84% of Massachusetts residents are satisfied with Romneycare
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Ezra Klein: Later this morning, President Obama will speak in the Rose Garden about the rollout of Obamacare. He'll be surrounded by people whom Obamacare has already helped. But he'll be speaking about the fact that they are the exception, not the rule.
The Obama administration expected glitches when they rolled out HealthCare.gov. And, at first, they thought that's what they were seeing. There was a sense of exultation as the site buckled under the initial traffic. It was like a restaurant that opened to lines stretched around the block. Or, to use the Apple metaphors the administration favored, an iPhone that sells out within minutes of release.
Three weeks later, the exultation has been replaced by urgency and anger. It's clear now that the site's problem isn't demand. It's that the site itself is broken. Consumers can't get in on the front-end. Insurers aren't getting the right information on the back-end.
The traffic problems may well have been a blessing in disguise for the Obama administration: If everyone had been able to buy health insurance, the insurers would be getting tens of thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands, of garbled or flatly incorrect applications. The results of that could've been catastrophic, as people would believe they had purchased health insurance they never actually got, or would've ended up on a plan different then the one they chose.
The problem here isn't just technological. It's managerial. The White House's senior staff -- up to and including the president -- was blindsided. Staffers deep in the process knew that HealthCare.gov wasn't ready for primetime. But those frustrations were hidden from top-level managers. Somewhere along the chain the information was spun, softened, or just plain buried.
The result was that the White House didn't know the truth about its own top initiative -- and so they were unprepared for the disastrous launch. They didn't even know they needed to be lowering expectations. In any normal corporation, heads would roll over a managerial failure of such magnitude and consequence.
And perhaps heads will roll. But for now, the White House is focused on trying to make HealthCare.gov work. Their frustration is they believe the product itself is great. Premiums came in well below the Congressional Budget Office's forecasts. The White House believes that if consumers could simply shop for the insurance they'd be pleased with both the selection and the prices. The problem, as they see it, is with the shopping experience. And the bright spot is the shopping experience is, in theory at least, an easier problem to solve.
Over the weekend, the Department of Health and Human Services posted an apology of sorts for the troubled launch and promised "a tech surge" to fix it. "Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov," they wrote.
Inside the White House, there's realism about the size of the challenge, but also optimism that it will be fixed. They know, however, that time is running short. HealthCare.gov probably has about a month before the problems of the web site infect the product itself.
The nightmare scenario looks something like this: The web site continues to be a mess through the fall. As such, only the people who need insurance most - -older, sicker people -- go through the trouble of signing up. Younger, healthier people come once or twice and then never again. The risk pools fill with more expensive applicants and, in year two, premiums spike. The result is that, 12 months from now, Obamacare has a working web site, but a more costly, less appealing, product.
The administration has some good news to report. Load times really are falling. Some insurers are reporting improved data transmission -- though there's still a long way to go. And at least the White House knows there's a problem, and can direct their energies towards fixing it or givings consumers workarounds. One smart change made to HealthCare.Gov, for instance, is the newly prominent "Apply by Phone" option, which routes customers to the call centers -- those, at least, are working.
But this wasn't how it was supposed to go. This wasn't the speech President Obama wanted to be giving. By October 21st, he wanted to be able to tell Americans how Obamacare was working, not explaining why it wasn't.
Wonkbook's Number of the Day: 5 million. That, according to one tech specialist, is the number of lines of software code that may need to be rewritten before the HealthCare.Gov system is fully functional.
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