Back-End to the Future

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In November 2013 I wrote a blog which stated:

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.

I was aghast that they had built this monstrosity and didn’t even finish it.  But like everything else, we forget and move on.  Now it is almost two years later and we find out this from the WSJ:

The Obama administration has been making billions of dollars in payments to insurance companies under the health law without being able to confirm just how much it owes each insurer, according to an inspector general’s report to be released Tuesday.

The back-end system for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to determine the exact amounts the government owes for each enrollee still hasn’t been completed.

While it is being built, insurers have been submitting estimated claims to the federal government, which has been paying the claims without knowing for sure whether they are accurate—or if enrollees are even current on their share of the premiums.

In all, the Obama administration didn’t have a firm grip on the almost $2.8 billion paid to insurers from January through April 2014, the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services concluded after studying a sample of the payments during that period.

 

Maybe the government should have finished the building out the back-end? I mean that sounds like it would have been a good idea.  Once again, the government fails us, many of us will have to pay these bills with our taxes and the insurers always win.  This is getting so common that it isn’t even news anymore.