More trouble for Obamacare

What happened

The website providing access to the federal health-care insurance exchanges may not be fully fixed by a self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline, an Obama administration official admitted this week, as pressure mounted on the White House to allow people to keep individual policies that are now being canceled. The administration had promised the HealthCare.gov site would be operational for a “vast majority” of users by the end of this month, but a source told The Washington Post that the site still freezes when 30,000 or more possible enrollees log on at the same time—just half its intended capacity. Publicly, administration officials said the site was already functioning much better and that the target date for the furious repair work hadn’t changed. In October, the White House admitted, only 26,794 people bought private insurance plans in the 36 states relying on the federal website, with another 79,000 buying insurance through state exchanges. The administration had projected 500,000 would enroll in the first month.

In Congress, several bills were submitted that would permit the 5 percent of Americans with individual insurance plans to keep policies that are being canceled under the law’s new regulations. As many as 12 million Americans could lose the low-cost, low-coverage insurance plans bought in the individual market, despite Obama’s repeated promise that anyone could keep plans they liked. Former Democratic President Bill Clinton urged Obama to fulfill that promise, even if it meant changing the law. “The president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people, and let them keep what they got,” he said.

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What the editorials said

“The reality of Obamacare comes into sharper focus every day,” said the Chicago Tribune, and it’s not pretty. The website’s technical problems will make it difficult for uninsured people to sign up by the Dec. 15 deadline to receive coverage by Jan. 1. Hundreds of thousands have received cancellation notices for individual plans. In 2014, people with employer-provided insurance may also face unwelcome changes. Even if a digital “SWAT team’’ fixes the website, we need a “complete congressional reimagining of the law.”

That’s just not realistic, said The Washington Post. “Trade-offs were always going to be part of health-care reform,” as the system depends on some healthier people paying more, so that millions of sick and previously uninsured people can get coverage. No “fix” to the law could allow everyone to be a winner. Despite the political furor stirred up by the law’s opponents, its goals remain both achievable and reasonable: “high quality health insurance available to all.”

What the columnists said

If the tech repair team doesn’t meet the Nov. 30 deadline, it “creates huge political problems for the White House,” said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. Everything I’ve heard from insiders “backs up the pessimists.” But since the process of fixing the software is so complex, involving so many lines of code and interfaces with dozens of insurance companies, “no one knows for sure” when it will work smoothly. If most users can sign up starting in December, “there’s still time” to minimize the damage, said Jonathan Cohn in NewRepublic.com. The initial enrollment numbers were bound to be low. As both the Romneycare and Medicare Part D rollouts proved, few people rush to sign up for government programs at the beginning of enrollment. “The statistics that really matter are the ones in December and beyond.”

As if Obama needed another problem, said Jonathan S. Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com, Bill Clinton just “stuck a knife” in the president’s back. His suggestion that everyone should get to keep their existing coverage will only feed the uproar over canceled individual policies. “The ground is slipping away from underneath the president’s feet.”

This is why American politics is so dysfunctional, said Michael Cohen in the New York Daily News. Americans want progress and change, but “without sacrifice or inconvenience.” To sell health-care reform to voters, Obama conveniently failed to mention that providing insurance to millions of people would require some disruption in the individual market. That played right into the hands of those who insist that “centralized government power is an unqualified danger.” Voters “can’t handle the truth,” so instead, our leaders engage in endless political posturing.