Heads should roll over the ObamaCare fiasco

Obama claims to be "madder" than anyone over the health-insurance exchange train wreck. There are plenty of people he can get mad at.

Kathleen Sebelius
(Image credit: (REUTERS/Jim Bourg))

For the past three weeks, systemic flaws in an enterprise that had 42 months between approval and launch have dominated the coverage of the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Originally dismissed as mere "glitches," it's now clear that these were humiliating failures. After all, pretty much everyone who has visited HealthCare.gov has been unable to enroll. And now that the shutdown isn't sucking up all the oxygen in D.C., more and more people are focusing on how poorly the system was designed and how the enrollment process failures might mask even worse problems with the system.

For instance, The New York Times informed its readers on Monday that, far beyond the idea of "glitches," the $400 million website might need 5 million lines of code rewritten. Even worse, insurers have found that the data passed to them for the few people to successfully enroll in a plan is rife with errors. "The system provides them with incorrect information about some enrollees, repeatedly enrolls and cancels the enrollments of others, and simply loses the enrollments of still others," the Times reported.

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Edward Morrissey

Edward Morrissey has been writing about politics since 2003 in his blog, Captain's Quarters, and now writes for HotAir.com. His columns have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Post, The New York Sun, the Washington Times, and other newspapers. Morrissey has a daily Internet talk show on politics and culture at Hot Air. Since 2004, Morrissey has had a weekend talk radio show in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and often fills in as a guest on Salem Radio Network's nationally-syndicated shows. He lives in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota with his wife, son and daughter-in-law, and his two granddaughters. Morrissey's new book, GOING RED, will be published by Crown Forum on April 5, 2016.