“We’ve got to take ownership that we messed up,” former White House adviser Lanny Davis told Megyn Kelly last night, “and Nancy Pelosi should say that — we messed up.” Bill Clinton’s former aide and counsel in the impeachment fight joked at the beginning of this clip that he’d hoped for a fun segment with Kelly, but that Pelosi’s refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of the bill she shoved down the throats of Americans “is painful.” Was it ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OFeUm-RvOk

“Nancy Pelosi should say that — we messed up…We have to take ownership,” Davis said, indicating that admitting fault is the first step to fixing the Affordable Care Act.

He added that the private sector should have had more of a role in developing HealthCare.Gov, which debuted Oct. 1 with significant glitches.

“We screwed up,” Davis said, advising Pelosi that she should admit that Democrats relied too heavily on the government to set up ObamaCare.

Actually, the problem wasn’t that there was too little involvement from the private sector; it’s that it didn’t belong in the federal government in the first place. But even apart from that, the site was built by the private sector, with the full cooperation of private insurers who hoped to score big off of a historic government mandate that forced Americans to participate in a command economy. The problem was that the people who command that economy are singularly unqualified for the job, as most if not all of them have done little but public-sector work for the majority of their lives. The incompetent management of this system began in the bid process and escalated throughout the project-management phase, and was obvious by the increasingly arbitrary ways in which regulations and statutes were applied and enforced.

That’s what is painful to Davis, who cheers government-controlled universal health care as the appetizer to his advice to Pelosi. Davis says it could have been accomplished through distributed authority in the private sector, but that’s never been the point of Democratic health-care policy. It’s always been about control and power, and dictating outcomes to insurers, providers, and consumers. We tried it, and now we see why the public sector should be limited to appropriate regulatory functions and law enforcement, and private economies left to voluntary association and the private sector.