have its rollout botched by what have to be avoidable mistakes. Just to start with, the Obamacare site developer said what screwed things up was that the administration, at the last minute, wanted users to sign up for an account before they could browse the site. Hey, you want people to look at your product – you don’t require them to register or sign in first. Isn’t that a barrier to retail success?

One congresswoman said this week that companies like eBay deal with zillions of customers without problems. Perhaps the administration should have waved a few bucks in front of the site developers for those entities. My running joke is that the powers-that-be should kidnap Edward Snowden, bring him back from Russia, and offer him amnesty if he fixes the Obamacare site.

Obamacare is a noble experiment to fix something that’s really broken: the American healthcare system. Maybe from a technical medical standpoint, it’s the best in the world, but who can argue that doing nothing to fix its delivery was ever an option?

If you stay on this planet long enough, you will see things you thought could never change collapse in a heap. It happened with the auto industry. I have seen it happening in journalism, my old profession. Personally, I think maybe one of the next things to go might be the whole private health insurance industry as we now know it.

But from heaps of rubble rise new ways of doing things. The auto industry is an example, and even in journalism, evolution is taking place. Maybe what needs to go is the employer-based health insurance concept, which, as I understand history, was only a patch so employers could get around wage freezes to attract employees.

Obamacare is a Rube Goldberg system designed to offer a better product to consumers without pissing off the corporations overmuch. With all its limitations, it should be given a real chance to succeed or fail. In the meantime, though, President Obama needs to take a PR class. I think such a thing is available at most community colleges at minimal expense.