"Obamacare" Exchanges Start Up As Gov't Shuts Down

My Way ^ | October 1, 2013 | Josh Lederman

[Biggirl]

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama's long-anticipated launch Tuesday of new insurance exchanges to provide health care to millions of uninsured Americans is coming under the cloud of a government shutdown that began the same day.

[skeeter]

Received notice yesterday that my current plan is not compliant with Obamacare.

Open enrollment for a compliant plan starts today, so today I find out how badly the Purple Lipped Prince and his court clowns Pelosi and Reid nicked me.

[KeyLargo]

The Obama Media Group is making sure that the sheeple understand that because the Obamacare implementation website is not working that it is all the Republicans fault.

ObamaCare’s Technology Mess
At least a half dozen state exchanges won’t offer full online enrollment thanks to unresolved software problems.

By
SCOTT GOTTLIEB
AND MICHAEL ASTRUE

President Obama is bracing Americans for inevitable problems as the Affordable Care Act rolls out this week, but what he calls “glitches” are hardly routine. Information technology is ObamaCare’s Achilles’ heel. The faulty IT will expose Americans to lost data, attempts to enroll online that fail and the risk of fraud.

There are two key technological flaws in ObamaCare. First is the “hub”—the software to link servers at the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security and state agencies to verify the income and health-insurance status of enrollees and ensure that they are eligible for subsidies. The other flaw is the “portal”—the federally run IT platform that is supposed to let consumers compare health plans and select one that best suits their needs.

In planning ObamaCare’s IT infrastructure, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) dawdled for more than a year under Administrator Donald Berwick until Marilyn Tavenner took over in December 2011. Even then the agency was slow to outsource key contracts and turned to what insiders say were not top-quality programmers. CMS did not sign a contract for a backstop system to process paper verifications and do paper verifications of online applications until July.

The Health and Human Services Department did not begin testing the chief pieces of this IT system until August. The testing found that states couldn’t consistently link to the federal portal (a problem that persists in some states), and that the hub couldn’t reliably verify if a person is eligible for a subsidy, or accurately calculate how much the applicant is eligible to receive. HHS prevented independent watchdogs, including its own inspector general, from examining the systems before they go live on Oct. 1. The result is a host of troublesome gaps and dangers...

Read:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303918804579105092032930278.html

[Grampa Dave]