ObamaCare's Black Box: Why the exchanges are worse than even the critics imagined

The Wall Street Journal ^ | October 16, 2013 | Staff

[2ndDivisionVet]

The White House set low expectations for the Affordable Care Act's October 1 debut, so anything remotely competent should have seemed like a success. But three weeks on, the catastrophe that is Healthcare.gov and the 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government is an insult to the "glitches" President Obama said were inevitable.

This isn't some coding error, or even the Health and Human Service Department's usual incompetence. The failures that have all but disabled ObamaCare are the result of deliberate political choices, which HHS and the White House are compounding with secrecy and stonewalling.

***

The health industry and low-level Administration officials warned that the exchanges were badly off schedule and not stress-tested despite three years to prepare and more than a half-billion dollars in funding. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her planners swore they'd be ready while impugning critics and even withholding documents from the HHS inspector general for a routine performance audit this summer.

Yet the launch has been worse even than critics predicted. The rare users who weren't locked out experienced crashes, delays and error messages. Mrs. Sebelius initially claimed this was merely servers crashing under unexpectedly high demand. She called it "a great problem to have."(continued)

[2ndDivisionVet]

Wow.

[1035rep]

Pathetic. The most incompetent president ever hiring the most incompetent people to run this country.

[Berlin_Freeper]

Maybe she’s lying to me?

[exnavy]

The norm in Washington city these days.

[Ronin]

If and when they dig into the expenditures on this, you can bet every peso, ruble, dollar, yen, reichmark or wampum you can beg, borrow, steal or counterfeit that a good third of all the dough has vanished down the corruption rathole.

It’s what the Chicago types do.

[Gene Eric]

I’m a critic. Doubtful it’s worse than I imagined. Actually, I hope it’s not as bad.

[Gene Eric]

BTW, we’re still waiting for the paperwork describing the changes to take effect Jan 1. It’s still a mystery!!!

ObamaCare on ObamaWare. What could go wrong?

[Secret Agent Man]

i hope it’s far worse than you imagined. if so it will wind up tanking itself. if not enough people sign up the first year it can’t sustain itself and it’ll implode on its own.

[CommieCutter]

[Oldeconomybuyer]

It’s the law of the land. Eat your peas. We’re moving on to Amnesty. Forward!!

[sodpoodle]

The rampant fraud in Medicare programs (Wheeler Dealer) and corrupt physicians filing for non-existent services is outrageous.

Insurance companies have lasted for decades - because they know how to manage risk, understand actuarial tables, collect adequate premiums and protect their stockholders.

The Federal Government answers to no-one - not a surprise - these bureaucrats don’t protect consumers (tax payers).

http://www.fbi.gov/losangeles/press-releases/2013/san-fernando-valley-doctor-pleads-guilty-in-multi-million-dollar-medicare-fraud-case-involving-treatments-never-performed

[Excellence]

Wow for later.

[HotHunt]

[IMR 4350]

Personally I believe this orchestrated screw up can be answered with a simple “What If” question.

What if Mitt Romney had won the election.

How would the news media be spinning this crap and who would benefit from the spin?

[goldi]

Last night, Ted Cruz said that the government won’t stop Obamacare. He said it is up to the American people to stop it.

[safetysign]

What difference does it make?

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

The failures that have all but disabled ObamaCare are the result of deliberate political choices, which HHS and the White House are compounding with secrecy and stonewalling.

This is inevitable. It's in their nature. They are liars to the core.

So they are in a vicious circle, from which their is no escape. This monstrosity will NEVER improve.

What we need now is for the Collaborators to step aside, and let the Tea Partiers tell this story to America.

[HotHunt]

?

[Maurice Tift]

  ... the 834s so far are often corrupted or in the wrong syntax, and therefore unusable unless processed by hand. In other cases the exchanges spit out multiple 834s enrolling and unenrolling the same user and don't come with time stamps that would allow the insurer to identify the most recent version.

   The upshot is that the exchanges, the insurers and the consumers will often have different records on file. These mismatches are an architectural flaw that could persist for years. The administrative-bureaucratic tangle will only become more complex as more people enroll, providers start billing insurers, patients show up in doctors offices thinking they have coverage they don't, and the IRS starts fining Americans for not having insurance.


  The things we know about this are already horrific but with so many pages of badly written law and additional regulations piled on top of the already bad law, it's going to be much worse. The fact that everything goes through Homeland Security, the IRS and Social Security will lead to all sorts of problems. The Affordable Care Office of the IRS is run by the former commissioner of the office in the IRS that targeted tea party groups. The IRS once assigned two employer id numbers to me, and then wanted two payments for everything. Mail from Social Security regarding business from 3 years prior indicates to me that they may have a huge backlog of business to process. I just see an enormous disaster and it's all very serious because it's going to kill a lot of people just trying to work themselves through the maze of incompetence on their way to visit a doctor who may no longer be practicing.