Obamacare a disaster that needs fixing

By Aaron Carroll,

The rollout of the federal Obamacare website has been a disaster, full stop. There can be no excuses, nor will I be making any. It’s been clear for years what needed to be done, and failing was not an option. The exchanges, and the website that allowed access to them, had to work, and they just do not.

I wrote a week or two ago that the initial problems with the HealthCare.gov website appeared to be because of volume issues. That could be spun as either a positive or negative thing. But it now seems that the surge was not the cause of the malfunctions. After the first weekend, when the administration added additional capacity to the servers, the issues didn’t go away.

What are they? I wish I could say for sure. But some good reports have come out that detail just a few of the problems.

The first appears to be that the administration decided that people would need to provide a significant amount of personal detail to look at coverage options.

But that’s just the front end. The back end is also a real problem.

Insurance companies are reporting that the data they are receiving from the HealthCare.gov website is garbled. This means that automatic processing of the insurance plans being ordered is impossible.

The administration is bragging that upwards of half a million applications have started. Shockingly few of them have been completed, though.

There are people who believe that government can never do things as well as the private sector. I’m not one of those people. But in this specific instance, those people have a point.

Evidently, those in charge of the rollout of the exchange website were unprepared. They didn’t have the necessary experience to manage the more than 50 different contractors producing software independently that would eventually need to function together as a whole. This is incredibly technical work, and it’s not clear that government was in a good position to direct things here.

If we were talking about a company having mismanaged things so badly, you could be sure that heads would roll. Many would be fired, and there would be a change in management. But that may not be possible here.

That doesn’t mean Obamacare will fail. It’s still possible that this could all be fixed. It’s also possible that should significant issues continue, timelines might be adjusted to accommodate implementation issues. But these will cause problems political and real in nature.

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