Megan McArdle summarizes the status of Healthcare.gov:
Which sums up all of our information about the site, broadly: We don’t know, because the administration doesn’t really have the information we want or any way to get it. It’s clearly choosing the most optimistic metrics possible while ignoring more obvious ones. But even the more obvious ones wouldn’t tell us what we really want to know, which is: Come Jan. 1, or April 1, how many people in the U.S. will have insurance?
The administration undoubtedly has a good count of how many error messages it has gotten. But how many people broke off their visit to the site because it was frustrating them? How many people didn’t visit, and therefore didn’t buy, because they’d heard the site was buggy and insecure? On the other hand, some other number of people haven’t even touched the site yet but will eventually log on, choose a policy and pay for it. How many of each? There’s no way to tell; we’re in uncharted territory.
As I’ve remarked before, ultimately the metric that matters is how many people sign up (and whether enough of them are young and healthy). The Congressional Budget Office projected that 7 million people would get policies through the exchanges in the first year — 2 million switching over from other policies, and 5 million new purchasers of individual policies. Obviously, 100,000 is not very rapid progress toward that goal. But how close should we expect to be?
Sorry to sound like a broken record, but there’s no way to tell. The law’s supporters have been pointing out that Massachusetts got very few people to sign up in the first few months, but it gave people longer to sign up before the mandate kicked in. And I’d have expected a post-Thanksgiving surge, which is apparently what we saw with Medicare Part D, but that obviously didn’t happen on the federal exchange. I’d guess that a minimum of a couple of million people need to buy insurance by Dec. 23, just to replace the policies that were canceled because of new Obamacare rules. HealthCare.gov can probably handle that load, if it’s evenly distributed. But of course, it may not be evenly distributed, and it may not show up at all.
That sounds about right. It’s pretty hard to tell but it certainly appears as though the administration’s primary objective right now is to keep the site not to mention the program limping along until after the midterm elections. That certainly preserves it as an issue.
Even I’m not cynical enough to suggest that’s been the plan all along—that providing insurance to more people was always a minor objective while the major objectives were keeping health care alive as a campaign issue. It would certainly be a unifying theory on the design, structure, and execution of the program conjoined with the public campaign.
