The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has come out in favor of delaying the individual mandate of the PPACA:
The Obama administration is claiming that Healthcare.gov is now working well for consumers about 90% of the time, a far better track record than at launch. Jeffrey D. Zients, who was picked by President Barack Obama to lead the repair team, said 50,000 people could use the website at the same time now and that the error rate is less than 1%. Zients and the Department of Health and Human Services haven’t said how many people have actually enrolled in a health plan through the federal website, which manages plans for 36 states including Wisconsin.
And it appears that a huge chunk of the insurance marketplace is still being built. Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the federal website, estimated that 30% to 40% of the site still isn’t done. He told Congress last month that “the back-office systems, the accounting systems, the payment systems” weren’t ready.
Zients claims the the latest software repairs should improve the “the back end of the system” as well as the consumer experience.
But insurers are right to be concerned. They need to be paid or else claims won’t be settled. Yes, Healthcare.gov’s problems may be forgotten if people who need affordable and reliable insurance coverage begin to get it. And we still believe that Obamacare can work and ought to be effective at reducing the number of uninsured in the United States.
But the system needs to work seamlessly, and it still seems to be a long way from seamless. The administration should acknowledge this reality and push back the start of the individual mandate.
I expect a lot more of these, both from supporters of the PPACA and its opponents, over the next couple of weeks.
However, the title of this conveys my opinion: I don’t think it’s going to happen. Consider: delaying the individual mandate would do nothing to restore the millions of individual and small group policies that have been cancelled already as a consequence of the PPACA. Forward!
One thing that has become completely clear is that most of the people and organizations insisting that the PPACA was good and had to be passed had no fucking clue about what it was going to do, or how it was going to do it.
I’m also curious as to how the website can work 90% of the time if 30-40% of it hasn’t been built yet, and if the whole thing has been built with no thought or work done on the security side. As I read it, if they mean the stuff that is built is working 90% of the time, the website can only be working at 54-63% of effectiveness, and that’s ignoring the error rate and the security issues. But then I’m just another wrecker….
That’s a problem I’ve pointed out before: the unit of measure is important. 90% of what? Sessions? Page loads? Keystrokes? It matters. 90% working can mean 100% non-functional depending on the unit of measure.
Yeah. What if it works 90% of the time for each user, but fails for everyone the other 10% of the time? For example at the point in time when people actually purchase insurance by making a payment?
All of a sudden I’m thinking, what if airlines were 90% successful: everything goes well until the landing!
@Icepick
The people who wrote it intended to entrench the system and insure that they profited. The barriers to a regulated free market have been put in place to keep the winners winning.
The Commerce Clause has been used for everything including growing wheat in one’s backyard, but somehow insurance regulation is a States Rights issue. State Regulation is a major barrier to a free market, but the writers missed this.
If all these people had to compete, prices would drop dramatically. The generic antibiotics work, but doctors still prescribe the strongest. The strongest antibiotics are substantially more expensive than the generic, but nobody gets taken to the golf course for prescribing generics.
And, lets not forget the rich white liberals lowering their premiums. They have shifted their cost to the less well off, but they care. “Sharing is caring.” When candidate Obama talked about spreading around the wealth, he meant spreading the wealth of the less well off to the more well off.