Will Obamacare get its act together in time?

[Captain ******* Kirk]

You were supposed to cheer me up by defending the indefensible failure that is the ACA website, not force me to pants you in front of the entire forum for the umpteenth time.

[Ben Kenobi]

You're Captain ****ing Kirk. It's your sacred duty.

[Dinner]

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/53249080/#53249166

The basic problem with the one fed website is that it was designed to run with up to 50k-60k users at the same time but they have sustained numbers of over 250k for most of the day. So, yes, the website isn't as robust as it needs to be and traffic is up to five times heavier than they thought it would be.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

How Many People Have Signed Up For Health Insurance on the Federal Health Insurance Exchanges?

Based upon my survey of a large number of health plans accounting for substantial market share in the 36 states the federal insurance exchange is operating in, not more than about 5,000 individuals and families signed-up for health insurance in the 36 states run by the Obama administration through Monday.

It is not uncommon for a major health insurer with a large market share to report less than 100 enrollments in the first week.

Reports today say the enrollments continue to trickle in at about the same rate.

Worse, the backroom connection between the insurance companies and the federal government is a disaster. Things are worse behind the curtain than in front of it.

Here is one example from a carrier--and I have received numerous reports from many other carriers with exactly the same problem. One carrier exec told me that yesterday they got 7 transactions for 1 person - 4 enrollments and 3 cancellations.

For some reason the system is enrolling, unenrolling, enrolling again, and so forth the same person. This has been going on for a few days for many of the enrollments being sent to the health plans. It has got on to the point that the health plans worry some of these very few enrollments really don't exist.

The reconciliation system, that reconciles enrollment between the feds and the health plans, is not working and hasn't even been tested yet.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

Obamacare's Troubles are Only Beginning

Right now, most of the problems with Obamacare's online insurance exchanges are with the signup process, particularly in the 36 exchanges being run by the federal government. But there are deeper, more fundamental problems looming even if the surface web-accessibility problems are largely fixed. For example: Just because someone has completed the online enrollment process doesn't mean that they've actually gotten coverage. Reports indicate that many of the applications that are making it through the system don't actually have enough data for insurers to process the enrollee. Here's Bloomberg News:

...

A report from CNBC over the weekend suggests that for some insurers, just about every application coming through the federal exchange system is insufficient for complete processing:

...

What happens when insurers don't have enough information to finish processing an application? They have to follow up with the individual and get the extra information, somehow. That means that the supposedly simply process of signing up online will actually require an additional follow-up step. And it probably means that some people who believed they had signed up for coverage will find out next year that their application didn't go through. So even after today's technical glitches are more or less resolved, it's possible that there are additional problems waiting down the line, some of which we might not even really find out about until next year.

[Dinner]

Bah, they have half a year to fix the website to handle the traffic. It's a non-issue in the long run.

[DinoDoc]

They had three god damn years to fix it and still weren't ready.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

Bah, they have half a year to fix the website to handle the traffic. It's a non-issue in the long run.

If you're currently uninsured and aren't successful in purchasing insurance on the exchanges by December 14th, you won't have insurance on January 1st and will have to pay a tax for violating the individual mandate. Tick tock...

[Ben Kenobi]

December 14th? At 7500 a week over 8 weeks, that's a total of 56k people registered.

Somehow I think that tax thingy ain't gonna happen.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

It would be pretty humiliating for the Democrats if the unbelievably incompetent government rollout of Obamacare forced them to delay the individual mandate, after they rejected repeated Republican calls to do so. They won't do it unless it's absolutely necessary, which it may well be if the current problems with Obamacare aren't resolved in the next couple months.

[DinoDoc]

It would be pretty humiliating for the Democrats if the unbelievably incompetent government rollout of Obamacare forced them to delay the individual mandate, after they rejected repeated Republican calls to do so. They won't do it unless it's absolutely necessary, which it may well be if the current problems with Obamacare aren't resolved in the next couple months.

Federal health exchange sending confusing enrollment information to insurers

By Amy Goldstein and Ariana Eunjung Cha, Published: October 11 E-mail the writers

The federal health-care exchange that opened a dozen days ago is marred by snags beyond the widely publicized computer gridlock that has thwarted Americans trying to buy a health plan. Even when consumers have been able to sign up, insurers sometimes can’t tell who their new customers are because of a separate set of computer defects.

....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...300_story.html

This is awesome.

[The Mad Monk]

Compounding the confusion, these electronic enrollment files are missing a critical element that they were built to include: a time stamp that would let a health plan track whether a consumer’s last step on the site was to actually sign up.

One insurance industry official familiar with the daily reports, known as “834s,” said that they rely on relatively old technology.

Rather than transmitting a file whenever a consumer enrolls, the reports are sent to each insurance carrier in a daily batch at 6 p.m.

Also, the reports contain a “stack” for each consumer, so that if a person picks a health plan, then retypes his or her phone number, two reports are generated.

James Turner, a software engineer from Derry, N.H., said he has spent seven hours since Oct. 2 trying to enroll but keeps encountering issues that make have made it impossible for him to complete the application. Turner, 51, one of a number of software engineers who have written online critiques of the system, said the most infuriating one involves his wife. According to the system, he said, “I have four spouses.”

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

I was listening to NPR and they were saying much of the problem is that individual states were also trying to update their medicare computer systems many of which were written in the 1960's and 1970's using kobold. Essentially this made the task orders of magnitude more difficult but states saw a chance to update their systems and stick the costs to the Feds so they went in whole hog causing many of the difficulties.

kobold really?

COmmon Business Oriented Language ring any bells

[DaShi]

Deekin code for Obama.

[-Jrabbit]

Eh, might be an old programming language, might be a minor mythologicial demon/sprite/gnome... 6 vs half-dozen.