A lot of people have had fun ridiculing the Obamacare website, and I especially enjoyed Jon Stewart’s take on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7InS-xW1LCI
I have not visited the dysfunctional site, because I don’t want to, and (fortunately) don’t need to. As Megan McArdle pointed out, though, those who have finally gotten through and managed to sign on despite the huge difficulties involved are, predictably, the ones who most need health insurance but can’t get it. The highest risk people!! It’s what McArdle calls “our old friend adverse selection”:
…If relatively few people are buying insurance in the private marketplace, those people are likely to be older and sicker than the population that was projected to enroll. That makes it likely that premiums will rise quite a bit next year, scaring off young, healthy people even more.
Um, how smart is that?
It does not surprise me that a government website — and the government itself — would be hopelessly stupid and inefficient, but there’s another problem which is much more than a glitch.
If you believe the hype, the Obamacare proponents say that getting young people to sign up is of paramount importance, right?
So why is it that despite this primary goal of signing up young people, there is no Obamacare app for smart phones, and the silly web site is woefully incompatible with mobile devices?
I live in an overwhelmingly student neighborhood, and virtually all of them are connected, and online all the time with their smart devices. If for some reason I wanted to reach them with a commercial pitch, common sense would suggest that at minimum I would make it at least possible for them to place orders on their smart phones. You know, like the way Amazon and Facebook and all successful online presences offer those “app” thingies?
Put charitably, the rollout of healthcare.gov has been a mess. Millward Brown Digital, a consulting firm, reports that a mere 1 percent of the 3.7 million people who tried to register on the federal exchange in the first week actually managed to enroll. Even if the problems are fixed, the debacle makes clear that it’s time for the government to change the way it ships code—namely, by embracing the approach to software development that has revolutionized the technology industry.
Companies such as Google (GOOG), Amazon.com (AMZN), Twitter, and Facebook (FB) all think in terms of platforms talking to applications. They deploy lots of small teams that are expected to ship new features and fixes all the time—sometimes daily.
Sheesh. This is such a no-brainer.
It’s as if young people are being systematically screened out!
You’d almost think they wanted this to fail.
Comments
11 responses to “The comedy gets funnier”
The Bringer of Light fail? Surely you jest!
I do believe they intended Obama Care to fail. Just not this soon. It was to be an emergent failure not an immediate catastrophic one.
Love tbe “Tron” reference about 8 minutes into the video.
Not sure how they could have intended anything – they didn’t even read the darned thing.
Stewart has been going after the Obamacare debacle pretty hard.
I wonder if he’s getting any pressure from the White House to stop doing that.
Can’t have the wrong people getting the wrong ideas.
all americans need and deserve healthcare all civilized nations have national health care and this is why china does not! We should have medicare for all ;but heath insurance lobbyist prevented it and we got this romney’s republican health care fiasco that was their anwser to mrs clinton’s proposal in 1993. what obama should have done was say in we can’t get medicare for all if anyone dies because of no insurance we will bring murder charges against all who voted against it and they will get in washington dc an all black jury of their peers!
What’s wrong with a black jury? Why so racist cap? Why?
Took me two hours to put all my info in the Colorado exchange website. Got stuck at insert formal Medicaid or CHP+ denial notice code. Turns out that to get the federal tax credit you first have to apply for Medicaid. In my case I know that I make too much money for Medicaid, but I’m still eligible for federal tax credits. So I have to wait “30 – 45 days” to get a denial notice from the State before I can continue the Obamacare enrollment process.
Crap. Without federal tax credits my monthly premium will rise almost 40% for a policy essentially identical to my current policy. I can’t afford that, so I wait.
Cap frequently has some cute leftist diatribe to attack those who promote personal liberty and responsibility, but since ObamaCare has hit big trouble, Cap is off the deep end, although my observation is that Cap is commonly racist and not unexpectedly so.
Perhaps a little attention to the details would have helped back in 2010.
BTW – I’ve sent the video link to almost everyone I know – on both sides – and they all responded with a laugh. Seems Jon Stewart hit it out of the ballpark.
I would like an all black jury :but I don’t think ted cruz or many tea partiers would!
Shorter cap: “I don’t think”.