“I don’t get the sense that at the time of passage, people had spent a lot of time thinking about the sheer mechanics of how this would all work: how the IT would be built, the rules written, the necessary information assembled. They spent a lot of time staring at the blueprints, not so much thinking about the building materials and the labor.”
“Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees — a major selling point for the health care legislation.”
“Almost all of those surveyed are concerned that the exchanges have not involved them as users in gaining input from the industry––traditionally a very bad sign in system development. And, the executives are very concerned about being able to reconcile billing and eligibility information from the exchanges.”
“State officials say they need 20,000 people for the job of signing up millions of Californians for health insurance in the coming months, but a battle is brewing over whether these workers should undergo background checks and fingerprinting. At issue is the level of screening these ‘assisters’ should receive before they handle confidential information about the people they are enrolling this year in the state’s new health insurance exchange, called Covered California.”
“Applying for benefits under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul could be as daunting as doing your taxes.
The government’s draft application runs 15 pages for a three-person family. An outline of the online version has 21 steps, some with additional questions. Seven months before the Oct. 1 start of enrollment season for millions of uninsured Americans, the idea that getting health insurance could be as easy as shopping online at Amazon or Travelocity is starting to look like wishful thinking.”
“After 2018, the future of ObamaCare’s exchanges will be all downhill. At least that’s how it looks to the Congressional Budget Office. Its projections imply that the number of people getting subsidized coverage will ramp up from the 2014 start to peak at 22.3 million in 2018, but then fall by 1.8 million over the next five years.”
“On Friday, HHS all but admitted that at least one element of the exchanges won’t be entirely ready on time: the Small business Health Options Program (SHOP) — the health insurance exchanges ObamaCare set up to serve small employers. The SHOP exchanges were supposed to be fully in place by January 1, 2014. But newly released regulations propose delaying a key part of the small business exchanges for a year: the employee choice provisions that were arguably the most significant feature of the program.”
“The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday quietly raised the 10-year cost of ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies offered via the health law’s exchanges by $233 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office review of its latest spending forecast.”
“HHS insists that the federally run exchanges will be online on time, but it has also continued to delay state implementation deadlines in a way that could suggest the agency is not quite as ready as it claims to be. That makes the following passage from the new federal budget baseline published by the Congressional Budget Office this afternoon rather, well, interesting:”
“The feds may not have provided an estimate of the cost of operating an exchange, but several other experts have. The results are eye-popping. According to Maryland’s Joint Committee on Health Benefit Exchange Financing, administrative costs alone will run the state an astounding $201 per person in 2015. The auditing firm KPMG recently found that Ohio can expect to spend $63 million to set up its exchange and another $43 million each year to run it.”