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.
HHS didn’t want users to see Obamacare’s true costs
“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.” (Emphasis added.)
As you know if you’ve been following this space, Obamacare’s bevy of
mandates, regulations, taxes, and fees drives up the cost of the
insurance plans that are offered under the law’s public exchanges. A Manhattan Institute analysis
I helped conduct found that, on average, the cheapest plan offered in a
given state, under Obamacare, will be 99 percent more expensive for
men, and 62 percent more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan
offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for
healthy people.
That raises an obvious question. If 50 million people are uninsured
today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to
make coverage even costlier?
Political objectives trumped operational objectives
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.
(Click link below to read more)
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About Me

- Judy Chaffee
- This site is the inspiration of a former reporter/photographer for one of New England's largest daily newspapers and for various magazines. The intent is to direct readers to interesting political articles, and we urge you to visit the source sites. Any comments may be noted on site or directed to KarisChaf at gmail.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
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