Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Might matter a little

It's not particularly astonishing that Obamacare is a train wreck, but this revelation is really a jaw dropper:
A crucial system for making payments to insurers from people who enroll in that federal Obamacare marketplace has yet to be built, a senior government IT official admitted Tuesday.

The official, Henry Chao, visibly stunned Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) when he said under questioning before a House subcommittee that a significant fraction of HealthCare.gov—30 to 40 percent of it—has yet to be constructed.

"We still need to build the payments system to make the payments [to insurance companies] in January," testified Chao, deputy chief information officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that operates HealthCare.gov.

That so-called financial management tool was originally supposed to be part of HealthCare.gov when it launched Oct. 1, but officials later suspended its launch as part of their effort to get the consumer interface part of the site ready. The tool will, when it works, transmit the subsidies that the government is kicking in for many enrollees to offset the costs of their monthly premiums.
"When it works," eh? Are you sure about that "when" part there, Ollie?

1 comment:

jerrye92002 said...

I'm still waiting for somebody to tip to the fact that, according to the law (not that /that/ means anything to King Barack), the 35 or so states without their own exchanges DO NOT GET federal subsidies! So, how affordable is care going to be for those without the subsidies, when they're already proving too expensive WITH the subsidies, if you can get the policy at all?