President Barack Obama reportedly said he wants to host SportsCenter’s “Top 10” plays of the night segment once he leaves the White House, but it may be more appropriate for him to host the program’s “Not Top 10” segment given the disastrous Obamacare rollout.
The rollout has been so bad that Obama will give a public address every day until the looming December 23rd deadline for Americans to get insurance for January. Even Judy Smith, the legendary Washington, D.C. “fixer” who is the inspiration for the hit show Scandal, has said she has not seen a disaster like Obamacare in a while.
Here are Obamacare’s “Not Top 10” moments:
1. Obama lied to Americans about whether they could keep their healthcare plans.
“If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,” Obama said in 2009.
Yet, after millions of Americans received cancellation notices from their insurance companies, Obama apologized for misleading Americans. In addition, his false statements have been made worse because the Obama administration had known that Americans would lose their insurance under Obamacare.
2. Obamcare exemptions
The law was so bad that Obama had to give exemptions to those in Congress and a one-year exemption of the employer mandate to big businesses. Yet, the Obama administration and Democrats would not give a one-year exemption to the American people, which, ironically, would have meant lawmakers in Congress and their staffs would not have needed special treatment.
3. Disastrous HealthCare.Gov launch
When Obamacare launched on October 1, even though nothing in the statute said Obamacare had to start on that day, the website did not work for nearly everyone attempting to look for health insurance on HealthCare.Gov. The administration had to take the website offline and enact multiple fixes. As a result, Obamacare sign ups fell 85% short of the administration’s goal.
4. Website not fixed
Though the Obama administration claimed its tech surge, which consisted of only six people, would make the website work for a “vast majority” of Americans by last weekend, Americans were still experiencing so many problems that the administration told people attempting to enroll in Obamacare to either start over or log in during “off-peak” hours.
5. Website security failures
Americans zealously guard private information about their health, and the Obama administration has given those using the website no security about whether their health information–or other private information–will be secure. HealthCare.Gov has been riddled with security flaws, and more are being found. Private information about enrollees have been given to people in other states, for instance, and the site may have more security flaws after the fix.
6. Insurance companies may not have records of Americans signed up for plans
Some Americans may not get coverage when they go to the doctor in January thinking they have insurance because the HealthCare.gov site did not properly transfer their information to the insurance companies. As has been reported, 40% of the site still not fully built and “back end” is also still not completely functional, which means “health insurers are still seeing enrollments that are duplicated and missing information.”According to National Journal, “there is still about a 5 percent error rate in the information the site submits to insurance companies on behalf of those picking a new insurance plan. If the site is fixed but this problem is not, the problem could get worse. People would sign on, fill out the forms, and insurance companies would be flooded with bad data.”
7. Waste
Taxpayers spent nearly $600 million on a website that is barely functional.
8. Young People and Millennials rejecting Obamacare
Many low-income young Americans are not qualifying for subsidies even though they are forced to buy healthcare and were promised they would be subsidized. Even a Harvard poll found that a majority of young adults want Obama recalled and oppose Obamacare. Obama’s numbers are fading even among his base in reliable states like California, which may portend trouble for Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections. Recently, Obama has held various events targeted at Millennials who are hesitant to purchase Obamacare. The Obama administration needs young Americans to buy Obamcare plans to prevent a so-called “death spiral.”
9. Forced Obama to conceded the federal government is inefficient
After the HealthCare.Gov failures, Obama conceded that the federal government is not as efficient, innovative, or cost-effective as the private sector.
“The challenge has been just making sure that consumers are actually able to get on a website, see those choices and shop,” Obama said. “And I think that we probably underestimated the complexities of building out a website that needed to work the way it should. There is a larger problem that I probably — speaking personally, but also as the administration — could have identified earlier, and that is the way the federal government does procurement and does IT (information technology) is just generally not very efficient.”
10. Small Businesses–and their employees–made more insecure
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose predictions about Obamacare, including its inclusion of rationing death panels have come true, said it best when she said, in the words of the late Ivring Kristol, that Americans would be “mugged by reality” when the employer mandate kicks in next year and almost 80 million more people will get their insurance plans canceled. In addition, employers may be hesitant to hire more employers and will be incentivized to reduce the hours of their full-time employees to not get hit by the employer mandate. Furthermore, small business enrollment in Obamacare was recently delayed–conveniently–until after the November 2014 midterm elections.
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