It’s possible that with another six months of work, Healthcare.gov might get into the kind of shape it should have been in when it was launched. We’re not there yet, as a new ObamaCare horror story in the Washington Post makes clear:
Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors.
Roughly 22,000 Americans have filed appeals with the government to try to get mistakes corrected, according to internal government data obtained by The Washington Post. They contend that the computer system for the new federal online marketplace charged them too much for health insurance, steered them into the wrong insurance program or denied them coverage entirely.
“According to internal government data obtained by the Washington Post?” Not “according to an official release from the Administration?” The people behind this train wreck still aren’t being forthcoming about its problems, even when tens of thousands of Americans are affected? Color me shocked.
Well, at least Obama’s crack team of commissars – the people better qualified to manage health insurance than any private company in America – are all over this, right?
For now, the appeals are sitting, untouched, inside a government computer. And an unknown number of consumers who are trying to get help through less formal means — by calling the health-care marketplace directly — are told that HealthCare.gov’s computer system is not yet allowing federal workers to go into enrollment records and change them, according to individuals inside and outside the government who are familiar with the situation.
Later we learn there’s no timetable whatsoever for fixing this problem, which is not even listed as a priority compared to the other vital components still missing from Healthcare.gov, including “an electronic payment system for insurers, the computerized exchange of enrollment information with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust people’s coverage to accommodate new babies and other major changes in life circumstance.”
The commissars are telling those unfortunate comrades who had such dismaying problems with the People’s Glorious Health Care Leap Forward to start the entire application process over again… a “solution” that people with knowledge of the problem say is not usually effective. There’s actually a nickname among HHS employees for people stuck between Healthcare.gov’s insistence that they qualify for Medicaid, and the Medicaid system’s equally adamant insistence they don’t: “loopers.” The lack of value Obama and his minions place on the time and trouble of ordinary American citizens is stunning. Remember that the next time he tells you how much he understands your life and cares about you.
“It is definitely frustrating and not fair,” said Addie Wilson, 27, who lives in Fairmont, W.Va., and earns $22,000 a year working with at-risk families. She said that she is paying $100 a month more than she should for her insurance and that her deductible is $4,000 too high.
When Wilson logged on to HealthCare.gov in late December, she needed coverage right away. Her old insurance was ending, and she was to have gallbladder surgery in January. But the Web site would not calculate the federal subsidy to which she knew she was entitled. Terrified to go without coverage, Wilson phoned a federal call center and took the advice she was given: Pay the full price now and appeal later.
Now she is stuck.
“I hope,” she said, “they really work on getting this fixed.”
I’m sorry, Ms. Wilson, but according to Barack Obama and his Party, you don’t exist. It may therefore take a while to exhume your information from the $600 million data tomb build by the President. Meanwhile, the Democrats ask you to do your patriotic duty and stop talking to the media, Ms. Anecdote.
Incidentally, the Post makes clear that the “start over” advice dispensed to other victims would not help Wilson, who actually made a payment on her junk ObamaCare policy, as is mandated by law for her insurance to be considered valid. Something like 25 to 30 percent of the ObamaCare “enrollments” claimed by Administration propagandists are about to vanish because those payments weren’t made.
I used to work in the computer industry. The idea of creating a database in which not even those with special administrative access can fix the data is… odd. How does anyone with a shred of professional integrity green-light the launch of a system like that?
