The Bar

Saturday 23 March 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Way to set the bar high on using the Federal Government’s “Insurance Exchanges”, the crown jewel of Obamacare. Peter Suderman at Reason:

What should we expect from ObamaCare’s health insurance exchanges when they go online later this year? Not perfection, that’s for sure.

“It’s only prudent to not assume everything is going to work perfectly on day one,” Gary Cohen, an official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) who is heading up the federal government’s exchange implementation, said at a policy meeting put on by the insurance industry. “As we move closer to October, my hopes are the range of things that could go wrong gets narrower and narrower,” he said. But, he added, “everyone recognizes that day one will not be perfect.”

Congressional Quarterly, which first reported Cohen’s remarks, also quotes Henry Chao, the CMS official in charge of the exchange technology, saying that with less than 200 days before the exchanges open, he’s “pretty nervous.” At this point, Chao officials are just hoping that what they build is mostly functional. “The time for debating about the size of the text on the screen, or the color, or is it a world-class user experience, that’s what we used to talk about two years ago,” Chao is reported to have said. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”

With expectations this high for the program that is supposed to change the face of healthcare in America, what could go wrong?

2013-03-23  »  madlibertarianguy