The panicky race to fix Obamacare’s website

What happened

The Obama administration this week raced to fix the technical problems that have crippled its new federal health-care website and frustrated Americans who’ve tried to shop for policies on the insurance exchanges. President Obama said he had hired “some of the best IT talent in the country” to work around the clock on HealthCare.gov—which processes enrollments for insurance in 36 states under the Affordable Care Act. “No one is madder about the website than I am,” he said, “which means it’s going to get fixed.” But specialists working on the project warned that repairs may take weeks, since about 5 million of the 500 million lines of code in the incredibly complex software may need to be rewritten. So efforts to fix the site may run into the hard deadlines set by the Affordable Care Act: People without insurance have until Dec. 15 to sign up for coverage that starts Jan. 1, and until March 31 to get coverage in 2014 and avoid a fine.

The Washington Post reported that an internal test of -HealthCare.gov in September resulted in a crash, even though just a few hundred people logged on simultaneously. Republicans demanded the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who managed the project. “Sebelius has had three and a half years to launch Obamacare, and she has failed,” said Sen. Pat Roberts. Sebelius insisted she would stay and fix the problems. “It’s tough to take these shots,” she said. “But I will take them until we get this right.”

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What the editorials said

This “computer snafu was self-inflicted incompetence,” said The Washington Post. Obama has claimed that “the number of people who’ve visited the site has been overwhelming,” with about 20 million visits since Oct. 1. “Why is that so overwhelming?” Google and Facebook handle billions of visitors every month. The problem is that Sebelius’s department “behaved as if this project were not a priority.”

“The bugs aren’t just in the software,” said the Chicago Tribune. “They’re in the law itself.” For Obamacare to work, millions of healthy, young Americans must sign up to offset the cost of health care for older people and those with chronic conditions. But an analysis of 22 of the lowest-priced plans on the Illinois exchange found a major catch: very high deductibles requiring individuals to lay out up to $4,000, and families $8,000, in medical bills before coverage kicks in. That’s no bargain. If healthy, young people decide to swallow a modest penalty instead of enrolling, “the entire system could plunge as costs rise, insurers pull out, and markets collapse.”

What the columnists said

The technical problems with the website are “not the whole story,” said Jonathan Cohn in NewRepublic.com. In the 14 states that opted to run their own insurance marketplaces, including California, New York, and Kansas, the online exchanges have been running much more smoothly. About 180,000 people have so far completed applications for insurance in these states, proving that Americans want health-care reform and that the law “can work, once the technology piece is in place.”

But Obamacare is doomed “if the fix-it effort moves too slowly,” said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. If problems persist into December or beyond, Obama will have to delay the law’s individual mandate, because he can’t fine people for not buying a product that isn’t available to them. No wonder liberals are embarrassed and furious, said Chris Stirewalt in FoxNews.com. The failure of HealthCare.gov poses a major threat to their near-religious belief in the ability of technology and government to deliver “a brighter, sleeker, faster, and more affordable future for health care.”

Republicans should be careful what they wish for, said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. Obamacare was never the Left’s dream health plan, and its reliance on private insurance companies was a sop to Republicans. Liberals would prefer “Medicare-for-all”—a single-payer system with no insurance companies. Obamacare’s failure wouldn’t necessarily boost Republican health-care proposals, which also require the government to run online insurance marketplaces. It might, however, strengthen the “case for a much simpler, government-run health-care system.”