Liberal economists fear collateral damage from website woes

Two of the nation's leading economists and former top government policymakers fret the Obama's administration's botched rollout of HealthCare.gov will undermine the public's already wobbly faith in the government's ability to help average people.

Writing Monday in the Washington Post, Lawrence Summers, the president's former top economic adviser and now a professor at Harvard University, warned that “there is a danger here that goes far beyond delays in access to health insurance.” Should the administration's promise of a fix by the end of the month lead to more unmet expectations, citizens will “lose respect for government” and “our democracy is the loser.”

In a similar vein, Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and an economics professor at Princeton University, wrote in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal that HealthCare.gov's transformation into “a national laughingstock … undermines trust in healthcare reform and, more generally, in the government's ability to solve problems.”

Both economists, long associated with Democrats, noted the unremitting opposition by Republicans to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Their attacks have “not been constrained by the truth. (Remember death panels?)” Blinder wrote.

Summers pointed to the opposition's deliberate efforts to delay confirming key appointments and withhold funds for implementation. “There is a line that must be respected between political opposition and conscious subversion. Everyone understands that when the country is at war, even a war a person may oppose, vigorous oversight is essential, but, in the end, there is an obligation to support American troops,” he wrote. “History will not judge kindly those who, having lost political debates over policy, go beyond vigorous oversight and seek to subvert enacted programs.”

Follow Merrill Goozner on Twitter: @MHgoozner