The Washington Post reports that the White House will announce Sunday that it has met its self-imposed deadline to fix the federal ObamaCare exchange known as HealthCare.gov. The Post also reports that, like everything else surrounding ObamaCare, this announcement is not even close to true.
The faulty $600 million site has been improved over the course of the last two months. Still, though, it can only handle 50,000 users at a time. Moreover, the site still loads slowly and the capacity for 50,000 users hasn’t yet been fully tested.
Earlier this month, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the administration’s goal was to make the site usable for 80% of users — another moving of the goal posts since the White House announced November 30 as a target date.
Other deadline misses include the HealthCare.gov program that allows small businesses to enroll online. This feature, known as SHOP, has been delayed until after the 2014 midterm elections. What hasn’t been postponed, though, are the insurance policy cancellations already plaguing small business owners.
In order to re-insure their employees, business owners will now have to work through a broker or insurance agent. That is if the the increased costs and hassles surrounding ObamaCare don’t result in small business owners deciding that insuring their employees just isn’t worth it. CBS News reported last week that this is already happening.
The Wall Street Journal reports that technical problems will still inhibit HealthCare.gov from verifying users’ identities and the transmission of accurate enrollment data to insurance providers. The fallout of the latter problem won’t be readily apparent until someone who has been told they are insured tries to visit a doctor or emergency room only to discover their insurer has no idea who they are.
Some crucial parts of HealthCare.gov are not even built yet, including the mechanism that pays your insurance carrier the part of your premium covered by the federal government — the infamous subsidy.
Some reports claim that in order for ObamaCare to meet its March 30 enrollment goal of 7-plus million enrollees (this number is necessary to make the system financially viable), somewhere around 54,000 people must sign up daily. Currently, only around 7,000 enrollments are occurring daily.
Granted, this is a big improvement over last month’s enrollment numbers, but two times zero is still zero.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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