In the midst of a government shutdown, the ACA exchanges open to much fanfare and success. Well, actually, no they didn’t. CNN and MSNBC tried all day to get them to work and could not sign up on live television. People browsing often couldn’t access the site or proceed through the process. They tried to blame this on traffic, but even ACA supporters have dismissed this canard.“I’m a very very big supporter of the health-care act, but I don’t buy the argument that the load was too unexpected.” – Washington Post
But Covered California had 5 million visits. That’s certainly a lot right?
Dana Howard, a spokesman for Covered California, said the error was the result of internal miscommunication. “Someone misspoke and thought it was indeed 5 million hits. That was incorrect,” he said.
Further, it appears that not one person has signed up in the entire state of California.
“Since Obamacare’s exchanges opened, none of the 645,000 people who visited California’s online exchange, coveredca.com, have enrolled in the healthcare program, California news station KUSI-CA reports.”
But you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person, so you want to go and do a rate comparison yourself. According to Covered California, that’s impossible.
The reasoning for this you get to find in the brochure on Covered California’s website.
Apparently it is impossible to compare these rates with rates you could have obtained because — well, because they say so. It’s not as if someone can’t say “I paid x over the last 3 years, and now I pay y,” but I digress. The truth is that ACA has been designed to fail your average consumer and shift the cost burden to the young and healthy. Insurers, as you can see above, are no longer allowed to set prices based on your risk, but to charge everyone based on the risk level of a much sicker person even if that does not apply to you. The only variables allowed are age and geographic region, which also leads to some odd effects within a single state. Many are finding that they can get a policy cheaper if they lived in another pricing region. California has 19 pricing regions. Clearly we can’t have interstate competition on insurance plans because that might actually offer consumers competitive choices, and now we can’t even have competition within a state.
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