The disastrous ObamaCare exchanges are just the tip of the iceberg

Some consumers could see their premiums and deductibles go up

Affordable Care Act page
(Image credit: (Joe Raedle/Getty Images))

Rarely has a government program rollout resulted in the level of disaster that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges have seen over their first two weeks. The White House refuses to release enrollment statistics that should be easily gleaned from internal systems serving the exchange sites, if those servers actually remained up and running. On both of its two weekends, technicians spent long hours attempting to fix the myriad problems that stymie consumers, only to have the problems persist — even when site traffic should be low, as CNN's Elizabeth Cohen discovered on Monday.

Small wonder, then, that no one really knows how many have managed to actually buy a health-insurance policy through the federal exchange. The Daily Mail sought out answers from the insurance industry, and got estimates of 51,000 after one week — a pace that would have just 2 million people covered properly by the March 2014 deadline to comply with the individual mandate, far below the 30 million uninsured that the ACA was intended to assist.

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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.