My wife has begged me not to go public ... we are private people and we know we will be hounded by the administration if I am identified publicly.
It seems that a lot of the info is coming out. When I left SSA the goal was to have 1 year of testing. I had left the agency, of course, a year before implementation. But it seems , because the rates were so high, a last minute decision was made to screen for subsidy for all applicants, due to the high prices of the plans.
Making the subsidy decision was always the achilles heel of this system. In order to make that decision the system must request income data from IRS, identity verification and SSA payment data from SSA, benefit data from the states (welfare, unemployment, etc), and, I believe, benefit data from the Veterans administration. In an online system, making all these data requests is very time consuming. The decision was made that all state data would be obtained by going through a single state hub for each state. A failure of any of these links causes the subsidy decision to fail.
The irony is that the general contractor, CGI, was overseeing QSSI, who actually designed and built the software. Now, they have put the people who screwed up the software design, QSSI, in charged of fixing it, and supervising themselves!
To be fair to the developers, the legislation was so poorly written that it was a huge challenge. Generally, with legislation of this sort, there is a back and forth between the agencies and congressional staffs so the legislation can be tweeked in order to make implementation practial. Since Obamacare was passed in secret, that process didn’t happen (to the best of my knowledge) and CMS had no idea how to implement some of it - there was a Federal Register publication by CMS asking if anyone had any ideas how certain aspects could be implemented! In the Medicare program, for Part B coverage, CMS long ago figured out that if people have the opportunity, they won’t enroll until they are sick; so there is a premium penalty of 10% for every year people delay enrolling. But with Obamacare, people can just pay the penalty (much cheaper than buying insurance) and enroll once they get a diagnosis of an expensive-to-treat condition. And they must be accepted. So insurane companies have to raise rates to have reserves to cover these people who will game the system. Dumb policy. But that’s what happens when there is no public debate.