By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--November 5, 2013
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A series of internal Obama administration memos obtained exclusively by ABC News reveal for the first time how dysfunction with Healthcare.gov has upended the entire Affordable Care Act enrollment process, including applications by paper and phone that officials have been pushing as more reliable alternatives. While President Obama and other top aides have publicly reassured frustrated customers that they can bypass the troubled website and apply by phone in as little as 25 minutes, those working most closely with the rollout acknowledged privately that even the non-electronic avenues would be no more efficient or guaranteed, the documents show. “The same portal is used to determine eligibility no matter how the application is submitted (paper, online),” reads a Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight memo from Oct. 11. “The paper applications allow people to feel like they are moving forward in the process and provides another option,” it says. “At the end of the day, we are all stuck in the same queue.”The problem, of course, is that whether you go by phone or snail mail, the person on the other end of that correspondence is still being forced to go through the same, non-functional, signup process. So not only did the President lie when he said Obamacare would make things cheaper, he lied when he said the website would be ready, he lied when he said you'd be able to keep your insurance, he lied when he said you could keep your doctor, and we now know he even lied in his 1-800 number response to the ACA's train wreck launch. The White House is parsing this by claiming that applications and enrollment are two different things, despite the fact that - when they need to to inflate their numbers - they use the terms interchangeably. Apparently, this is all part of being the most transparent administration in history.
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