Last week’s rollout of Obamacare made two things painfully clear:
A) There really is a crying demand for the affordable health coverage that President Obama promised, and B) his administration is embarrassingly ill-prepared to deliver it.
In the days since HealthCare.gov went live on Oct. 1, millions upon millions of uninsured Americans have tried to do what Obama asked — and what his Affordable Care Act requires — by signing up for coverage through a government exchange.
And what did the vast majority get for their trouble? The online version of a doorbuster sale from hell: Computer glitches. Frozen websites. Endless wait times. Useless help lines.
And, in all but a tiny percentage of cases, no insurance.
Massachusetts reported singing up a mere 1,112 people. Connecticut eked out 1,017.
Officials at the federally operated HealthCare.gov were not even saying how many applications had successfully processed. Ditto for the New York State of Health Marketplace. Its chief, Donna Frescatore, said on Friday that 65,500 people had “visited and actively shopped on the site,” but gave no hint of how many of them had actually enrolled.
Which suggests that the numbers are either humiliatingly low or, worse, that the systems are too dysfunctional to track that basic information.
In short, the first week of Obamacare was looking uncomfortably similar to the train wreck that its critics had predicted.
Tea Partying Texas Sen. Ted Cruz himself could hardly have done a better job of discrediting the whole concept.
I say this as someone who believes the Affordable Care Act is a good-faith effort to fix a badly broken health-care system, one that shamefully leaves 18% of the population under 65 living without reliable access to doctors and hospitals, one serious illness away from financial ruin.
But the ultimate test of the law’s workability is whether it can actually sell insurance to those who need it. And by that measure, so far, the system is unquestionably flunking.
Blaming heavy traffic won’t wash. The Obama administration had three-and-a-half years to prepare for what they should have known would be an onslaught.
As Cecily Strong quipped on “Saturday Night Live”: “You can’t campaign on the fact that millions don’t have health care, and then be surprised that millions don’t have health care.”
Outside experts are pointing to deeper-seated problems, such as flaws in the design and coding of the website — issues that seasoned computer pros from, say, Netflix or Amazon surely could have diagnosed and cured in short order.
Given the complexities of the job — implementing a complicated law while handling sensitive personal information and dealing with hundreds of insurance companies and multiple layers of bureaucracy — Obama should have known to bring in the A Team.
Congress made things harder by slashing the budget for implementing Obamacare. And state governments further complicated things by refusing to cooperate — forcing the feds to take on the whole job for 34 states.
But none of that excuses letting down the millions who tried to sign up in the first week.
These should have been Obamacare’s first and easiest customers — people with basic awareness of the law and the computing ability to get on the Internet.
They were more anxious than most to sign up for insurance, or find out what doctors are in which plans, or at least to figure out what it’s all going to cost. They were probably nervous and confused about dealing with complex choices and rules.
And what they found was a parody of bureaucratic incompetence.
State and federal officials say they are working diligently to improve their systems so everyone will have plenty of time to sign up before the legal deadline of Dec. 31 — as they must.
“On a 24/7 basis, technicians continue to monitor the site and address any issues that affect users’ experience and ability to access the marketplace,” was Frescatore’s less-than-completely-convincing assurance.
Let’s hope they fix this mess. Whether they can ever live down this awful first impression of government health care in action is another question.
whammond@nydailynews.com
