The Obamacare Roll Out Debacle and why Sebelius Must Go!

The Obamacare Roll Out Debacle and why Sebelius Must Go!

The kickoff of Obamacare and rollout of the exchanges since October 1 has been a disaster. It has been a technical disaster, a fiscal disaster, and most importantly, a human disaster. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius should be held responsible.

We now know that the Obama administration’s early characterization of the problems as “glitches” caused by overwhelming demand was disingenuous at best.

The technical failures are extraordinary. Millions of people are supposed to sign up for insurance plans using the exchanges in the next few months, but very few have been able to do it. It appears the system has turned away the vast majority of users. Apparently the flaws are so serious they may not be fixed for “a couple of months,” according to an astonishing New York Times report this weekend.

The Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, cost taxpayers an estimated $500 million and yet doesn’t work, even after three years of lead time to develop it. For comparison, the Mars Pathfinder (a pretty complex technical undertaking) cost $150 million and was developed in less than three years. It also actually worked.

Details have begun to trickle out about just how poorly the government managed this project. The Times reported:

Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.

Fatefully, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services assumed to itself the responsibility of managing the project, which, the Times continued, “some people intimately involved...seriously doubted that the agency had the in-house capability to handle.”

Much of the complexity was avoidable, but HHS and the White House complicated the challenge for political reasons. In particular, the administration chose to require users to register and enter lots of personal information before showing them the prices of various plans, so that consumers would only see prices after their subsidy was factored in. The administration insisted on the more complex registration system because it was afraid of the sticker shock Americans might feel if they saw the true costs of the policies.

No one, including those Americans who are deeply opposed to Obamacare, should think that the exchange failures are a minor problem. Even the New York Times admitted they “threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative,” making the law even more fiscally toxic than it already was. That’s because those Americans who are less likely to have health problems (like young people) need to enroll in the plans to help balance the cost of the more risky, more expensive people who are likely to flood into the system. The technical breakdown poses such a high barrier to entry that the healthy may not bother to enroll and instead simply pay the fine, while those with serious health problems will be willing to spend days trying to sign up, if that’s what it takes. That’s a recipe for financial disaster.

The human disaster is just as significant. Millions of people are being forced to buy health insurance in the next few months--many of them because Obamacare caused their employer to drop their coverage. And yet because the system is failing so badly, these Americans don’t know what coverage they’ll be able to get for themselves and their families, or how much it will cost. When they try to log onto the government website, they’re met with error messages and blank screens--sometimes after hours of frustrating attempts to enroll. This is a horrible position for the administration to put people.

The worst part is that senior officials knew the exchanges weren’t ready to launch but chose to proceed anyway, rather than face the political embarrassment of a delay. Long after they recognized there were major problems with the system, they continued to promise that everything was fine. In June, Secretary Sebelius insisted they were “ready to go on October 1.”

Even after the issues became obvious to the public, Secretary Sebelius remarked glibly that she hoped Americans would “give us the same slack they give Apple,” as though Americans’ health coverage is as trivial a concern as their Smartphone software. Later, in a Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart, she claimed she couldn’t say how many Americans had signed up for Obamacare because she didn’t know. The claim is hard to accept, but whether she really didn’t know or she was deliberately deceptive, it doesn’t portend good things for Obamacare.

Senator Pat Roberts has called for Secretary Sebelius to resign, and he’s right. She has presided over one of the largest bureaucratic disasters in recent memory. If she won’t go voluntarily, President Obama should fire her. It’s time for real accountability.