tinyurl.com/k6crazn -> www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/opinion/krugman-california-here-we-come.html&OQ=hpQ26rrefQ3DopinionQ26_rQ3D1Q26&OP=d5055c8cQ2FR0-eRhbeRQ3CQ3CQ3CRzen(RQ5E0NAa00e,R,tQ24Q2BRQ24Q24R,1R0-mhm0hRSaVYnQ3EhDNQ3E(mQ270ahmQ3EDzMaMDQ3CMD
PAUL KRUGMAN Published: November 24, 2013 It goes without saying that the rollout of Obamacare was an epic disaster. Was it a failure of management, messing up the initial implementation of a fundamentally sound policy? Or was it a demonstration that the Affordable Care Act is inherently unworkable?
We know what each side of the partisan divide wants you to believe. The Obama administration is telling the public that everything will eventually be fixed, and urging Congressional Democrats to keep their nerve. Republicans, on the other hand, are declaring the program an irredeemable failure, which must be scrapped and replaced with ... well, they don't really want to replace it with anything. At a time like this, you really want a controlled experiment. What would happen if we unveiled a program that looked like Obamacare, in a place that looked like America, but with competent project management that produced a working website? Now, California isn't the only place where Obamacare is looking pretty good.
New York is doing OK And we shouldn't forget that Massachusetts has had an Obamacare-like program since 2006, put into effect by a guy named Mitt Romney. First of all, it's huge: if a system can work for 38 million people, it can work for America as a whole. Also, it's hard to argue that California has had any special advantages other than that of having a government that actually wants to help the uninsured. When Massachusetts put Romneycare into effect, it already had a relatively low number of uninsured residents.
At this point, more than 10,000 applications are being completed per day, putting the state well on track to meet its overall targets for 2014 coverage. Just imagine, by the way, how different press coverage would be right now if Obama officials had produced a comparable success, and around 100,000 people a day were signing up nationwide. Equally important is the information on who is enrolling. To work as planned, health reform has to produce a balanced risk pool -- that is, it must sign up young, healthy Americans as well as their older, less healthy compatriots. What we have in California, then, is a proof of concept. Yes, Obamacare is workable -- in fact, done right, it works just fine. The bad news, of course, is that most Americans aren't lucky enough to live in states in which Obamacare has, in fact, been done right. gov or with one of the state exchanges, like Oregon's, that have similar or worse problems. Will they ever get to experience successful health reform? There won't be a moment when the clouds suddenly lift, but the exchanges are gradually getting better -- a point inadvertently illustrated a few days ago by John Boehner, the speaker of the House.
tried to sign up on the DC health exchange, then triumphantly posted an entry on his blog declaring that he had been unsuccessful. At the bottom of his post, however, is a postscript admitting that the health exchange had called back "a few hours later," and that he is now enrolled.
on hold for 35 minutes, listening to "lots of patriotic hold music." There will also probably be growing use of workarounds -- for example, encouraging people to go directly to insurers. This will temporarily defeat one of the purposes of the exchanges, which was to make price comparisons easy, but it will be good enough as a short-term patch. And one shouldn't forget that the insurance industry has a big financial stake in the success of Obamacare, and will soon be pitching in with big efforts to sign people up. But in California we can see what health reform will look like, beyond the glitches.
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