Back-End Games

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I found the above image on the internet.  It has been a while since I have picked on Obamacare.  I have left it alone despite all the unilateral “changes” that the President has made to some of the requirements.  It is beyond me how a bill can be constantly tweaked by the government and still called legal but we will let that go for now.   Anyway, four months ago I wrote the following:

Oh….my…..God!  According to Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, up to 40 percent of the technology needed to run the new Obamacare health insurance marketplace has not yet been built and will not be ready when insurance companies start sending in bills when coverage begins January 1.  So let me get this straight.  They started this thing without proving it can work…and it can’t.  And now they openly admit that 40% of the back-end technology is missing.  Are you kidding me?  And when Chao says 40% is he severely underestimating the real amount so save face?  I bet yes.  This is bad.  Real bad.  I still have not been able to get on the Healthcare.gov site.  It says I am locked up in verification purgatory.  And now they tell me that even when I do get something it could break down in January.  Where is a puke bucket?  I am going to get sick.

Why would they leave the back-end undone?  Well, right now the administration is bragging that the new health exchanges reached 5 million enrollees (wasn’t it supposed to be a lot more?).  Anyway, there is this huge debate on whether many of these enrollees were previously uninsured or not.  In other words, they could have been dumped from their old insurance and went scrambling to replace it on the exchange.  This replacement, in general, has been for a lot more money, by the way.  If this is true, that could knock down that 5 million number.  Surely the government can clear this up, right?  This just in:

In congressional testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that the government can’t track how many people have paid their premiums because the “back end” of HealthCare.gov that would allow insurers to reconcile enrollment and payment information with the government isn’t completed.

So now I know why the government didn’t have the back-end done.  I get it.  What happened to that whole transparency goal for this administration.