Former Obama Administration healthcare advisor Ezekiel Emanuel says the administration should be giving detailed daily briefings on the status of the Healthcare.gov web site:
Former White House health care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel said Monday that administration should be giving “wonky†daily briefings on what is wrong with the health care exchange website — and how they’re going to fix it.
“I think they need to have daily briefings and they need to give us milestones over the next four weeks as to what we should look for for improvement. Reassurance verbally is not worth much at this point,†Emanuel said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.â€
He wants to know what the problems are, what’s being done about them, and when they’re resolved. I think that this illustrates why we should be cautious about physicians becoming involved in politics.
Who would give such a briefing? To whom? 99% of the people, including Dr. Emanuel, wouldn’t understand a detailed technical briefing. Additionally, he’s assuming that such a briefing would build confidence rather than tear it down, something of which I’m unconvinced.
On a peripherally related subject, I have a hypothesis on the 476,000 healthcare insurance exchange enrollments we’ve been hearing about. I wonder if the number hasn’t been reverse engineered. Perhaps they did the same calculation I did. 7 million enrollments needed divided by 200 days (until March 31, 2014) is 35,000 per day. Multiply that by 18 (the number of days elapsed) is 630,000. Back that off by a third to compensate it for the well-publicized problems and, voila!, 476,000. A number that’s not so high as to be incredible and not so low as to induce panic.
I agree, but I think its the insurance company partners are the ones freaking out the most at this point, perhaps a morning telephone update to them might be in order.
The POTUS briefing today sounded defensive and contained some claims that I think are likely to be disputed or subject to walk back. I don’t think the Administration can wear the two hats of promoting young adults to sign-up while being transparent about the problems.