Sunday night, many of the cheery headlines boasted, “The government says more than 50,000 people can log on to the website and more than 800,000 people will be able to shop for insurance coverage each day.”
And now, the fine print: “Government officials, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss ongoing operations, cautioned last week that they will not know if they’ve actually expanded the site’s carrying capacity to 50,000 users at once until they have that many users online in the coming days.”
Basically, they’re bragging that they think they have the site significantly improved.
The whole paying-for-the-subsidies part? Not finished yet.
Parts of the Obamacare enrollment system
used to pay insurers are being pushed back from January in the latest
technology delay for the president’s U.S. health care overhaul.
The administration is setting up a
temporary process to send companies the federal subsidies used to help
millions of Americans buy coverage because the online system won’t be
ready as planned, said Aaron Albright, a spokesman for the Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services. Insurers will estimate what they are
owed rather than have the government calculate the bill.
When I say “we get,” I mean, “the administration will release” new numbers in two weeks. They have these numbers, and can release them at any time. They just choose not to, out of embarrassment.
But sometimes people leak:
About 100,000 people signed up for health
insurance through the online federal exchange last month, a roughly
four-fold increase from October even as a team of U.S. government and
contractor programmers was fixing the troubled Affordable Care Act
website, said a person familiar with program’s progress.
Christian Schneider: “HHS’ new tactic: comparing the new Healthcare.gov to how terrible it used to be. So, basically the same ad campaign as Domino’s.”
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