Obamacare still not working. Avik Roy writes in Forbes:
A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.Ouch.
“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.” Why was it delayed? “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.” .....
The answer is that Obamacare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions.
But the laws’ supporters and enforcers don’t want you to know that, because it would violate the President’s incessantly repeated promise that nothing would change for the people that Obamacare doesn’t directly help. If you shop for Obamacare-based coverage without knowing if you qualify for subsidies, you might be discouraged by the law’s steep costs.
So, by analyzing your income first, if you qualify for heavy subsidies, the website can advertise those subsidies to you instead of just hitting you with Obamacare’s steep premiums. For example, the site could advertise plans that cost “$0″ or “$30″ instead of explaining that the plan really costs $200, and that you’re getting a subsidy of $200 or $170. But you’ll have to be at or near the poverty line to gain subsidies of that size; most people will either not qualify for a subsidy, or qualify for a small one that, net-net, doesn’t make up for the law’s cost hikes.
This political objective—masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans—far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly. Think about it the other way around. If the “Affordable Care Act” truly did make health insurance more affordable, there would be no need to hide these prices from the public.
Comparable private-sector e-commerce sites, like eHealthInsurance.com, allow you to shop for plans and compare prices simply by entering your age and your ZIP code. After you’ve selected a plan you like, you fill out an on-line application. That substantially winnows down the number of people who rely on the site for network-intensive tasks.
The federal government’s decision to force people to apply before shopping, Weaver and Radnofsky write, “proved crucial because, before users can begin shopping for coverage, they must cross a busy digital junction in which data are swapped among separate computer systems built or run by contractors including CGI Group Inc., the healthcare.gov developer, Quality Software Services Inc., a UnitedHealth Group Inc. unit; and credit-checker Experian PLC. If any part of the web of systems fails to work properly, it could lead to a traffic jam blocking most users from the marketplace.”
Jay Angoff, a former federal official at the agency that oversees the exchange, told the Journal that he was surprised by the decision. “People should be able to get quotes” without entering all of that information upfront.
Weaver and Radnofsky say that the core problem stems from “the slate of registration systems [that] intersect with Oracle Identity Manager, a software component embedded in a government identity-checking system.” The main Healthcare.gov web page collects information using the CGI Group technology. Then that data is transferred to a system built by Quailty Software Services. QSS then sends data to Experian, the credit-history firm. But the key “identity management system” employed by QSS was designed by Oracle, and according to the Journal’s sources, the Oracle software isn’t playing nicely with the other information systems........ Rest of article
15 comments:
That has been updated as of yesterday, the prices are available before registration. I haven't checked it this morning and I plan never to return, anyway.
Of course, for people 20-49, the price for a healthy man age 27 are shown and for people 50 and above, the price for a healthy man age 50 are shown.
Transparency!!!
For those of you that did not see this boondoggle coming, please do us normal people a favor and never vote again. You are just too stupid to be trusted.
I finally got a quote. For a family of three, male 51, female 57 and female 18 all non smokers: premium was $943 a month with a $12600 deductible. Now, 400% poverty is $78,200. How is a family of three supposed to pay the premiums and deductible if they have average expenses (housing, transportation food, and other life expenses)? I do not see how his could be considered affordable and would love to see any ACA defender tell us how it would work for this family.
I challenge any proponent of the system to go on exchange for Mississippi and find out what doctors and what hospitals are taking the insured from either the Magnolia or the Humana Plans.
[crickets chirping @ JFP]
I'm self-employed and have a traditional 80/20 policy with Blue Cross that costs me about $200 a month, and I get free wellness physicals (including lab work) each year. $15 copay on presciptions. Just for kicks, I went to healthcare.gov and got an estimated quote. The only provider listed for Mississippi was Humana and the cheapest plan for me (54, male, non-smoker) was $345 and the most expensive was $599. Seems there's nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act.
With so many people shooting at it, crashing and burning could be very likely. Instead of pulling together to make it work, the energy is in politics pulling it apart. Dewey Philip Bryant is playing god and not allowing a state exchange, while forcing Blue Cross to do something he doesn't have the power to do. This guy is an absolute failure, but he is a white Christian. Mississippi will love him for that.
When Obamacare crashes it will be the result of self-inflicted wounds.
Of course, it's a mess.
Of course, there's no real competition on the federal government site because all states were supposed to be open to competition and create competition in setting up their sites.
And, most of the work on setting up the system was designed early on with the belief the volume on the federal site would be the smallest volume, not the largest volume.
And, then there was all the tinkering in the first place designed to screw it up.
So now, we have the worst of both worlds...we are stuck with a system that was not completely erased , only sabotaged so as to fail.
So, you have in early days, " we want the states to have authority" and then the states don't take authority and do their due diligence. Worse, tax dollars get wasted when the Insurance Commissioners try and the legislatures nix too late.
Thank you Congress. Thank you legislatures.
Of course, learning how the insurance industry and medical industry operates and then doing the math and thinking through system functions is so much harder than screaming about death panels, socialism, and pitiful dying children and doesn't get you scared voters who open their wallets and go to the polls.
God forbid , instead of complaining how thick the ACA was, anyone should have READ it and asked questions based on FACTS!
October 26, 2013 at 11:06 AM = broken record
Let's blame it on Bush, D-bags. That's all your party and your incompetent President know how to do.
Wonder what Fat Bobby (D-Annandale) and Egomaniac Cecil Brown (D-Outer Space) have to say about this budget busting development.
CBS News: Barry's Debacle Looks to be FIASCO
11:31 am debate the points made
This whole fiasco is an example of " cutting off one's nose to spite one's face".
Whoopee, the right fighters get to say " See? We told you it wouldn't work" after making sure it wouldn't.
Those for it, arrogantly underestimated the right wingnuts.
The sane end up holding the extremists' and dumbskulls' on both sides bag of doodoo.
I know you'd rather be right ( as in I told you so) than have our Nation prosper, but FU and your dysfunctional ego!
I dont' care how psychologically damaged you are, you are taking this country down with you and I'm going to call BS on you and your kind!
Admit that you haven't read the damn bill or followed the poltical games being played in detail. And, since you haven't, shut the hell up!
11:38, have YOU read the LAW? It is doubtful that anyone has read the thing except for a few Supreme Court clerks.
I do know that government running anything is going to end poorly because we have many, many years of proof of that with ZERO successes.
Furthermore, there is utterly no chance of any successes by the Obama Administration unless it is simply by accident, they have proven themselves to be completely incompetent with everything they have touched.
The fun part of this whole ordeal is that those people that currently work for private insurers are certainly going to count toward the unemployment tally in very short order. That is somewhere in the neighborhood of three million. Of course, normal people knew that years ago when this idiocy was proposed.
By the way, the political aspects of the passing and implementation of the law are unimportant to me, the financial and philosophical aspects are the ones that worry me to death.
I dont' care how psychologically damaged you are, you are taking this country down with you and I'm going to call BS on you and your kind!
Oh Shit! Anonymous is calling people out. Oh No! What will we do now?
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