The Obamacare Catastrophe

On Oct. 1, the Obama Administration launched healthcare.gov, a government-run website aiming to provide Americans with easily adopted and inexpensive healthcare coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). From its conception, ‘Obamacare’ prompted intense partisan divisions, impassioned political attacks, and ideological defenses. Republican and Libertarian policy makers viciously and almost unanimously criticized the ACA for expanding government control over one-sixth of the American economy, coercing American citizens to adopt health insurance and subsidizing health care with the simple and economically-ignorant excuse that ‘healthcare is a human right.’ And yet, despite all this criticism, few of Obamacare’s critics predicted that its implementation would be so catastrophic. While the ACA’s website has been up-and-running for a full month already and Health and Human Services administrators brag that nearly half-a-million applications have been started, healthcare providers estimate that fewer than 100,000 Americans have effectively signed up for health-insurance through the problem-riddled program.

Last Saturday, President Obama bluntly affirmed that “the website that’s supposed to make it easy to apply for and purchase the insurance is not working.” But while the Presidential radio address admitted the program’s failures, it blamed ‘glitches’ caused by heavy website traffic rather than the Affordable Care Act’s inherent implementation flaws. The extreme problems with healthcare.gov are systematic failures that will take months to repair rather than mere ‘glitches’ provoked by the site’s fewer-than eight million weekly hits.

Firstly, the site’s healthcare applications are far too complicated and time-consuming for the average, healthy American to sit through, with some site visitors admitting they spent over an hour trying to enroll in a program before ultimately giving up.

Secondly, according to one health care provider, “even when consumers have been able to sign up, [we] can’t tell who... new customers are because of a separate set of computer defects.” In 99 percent of applications, the Obamacare site has failed to provide potential insurers with enough verifiable information to facilitate enrollment. Even more disconcerting is the fact that the website, according to insurance expert Bob Lazlewski, enrolls, un-enrolls, and repeatedly re-enrolls the same individuals, thus confusing healthcare providers and prompting them to ignore completed applications.

But I lost most confidence in the program watching Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ interview on Jon Stewart two weeks ago. When asked point-blank how many people had enrolled in health care plans through Obamacare, Sebelius replied, “I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” a confession of startling ineptitude that begs the question: if the government can not identify who enrolls in health coverage through their website, how can it expect to manage the system?

Yet these structural failures, extreme as they are, draw attention away from the Affordable Care Act’s greatest shortcoming: its unaffordability. As Obamacare forces insurance firms to offer low monthly premiums and cover people with preexisting conditions, insurers raise deductibles to stratospheric levels far outside the average American’s price-range.

Additionally, by regulating competition, premiums under Obamacare’s cheapest plans are estimated by the Manhattan Institute to be 99 percent more expensive for men and 62 percent more expensive for women than current premiums. As the Affordable Care Act overcharges the healthy to subsidize the health care of the chronically ill, elderly, and impoverished, these disparities are even wider for healthy, young, middle-class Americans. The result? The vast majority of the 50 million uninsured Americans will not sign up for Obamacare unless coerced.

Of course, this is exactly what Obama plans to do this spring, when the ‘individual mandate’ will effectively fine citizens for not owning health insurance. But penalizing Americans until they adopt expensive insurance plans should not be our government’s tactic; its primary goal should be to create more affordable and varied healthier plans for citizens to choose between. Regardless of the ‘individual mandate’ and the inherent political problems that arise through coercive governance, Obamacare looks destined to collapse. The system requires seven million participants, the majority of whom must be healthy, in order to function, and with fewer than 100,000 enrollments in the first month, this bare-minimum seems unattainable.

Nevertheless, conservative Americans and Obamacare opponents should not rest smugly with the knowledge that this program is collapsing. Instead, Americans should be wary that the Democratic Party will inevitably attempt to pump taxpayer money into the program, determined to fulfill their dreams of government-subsidized health care. Republican policy makers therefore must immediately begin to brainstorm cost-effective, free-market alternatives to the ACA and advocate for the program’s replacement. The Obama Administration has already spent half-a-billion dollars creating an unusable website. This is just a website. If the federal government is incapable of effectively and frugally setting up a website viewed by eight million people weekly, how can we trust it to effectively manage the complex and varied health care needs of 400 million Americans?