What’s that line about success and failure? Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan? If the past two weeks are any indication, the passion behind the creation of the federal health insurance exchange has produced a lovechild that nobody is rushing to claim credit for. Since open enrollment began the Obama administration has not gone into detail and neither have the IT companies that developed it.
Amidst the concern over how long it will take to figure out the cause of the problems with the federal health insurance exchange is one nagging anxiety some insurers are beginning to express. Will members blame them and not the government for these problems?
A Politico article raised the issue as part of a broader story looking at perceptions of the scope of the problems with Healthcare.gov. The widespread estimates of the time frame to fix those problems, whatever they are, would make a bookie salivate. The website itself has told frustrated users “within 24 hours.” Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini predicted it could take three years.
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“There’s so much wrong, you just don’t know what’s broken until you get a lot more of it fixed,” he said in a CNBC interview.
Even though problems with the exchange stretch back to 2010, no action appears to have been taken to address the warning signs. But the funding allotted for the project was cited by one official as a contributing factor behind the problems the system has, according to Don Berwick, a former Medicare and Medicaid head in the Obama administration.
“The total implementation budget for Obamacare in the first two years, as I recall, was something in the order of $1 billion. The resources were spread quite thin and it was not possible at that time to get more resources from Congress,” he said. “We really wished there were more. The money wasn’t there.”
He comes across as very optimistic about the current problems with the website blowing over once Obamacare kicks in:
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“I wish it had been better now, but I think this’ll soon be a memory.”
Insurers would love to believe it. They will be keeping their fingers crossed that come January the system will at least function at a level that they won’t have to worry about a backlash from miffed customers. Some fear they and their brand take a beating if customers hold them responsible if problems with the federal system mean they get turned down for a doctor’s appointment. Politico quoted an insurer source:
“At that point, the [customer] will blame the company, not HealthCare.gov,” the source said.
With people facing a tax penalty if they fail to enroll by mid-February, the pressure is on the administration to either make some changes in the Affordable Care Act or do a better job of figuring out what the problems at the root of the exchange are.
