EDITORIALS

Is this Problem No. 159?

Please slow down this news cycle

WHO CAN keep up? The news keeps going by like a fast freight. About to derail. Who was that masked man? Or rather government worker who wishes he had a mask-so he couldn’t be held responsible for anything to do with the trainwreck that’s known as Obamacare.

Everything becomes a blur. Ballplayers who make it to the Big Leagues talk about how the game “slows down” after a few years’ experience out there on the diamond. Maybe after a few years of dealing with Obamacare, the news stories about its flaws will come further and further apart, and this game will finally slow down. But right now, it’s hard to see the ball into the glove.

Let’s see, what did we say in this space late last week? Oh yes, this, among other things:

“After the much-reported debacle that was the rollout of healthcare.gov, the administration put the computer geeks on the job. (You’d think they would have started by lining up the computer geeks instead of using them as a last resort.) Now, lo and behold, with all the software fixes and hardware upgrades, the website is said to work . . . more than90 percent of the time! . . . . But you’d think the website responsible for getting people health-care coverage in this ‘advanced’ country would work closer to 100 percent of the time. Somewhere in the vicinity of 99.999 percent of the time. Like websites that work-Google, say, or Amazon.com.”-Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, December 5, 2013.

OH, FOR the good old days-that is, late last week-when 90 percent sounded like success! Now the Washington Post, which is not exactly the house organ of the Republican Party, reports that of those Americans who have gone to healthcare.gov to sign up for insurance, about one-third of their applications contain errors. Some of the errors were generated by the computer system. Others are so varied and numerous in their origin that their sheer profusion would strike fear into the heart of even an outwardly imperturbable IT expert.

It seems that tens of thousands of people could have signed up for healthcare plans this month, but might not have those policies come the first of the year-that ever-changing deadline-because the insurance companies they chose don’t have their correct addresses. But that’s just the beginning of the problems. The computers sometimes don’t let companies know about duplicate enrollments or cancellations. Sometimes those surfing the website hit the confirmation button twice, which seems to confuse the high-speed, low-drag computer.

Then you have what the IT folks call Orphan Reports-those requests for insurance that are excluded from healthcare plans, and nobody knows why. And so endlessly on.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to re-do a sixth of the American economy.

What, the White House worry? It denies that any significant number of folks are having trouble arranging for their Obamacare. Indeed, those speaking for the administration have nothing but praise for the relaunch of the website, claiming the re-do is proceeding with “private sector velocity.”

Only a contrarian might ask: If the private sector’s ability to get insurance policies to the right people at the right time, and for the right price, is the standard to meet, why not just leave it there? And stick with the free market.It’s a question that more and more frustrated Americans may soon be asking themselves as they cuss their computers in the middle of the night.

HERE’S MORE bad news for Obamacare. What’s this, Problem No. 160?

According to a poll conducted by something called the Institute of Politics at a university called Harvard, fewer than one-third of uninsured young Americans are thinking about signing up for Obamacare.

If that’s the case, and young uninsured Americans stay away from Obamacare in droves, preferring to pay the penalty if the government can catch them, then Obamacare will have a much higher ratio of older, sicker people on its books than younger, paying customers. And even Obamacare’s proponents say the law can’t work if that’s so. The government needs millions of young folks paying premiums to offset the medical costs their parents and grandparents are more likely to run up.But now this poll out of Harvard, academic capital of gliberalism, says only 29 percent of young folks want anything to do with Obamacare.

That’s the not-very-new news today.

Tomorrow, don’t be surprised if it gets even worse. The patient called Obamacare seems to be hovering somewhere between Critical and Who Knows?

Somebody tell us this isn’t a government operation . . . .

Editorial, Pages 10 on 12/09/2013

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