So you decide it's time to get health insurance from that ObamaCare. You go on HealthCare.gov, create an account, enter your information, pick out a plan, calculate your subsidy if applicable . . . hey, it's government health care at its finest! You log off and post on Facebook that ObamaCare worked great for you, and three cheers, you're now covered!
But then . . .
Well, it's only happening to one in three users, but the system may have forgotten to tell the insurer about you. Or it may have logged duplicate records of your enrollment. Or it may have gotten information about your family members wrong. ("I don't have a daugther named Bruce! You do now!")
The Washington Post informs us that there is no end to the ways the Obama White House has found to screw up health care in America:
The mistakes include failure to notify insurers about new customers, duplicate enrollments or cancellation notices for the same person, incorrect information about family members, and mistakes involving federal subsidies. The errors have been accumulating since HealthCare.gov opened two months ago, even as the Obama administration has been working to make it easier for consumers to sign up for coverage, the government and industry officials said.
Figuring out how to clean up the backlog of errors and prevent similar ones in the future is emerging as the new imperative if the federal insurance exchange is to work as intended. The problems were the subject of a meeting Monday between administration officials and a new “Payer Exchange Performance Team” made up of insurance industry leaders.
The idea that one-third of the enrollment records are flawed “doesn’t accurately reflect the picture of what’s happening right now,” White House senior communications adviser Tara McGuinness said.
“We’ve got a team of experts already working closely with issuers to make sure that every past and future 834 is accurate. We’re confident they’ll succeed,” McGuinness said. The 834s are nightly enrollment forms sent to insurers to tell them who their new customers are.
The White House is subtlely trying to blame the users for some of the errors, saying they're clicking SUBMIT more than once or going back and forth on the site when they shouldn't. You've had that happen, right? You're trying to buy a book or a CD online, and you use the BACK button when you shouldn't have, and the next thing you know you've inadvertently put the item in your shopping cart twice?
But . . . sites that are designed well for online purchases anticipate that sort of thing, and build in safeguards against them. For one thing, they have the server capacity to keep the site from slowing down such that people wonder if their order actually took. Or they disable the possibility of your putting in the same order twice. This is not even mildly difficult for your average e-commerce site designer, but it apparently is a bit much for the people who got more than $600 million from the Obama Administration to spend three years building a site that still doesn't work properly.
Well, the good news is that eventually, one way or the other, HealthCare.gov will probably be made to work correctly. The bad news is that the product it seeks to sell you will never work correctly, because it is a flawed concept that fails when it functions as designed.
The only way to fix that glitch is to repeal ObamaCare.
