The relaunch of Obamacare

What happened

President Obama relaunched his signature health-care law this week, declaring that the troubled enrollment website was largely fixed, and kicking off an aggressive new campaign to sell the Affordable Care Act’s benefits to millions of Americans without insurance. The Obama administration said it had successfully made emergency technical repairs to the HealthCare.gov site and that it now works well for “the vast majority of users.” Officials admitted, however, that “back-end” connections that transmit applications to insurance companies are still being rebuilt. The site can now handle 50,000 users at once, according to the White House, and about 1 million people visited the site on each of the first two days after the Dec. 1 target date for repairs.

The White House, Democrats, and advocacy organizations will spend the next three weeks publicizing the law’s benefits, and urging Americans to reconsider signing up for insurance through the private-insurance marketplace set up by the ACA. As part of that counteroffensive, Obama accused Republicans of trying to sabotage health-care reform for partisan purposes, and challenged them to propose an alternative way to guarantee affordable coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and the country’s 40 million uninsured. “We’re not going back,” Obama said. “That seems to be the only alternative that Obamacare’s opponents have.”

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What the editorials said

Finally, “a bit of good news on health-care reform,” said the Tampa Bay Times. Now that the frustrating technical failures of Obamacare’s initial rollout are being overcome, Americans are beginning to sign up for the coverage they need. But “Obama and his signature effort are nowhere near out of the woods,” said USA Today. The administration has wasted two months of a six-month open enrollment period, and people who want insurance that begins Jan. 1 have only until Dec. 23 to sign up. Despite the front-end fixes on the website, the data being sent to insurers continues to have “a disturbingly high error rate.”

“That could be a bigger problem than website pages that load slowly,” said Bloomberg.com. Insurers are missing crucial data needed to actually issue policies to people applying for them. Imagine the uproar if people who sign up through Obamacare visit a doctor in 2014, only to discover “they’re not signed up for the health plan they thought covered them.”

What the columnists said

With the website largely fixed, we’re now into the “next phase of the health-care battle,” said Sean Sullivan in WashingtonPost.com. Can Obama successfully resell his tarnished reform to the public, or can Republicans scare people off by portraying it as a complete disaster? There is some reason for optimism, said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. Some states that are running their own exchanges have seen a surge of real interest, with California signing up 80,000 people by mid-November and an additional 20,000 more every week. Soon, insurers will launch a massive, national advertising campaign to persuade people to sign up. The “rollout has been rough,” but “health-care reform has come to stay.”

Don’t be so sure of that, said Jonathan S. Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. Changing the public’s perception of Obamacare “will require more than a good public relations strategy.” Americans are angry that the law “is creating a large number of losers”—middle-class people who must surrender inexpensive plans bought on the individual market in order to subsidize cheaper policies for the poor. People now see that “the presidential lie about people keeping their insurance and doctors” was a deliberate attempt to disguise the reality that Obamacare is “redistributionist.”

In the chaos of the past two months, the White House has quietly changed its definition of success, said Megan McArdle in Bloomberg.com. The administration originally hoped to sign up 7 million Americans this year, with 2.7 million of them young and healthy to balance out the old and the sick. You won’t hear Obama admit this, but the only goal that matters now is to get enough signups to keep worried Democrats and frustrated insurance companies from openly turning against the law. “A program that survives until 2015,” the White House figures, “can be fixed.”