Obamacare's Medicaid Problem
...As the Obamacare website struggles, the administration is emphasizing state-level success. President Obama said Monday, "There's great demand at the state level as well. Because there are a bunch of states running their own marketplaces."...
...But left unsaid in the president's remarks: the newly insured in some of those states are overwhelmingly low-income people signing up for Medicaid at no cost to them.
Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said, "We're seeing a huge spike in terms of Medicaid enrollments."
He says the numbers have surprised him and state officials.
CBS News has confirmed that in Washington, of the more than 35,000 people newly enrolled, 87 percent signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, out of 26,000 new enrollments, 82 percent are in Medicaid. And in New York, of 37,000 enrollments, Medicaid accounts for 64 percent. And there are similar stories across the country in nearly half of the states that run their own exchanges....
Now She Tells Us: Sebelius Says Obamacare's Exchange Website Needed Six Years of Development, Instead Of Two
...For people who have been following the story closely, it’s been clear for months that Obamacare’s exchanges were not ready to go live on October 1, and that their implementation needed to be delayed. The Obama administration insisted otherwise, claiming that everything was hunky-dory, and that reports to the contrary were simply the work of partisan saboteurs. But earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted the truth. “We didn’t have enough testing…for a very complicated project,” she conceded to the Wall Street Journal. The exchanges needed five years of construction and one year of testing, and instead had only “two years [of construction] and almost no testing.” That leaves us with an obvious question: Why, then, did Sebelius insist on rolling out the exchanges four years ahead of time?...
...The answer may be that she was under direct instructions from the White House. According to a letter sent to White House officials by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, CGI Federal—one of the key contractors involved in the project—said that officials with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the government agency tasked with running the exchanges, “constantly mentioned the ‘White House’ when discussing matters with CGI. For example, CGI officials told Committee staff that the ability to shop for health insurance without registering for an account—a central design feature of the health insurance exchange—was removed ‘in late August or early September.’”
Back in January, CGI representatives told the committee that they didn’t think that “the website would be operational before the October 1, 2013 deadline” because there was a “lack of coordination and an abundance of confusion between stakeholders involved in setting up the website,” and felt that they needed “more direction on ‘budgetary and project governance.’”...
...Incredibly, by September 26—five days before the website was set to launch—there had not been a single test as to whether or not an individual could “complete the [enrollment] process from beginning to end: create an account, determine eligibility for federal subsidies and sign up for a health insurance plan, according to two sources familiar with the project.”
They finally did test the website after September 26. “It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously.” This is a website, remember, that is supposed to eventually serve more than 15 million people....
