Video montage: Kathleen Sebelius vows working Obamacare website on Oct. 1

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As the Obamacare website launch deadline approached, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius vowed that it would be up and running by Oct. 1.

Via: Washington Examiner

Uninsured Americans Still Unfamiliar With Health Exchanges

Seven in 10 not familiar with exchanges, unchanged since September

PRINCETON, NJ -- Although federal and state health insurance exchanges opened on Oct. 1, 71% of Americans who lack health insurance -- the primary target group for the exchanges -- say they are "not too familiar" or "not familiar at all" with them, little changed from last month. At the same time, 28% of uninsured Americans say they are very or somewhat familiar with the exchanges, up slightly from 25% last month.

The exchanges are online insurance marketplaces that allow eligible Americans to find health insurance plans, as required by the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Many Americans have had difficulty signing up for insurance at the exchanges since they opened, due to heavy traffic on the websites and technical glitches plaguing them. It is unclear how many Americans have signed up for insurance since the exchanges opened; the Obama administration has not yet released enrollment figures.

Via: Gallup

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Two weeks in, Obamacare website still broken

The Obamacare enrollment website remains badly broken despite two weeks of intensive round-the-clock efforts at repairs.

HHS isn’t making any predictions about how long it will take to fix it — or rebuild it. But advocates, lobbyists and industry officials are talking about it as a months-long repair effort.
How many months is an open question — and one with big consequences for the massive effort to enroll 7 million people in the new insurance exchanges and millions more in Medicaid by the end of March. People trying to switch from their current insurance into subsidized exchange plans could also face gaps.

A two-month delay, for instance, would be a different scenario than five or six months, particularly since people can face penalties if they don’t apply by mid-February.

(PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes)

In the meantime, few people can get through the enrollment process online. According to some analysts like Millward Brown Digital, thousands of consumers have stopped trying, at least for now.

At a summit of health care advocacy groups at the Newseum on Tuesday, the audience was asked how many had successfully made it through HealthCare.gov even far enough to browse the selection of health plans. Only two out of about 70 people raised their hands.

The administration hasn’t said much about the nature of the technical problems. Officials initially described them as the kind of “glitches” that inevitably occur in a tech launch, and attributed them to the high interest in new health coverage options that drove unexpectedly high traffic to HealthCare.gov.

Via: Politico
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Dana Milbank: Now, lead from the front

Let us hear no more about President Obama leading from behind.

Since a White House adviser uttered that phrase to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza in 2011 to describe Obama’s leadership in Libya, “leading from behind” has become a favorite refrain of Republicans trying to portray Obama as weak.

Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) detected “a policy of leading from behind, of indecision” in Syria. Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) said Obama’s “strategy of leading from behind meant [Moammar] Gaddafi’s weapons stockpiles went unsecured.” Sen. Dan Coats (Ind.) said Obama’s insistence on higher taxes was more evidence that “the president continues to lead from behind.” Rep. Doc Hastings (Wash.) even said that “the American people have been waiting for the Obama administration to stop leading from behind” — and to hurry up approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

But the last use of the phrase I could find in the congressional record was on Oct. 2, at the start of the shutdown, when. Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.) said Obama had been “once again attempting to lead from behind in a crisis.”

They aren’t saying that now.

Obama got out in front of the shutdown and debt-ceiling standoff. He took a firm position — no negotiating — and he made his case to the country vigorously and repeatedly. Republicans miscalculated, assuming Obama would again give in. The result was the sort of decisive victory rarely seen in Washington skirmishes.

Via: Washington Post

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#Obamacare Watch: This Is What Technocracy Looks Like edition.

And this is why we left that particular political philosophy in the Thirties, where it belongs.

Grim reading on the Obamacare exchanges here from Yuval Levin (short version: the exchanges are in one whole joojooflop situation), with an important caveat:

The character of the conversations I had with these very knowledgeable individuals in the last few days reminded me of something: It reminded me of the daily intra-governmental video conferences and calls in the wake of hurricane Katrina in 2005. I was witness to many of those, as a White House staffer. What I saw in the first days of the disaster quickly fell into a pattern: local, state, and federal officials on the ground would report on what they knew directly—which was often grim—and then they would pass along information they’d heard but hadn’t gotten first hand, which was often much more grim but almost always ultimately turned out not to be true. Some of these stories went public (remember the shootings at the Superdome? They never happened). Some didn’t. They were often reported with a kind of detached authority that made them believable, and they were a function of living in panic amid an unbelievable situation over time.

The combination of these conversations over a week has therefore left me thinking that it may not be clear to anyone exactly how deep and lasting these problems will prove to be, which could mean they’re worse than they seem but could mean they’re not as bad as they seem. The technical architecture of the federal exchanges and to a lesser extent the state ones has been very badly screwed up. The problem may be so bad as to render Obamacare’s rollout impossible in practice at this point. But it may not be. And right now no one knows if it will or will not. My gut sense after listening to these insiders, for what little it’s worth, is that it’s not likely that the situation will prove to be much worse than it now seems, and it’s more likely that it will prove to be less bad than it now seems.

But I don’t know, and no one else does either.

Via: Red State
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