- A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies.
- HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly.
- But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.
- An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.
- A Manhattan Institute analysis found that, on average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, under Obamacare, will be 99% more expensive for men, and 62% more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for healthy people.
- IT and insurance experts have been saying for at least eight months that implementation of the exchanges was going badly, that as early as February officials were warning of a “third world experience.” The Times’ sources are just as blunt.
- “These are not glitches,” said one insurance executive.
- “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous.
- At the end of our [conference calls with the administration], people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’”
- If 50 million people are uninsured today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier?
Full story from Avik Roy at Forbes, Hat Tip to Ryan Kennedy.
