“We have met the goal,” the crew assigned to fix the fatally flawed healthcare.gov crowed this morning as the president’s last (to date) deadline came and went. “The system now works most of the time,” administration officials said Sunday in a progress report.
But they also acknowledged the rocky rollout of healthcare.gov included hundreds of software bugs, inadequate equipment and inefficient management….
“The bottom line — HealthCare.gov on December 1st is night and day from where it was on October 1st,” chief White House troubleshooter Jeff Zients told reporters.
It may be a new day at healthcare.gov, but there seems to be a great deal of vision-impairing fog producing hazardous conditions. The user experience on the website may be improved, but whether or not users actually can buy insurance and receive promised subsidies — presumably why they are there in the first place — remains to be seen.
Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said insurers have complained that enrollment data sent to them from the website include too much incorrect, duplicative, garbled or missing information. She said the problems must be cleared up to guarantee consumers the coverage they signed up for effective Jan. 1.
The administration’s self-serving announcement today congratulating itself for having reached, sort of, its continually modified and less ambitious goal reminds me of remarks by the principal of daughter Jessie’s new middle school (she had just graduated from elementary school) on parents’ night some years ago. “I am so pleased to announce,” he beamed (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “that the new grading system we introduced at the beginning of last year has worked wonders! Our students’ grades improved dramatically throughout the year.”
“Of course,” he added after a slight pause, “we still have a good deal of work to do. The scores on standardized tests, for example, have not shown a similar improvement.”
Helene and I laughed, thinking he was making a joke, but he wasn’t. We took Jessie out of that school the next week.
If that’s not enough, peruse The New Yorker and see what they deem “intellectual”.
Determine the “implied” demographic, then consider the ads and determine the de facto demographic.
*sigh* wrong thread