The Washington Post reports that the ObamaCare site problems are even worse than originally believed. It is not just the buyer-end of the ObamaCare website that is unworkable; so is the back end that is supposed to tell insurance providers who their new customers are. This might also explain why the White House is refusing to release to the media the number of ObamaCare enrollees: they just don’t know.
The problems stem from a feature of the online marketplace’s computer system that is designed to send each insurer a daily report listing people who have just enrolled. According to several insurance industry officials, the reports are sometimes confusing and duplicative. In some cases, they show — correctly or not — that the same person enrolled and canceled several times on a single day.
The ability of consumers to sign up for a health plan, and the ability of the insurers to know who they are covering, is key to the success of the federal law that will for the first time require most Americans to have health insurance starting Jan. 1.
The only possible silver lining in this for the administration might be that the sporadic reports of the shockingly low number of enrollees are incorrect. More people might be signing up than what those reports suggest. Unfortunately for them, their insurance providers just don’t know it.
What is especially unjust about all of this is that every American now lives under a government mandate to purchase health insurance or pay a hefty fine. The sign-up window to avoid the fine lasts only six months and already two weeks have been burnt up by a site that doesn’t work (and reportedly cost $634 million). Still, the president is refusing to give the American people the same one-year delay he gave big business.
In the early days of the ObamaCare launch debacle, the Administration did its best to spin America by explaining that the sites were crashing due to the “luxury problem” of demand. Millions were hungering for ObamaCare and the sites couldn’t handle the traffic! Now that nearly two weeks have passed and the problems persist, not even a sympathetic media is buying it.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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