www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/14/obamacares-website-is-crashing-because-it-doesnt-want-you-to-know-health-plans-true-costs -> www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/14/obamacares-website-is-crashing-because-it-doesnt-want-you-to-know-health-plans-true-costs/
gov website requires that individuals looking for coverage enter personal information before comparing plans. IT experts believe that this requirement is causing the website to crash. 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. 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.
report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. "But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said." "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."
Manhattan Institute analysis I helped conduct found that, on average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, under Obamacare, will be 99 percent more expensive for men, and 62 percent more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for healthy people. If 50 million people are uninsured today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier? Political objectives trumped operational objectives The answer is that Obamacare wasn't designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions.
com/embed/p3iP3kDojgg But the laws' supporters and enforcers don't want you to know that, because it would violate the President's incessantly repeated promise that nothing would change for the people that Obamacare doesn't directly help. If you shop for Obamacare-based coverage without knowing if you qualify for subsidies, you might be discouraged by the law's steep costs. So, by analyzing your income first, if you qualify for heavy subsidies, the website can advertise those subsidies to you instead of just hitting you with Obamacare's steep premiums. For example, the site could advertise plans that cost "$0'' or "$30'' instead of explaining that the plan really costs $200, and that you're getting a subsidy of $200 or $170. But you'll have to be at or near the poverty line to gain subsidies of that size; most people will either not qualify for a subsidy, or qualify for a small one that, net-net, doesn't make up for the law's cost hikes. This political objective--masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare's insurance plans--far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly. If the "Affordable Care Act" truly did make health insurance more affordable, there would be no need to hide these prices from the public.
com, allow you to shop for plans and compare prices simply by entering your age and your ZIP code. After you've selected a plan you like, you fill out an on-line application. That substantially winnows down the number of people who rely on the site for network-intensive tasks. If any part of the web of systems fails to work properly, it could lead to a traffic jam blocking most users from the marketplace." Jay Angoff, a former federal official at the agency that oversees the exchange, told the Journal that he was surprised by the decision. "People should be able to get quotes" without entering all of that information upfront.
intersect with Oracle Identity Manager, a software component embedded in a government identity-checking system." gov web page collects information using the CGI Group technology. Then that data is transferred to a system built by Quailty Software Services. QSS then sends data to Experian, the credit-history firm. But the key "identity management system" employed by QSS was designed by Oracle, and according to the Journal's sources, the Oracle software isn't playing nicely with the other information systems. our software is running properly," said an Oracle spokeswoman in a statement.
we already knew: that the Obama administration refused to delay the implementation of the exchanges, despite the well-known problems, because they were afraid of the political blowback. "Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law."
documented last week, 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 level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are." Richard Foster, the former chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said last week that "so much testing of the new system was so far behind schedule, I was not confident it would work well."
com/embed/2Qtx_ZcHOjw White House knowingly chose to court disaster Think about it. It's quite possible that much of this disaster could have been avoided if the Obama administration had been willing to be open with the public about the degree to which Obamacare escalates the cost of health insurance. If they had, then a number of the problems with the exchange's software architecture would never have arisen. But that would require admitting that the "Affordable Care Act" was not accurately named. The White House knew that its people on the front lines, people like Henry Chao, were worried that the exchanges would get botched.
missed half of the statutory deadlines assigned by the law. But they were more afraid of the PR disaster of disclosing Obamacare's high premiums than they were of the PR disaster of crashing websites.
interviews Bob Laszewski, a consultant to the insurance industry. rate shock," and that the problems could take "three or four or five months" to fix: They were paranoid because Obamacare was under siege. If they were open with their partners there would've been criticism, but it would've been constructive criticism. None of us had any idea that the government Web site would require security sign-ins before browsing. If it had been transparent I think most of this would've been caught upfront. One thing the Obama administration has been really paranoid about is rate shock. When someone like me says there'll be rate shock they say you have to net out the subsidies. But I think what happened was when they designed their system they were so paranoid about that that they wanted to make sure people browsing got the lowest price. And my theory is that's why they went to the architecture they did even though the IT systems people wanted to go another way... The problem with the Obama administration keeping this open is its five times harder to fix something like this on the run. If it would've taken a month to fix it during the shutdown, it'll take three or four or five months to fix it while it was running.
interviews several officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and says that "it struck several of the people I spoke with as plausible" that "this decision was made in order to prevent people from seeing premium costs before they could also see any subsidies they might be eligible for, so that the shock of higher prices could be contained and so that simply curious observers and journalists couldn't get a picture of premium costs in the various states."
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