Chronicles of Obamacare at a Voice of the Crust
6th October 2013
(You’ll have to hack your way through the spin.)
Confusion persisted Wednesday around the long-awaited opportunity for Americans to sign up for coverage through new health-insurance marketplaces, with the federal Web site for more than half the states remaining balky and health plans uncertain whether they had any new customers.
Welcome to dealing with the government. This ought not to have come as a surprise to anybody. Nobody ever puts ‘efficiency’ or ‘effectiveness’ or ‘user-friendly’ and government in the same sentence except as a contrast.
The federal site, Healthcare.gov, was sluggish and flashed error messages much of the day. The Obama administration said the delays were simply the result of an initial rush of people flocking to the site — 4.7 million unique visitors in the first 24 hours — while some in the health-care industry suggested that the problem was more serious.
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
Officials at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that some people were able to get far enough into the site to peruse their insurance options, find out whether they qualify for financial help and ultimately enroll in a health plan. But administration officials, for a second day, declined to disclose how many people actually had enrolled and where in the country they live.
Or how old they are. Remember that much of the purported benefit of Obamacare is predicated on spreading the cost of insurance coverage for old people over the premiums paid by young people who are less likely to submit claims, and critics have said from the start that young people are stupid but not that stupid; they may not be able to read but they can count.
“Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official, who like many in the industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for possibly offending the Obama administration. “We are talking single digits.”
Emphasis added to highlight the fact that insurance officials aren’t stupid either; they know that the tiger is going to be eating people, and they want to be near the end of the list rather than at the start.
A spokesman for one major Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in a southern state said that, as of Wednesday afternoon, it had not received word from federal health officials of any customers who had completed enrollment in the plan — even though a local news outlet had reported about a man who thought he had signed up. So, plan officials didn’t know whether the man’s enrollment was incomplete or whether the federal reporting of enrollment was running behind.
One guy. Wow. There’s a market worth pursuing.
“It’s a little confusing,” said Beigel, who earns $8,000 a year running a small cleaning service and likely will qualify for free care under expanded Medicaid. “It’s not so great.”
Yeah, there’s the bottom line. People won’t take a bad product even if it’s free.