Obamacare: Too complex to work?

The Affordable Care Act's “mind-numbing complexity” will make it difficult—too difficult?—to implement.

Two weeks into the age of Obamacare, said John Sununu in The Boston Globe, the program’s constantly crashing HealthCare.gov website serves as vivid proof of the bureaucratic program’s crippling complexity. Despite spending three years and $600 million on setting up an online system, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has utterly failed the millions of people who have tried to get information or sign up. The bugs in the software may eventually get fixed, but not so the “deeply flawed,” 2,000-page Affordable Care Act itself. To enroll a citizen in the program, said Gordon Crovitz in The Wall Street Journal, the website first must gather detailed income and other data from the applicant, combine it with eligibility data from dozens of state and federal agencies, and then offer a plan in compliance with 47 separate statutory provisions. It’s that “mind-numbing complexity,” not glitchy software, that’s Obamacare’s fatal flaw.

The admittedly inept rollout “is not the end of the world,” said Stephanie Mencimer in MotherJones.com. In 2006 both George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D program for seniors, and the “Romneycare” plan in Massachusetts upon which the ACA is based, got off to starts just as chaotic as Obamacare’s, if not worse. Romneycare’s rollout was so bad that a full two months after launch, only 18,000 of the state’s 300,000 eligible citizens had successfully navigated the enrollment process and signed up. “Eventually the kinks got worked out,” and today 96 percent of Massachusetts residents have health insurance—more than in any other state. If Obamacare’s engineers can debug the system by early December, this rocky debut will be forgotten.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us