President Obama said Monday that the website Americans are supposed to use to sign up for health insurance “hasn’t worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work.”
That’s like saying New Coke just got off to a rough start.
Even Ezra Klein, the liberal columnist for the Washington Post and ardent supporter of the Affordable Care Act, says the launch has been a disaster.
“One of the Obama administration’s jobs, separate from all of the political stuff we talk about here (on MSNBC) is to simply run things like this well, to run their signature legislative initiative well,” Klein said on Morning Joe. “On that, so far, this has been a big failure.”
The President tried to get ahead of the controversy during Monday’s media event in the Rose Garden, but some of the words rang hollow.
Obama said nobody is madder than he is at the technical problems with the site. I doubt that. He likely has not been around anyone who has been promised that signing up would be as easy as buying an airline ticket online, only to try unsuccessfully 20 or 30 times to maneuver the system.
Consumer Reports says, “Of the 9.47 million people who tried to register in the first week, only 271,000 were able to create an account, according to one analysis. That’s about 1 in 35. Many people couldn’t even create user names and passwords.”
A number of independent IT analysts theorize that the requirement that users have to create an account before shopping in the marketplace creates a bottleneck that bogs down the entire system.
But that may be the easiest problem to solve.
The New York Times reports, “One specialist said as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the website runs properly. ‘The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later,’ said one person involved in the repair.”
We don’t know how the sign up is going in West Virginia. The only insurance company in the marketplace, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, refers those questions to the federal Department of Health and Human Resources. And that agency, remarkably, won’t say how many people have successfully filled out the online forms.
“We’re well into the tech surge to fix the problem,” the President added. However the Administration provided no information on who is doing what. Polls show Americans don’t think the government’s working well right now—the government shutdown was the latest example—and now the introduction to the new health care law is a flawed website.
Frankly, the website failures may be more of a disappointment than Congress; we expect Congress to be inept, but we have become accustomed to easily navigating the Internet.
The President is correct when he says the website is not the law, but the failed rollout is, in medical terms, a warning sign. It does not bode well for the government remake of the country’s health care delivery system.