Federal contractors have identified most of the main problems crippling President Obama\u2019s online health insurance marketplace, but the administration has been slow to issue orders for fixing those flaws, and some contractors worry that the system may be weeks away from operating smoothly, people close to the project say.<\/p>\n
Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.<\/p>\n
Time to panic? No. But it\u2019s time to prepare to panic. It sounds like the earliest anyone is projecting fixes is sometime in the middle of November. That\u2019s the time when it absolutely has to work \u2014 and if it doesn\u2019t, we should panic. Maybe not \u201cGet in the shelter, Homer!\u201d panic, but I\u2019d definitely think about rebalancing the 401(k) and maybe voting in some politicians who will treat this with the gravity it deserves, rather than giving Rose Garden speeches saying that everything\u2019s basically A-OK if you don\u2019t look at the parts that don\u2019t work! Because make no mistake: If this piece doesn\u2019t work, then most of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
Am I exaggerating? I know it sounds apocalyptic, but really, I\u2019m not. As Yuval Levin has pointed out, what we\u2019re experiencing now is the worst-case scenario for the insurance markets: It is not impossible to buy insurance, but merely very difficult. If it were impossible, then we could all just agree to move to Plan B. And if it were as easy as everyone expected, well, we\u2019d see if the whole thing worked. But what we have now is a situation where only the extremely persistent can successfully complete an application. And who is likely to be extremely persistent?<\/p>\n
Very sick people.<\/p>\n
People between 55 and 65, the age band at which insurance is quite expensive. (I was surprised to find out that turning 40 doesn\u2019t increase your premiums that much; the big boosts are in the 50s and 60s.)<\/p>\n
Very poor people, who will be shunted to Medicaid (if their state has expanded it) or will probably go without insurance.<\/p>\n
Insurance that is only sold to these groups is going to be very, very expensive. Not the first year \u2014 President Barack Obama was in the Rose Garden just this morning, touting the fantastic cost savings available to the old and sick people whom Obamacare was already helping. But if those are the only people who sign up, insurers will lose a bunch of money on these policies. And then next year, they\u2019ll ask for a lot more money.<\/p>\n
What happens next \u2014 as we\u2019ve seen in states such as New York that have guaranteed issue, no ability to price to the customer\u2019s health, and a generous mandated-benefits package \u2014 is that when the price increases hit, some of those who did buy insurance the first year reluctantly decide to drop it. Usually, those are the healthiest people. Which means that the average cost of treatment for the people remaining in the pool rises, because the average person in that pool is now sicker. So premiums go up again . . . until it\u2019s so expensive to buy insurance that almost no one does.<\/p>\n
For folks who make less than 400 percent of the federal poverty line, that won\u2019t matter much; the price of a \u201csilver\u201d plan (which covers about 70 percent of expected expenditures) is capped as a percentage of their income. For those who make more than 400 percent of the poverty line (a little over $40,000 for a single person), however, that will be a big problem. And, of course, the federal government will also have a big problem if the cost of subsidized policies starts marching rapidly northward.<\/p>\n
About 5 percent of the U.S. population bought individual insurance on the private market pre-Obamacare, and about half of the law\u2019s coverage expansion was slated to come from people buying policies in the individual exchanges. Moreover, the states\u2019 high-risk pools, which covered a bunch of very sick people, are coming to an end, dumping those people into the normal private market. And some employers, whose policies did not meet the minimums set by the health-care act, are expected to dump their employees into the private market rather than buy more expensive insurance. If this segment of the market breaks, it\u2019s a Big Deal.<\/p>\n
The line taken by the president\u2019s speech this morning, and by the White House more generally, is that while these problems are unfortunate, they\u2019re just not that big a deal. \u201cIt\u2019s important to remember the website alone is not the Affordable Care Act,\u201d Jay Carney said last week.<\/p>\n
This seems to be the administration\u2019s line every time anything goes wrong with this system. In July, we learned that the employer mandate was being delayed, but don\u2019t worry, because that\u2019s not really essential. Now we learn that the much-touted exchanges aren\u2019t really essential, either \u2014 in his speech this morning, Obama helpfully pointed out that you could also sign up by phone. One begins to wonder if Obamacare consists of any actual thing, such that one could ever definitively say that it had happened or not happened . . . that it was working or not working. Perhaps Obamacare is just a dream that lives on in the hearts of the men and women who designed it. As long as they draw breath, Obamacare did happen, and it is working.<\/p>\n