Shutdown eclipses Obamacare’s debut

On the first weekend after the end to the government shutdown, visitors to the Lincoln Memorial stop to admire a US Park Police horse in Washington. Congress agreed to a bill which brought a temporary end to a stand-off that had threatened to pitch the US economy into a historic default.

AFP

Washington

Technical problems have hobbled the website design to sign up millions of uninsured Americans for healthcare, but they have largely been overshadowed by a 16-day government shutdown.

The government’s healthcare.gov website launched on October 1 was supposed to spearhead President Barack Obama’s sweeping healthcare reform, known as Obamacare.

The federal website serves 36 states, with the 14 other US states managing the system locally with their own websites.

But the websites have struggled with overloads, glitches and crashes, in a big embarrassment for the programme.

“What breaks my heart... we’re overshadowing how badly Obamacare has been rolled out,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told ABC television’s This Week programme.

Until Congress ended the federal government shutdown in an eleventh-hour vote late Wednesday, the budget and debt crisis that paralysed Washington largely obscured the health reform’s troubled debut, even as Republican lawmakers were fighting to have it overturned.

“Government shutdown: Obamacare dodges a bullet,” the Los Angeles Times summed it up in a headline earlier this week.

The site launch was a “gargantuan failure,” said health industry consultant Bob Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates.

He estimated that during the federal website’s first two weeks, only 10,000 Americans enrolled for insurance, with the websites in states handling their own exchanges getting mixed results.

According to The Washington Post, about 185,000 people had signed up by Wednesday on the state-based exchanges.

That’s a far cry from the 7mn Americans expected to enroll within the first year, according to estimates by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

And more than 50mn Americans lack health care overall.

“The health insurance industry is shocked and extremely concerned,” Laszweski said.

“These people who are enrolling are their customers and (insurance companies) are very concerned that there will be service problems as we go forward and that they will be blamed for it... They are the ones that would have to lose the money.”

Amid all the criticism, the Obama administration has so far refused to reveal how many Americans have signed up for insurance on its website, promising monthly data starting next month.

“This is one of the largest and most complex things we have ever done. Typically, a company launches a project like this in a city, then a few cities,” said independent technology analyst Jeff Kagan.

“They figure out what doesn’t work right and they fix it before they roll it out nationwide. Why the government thinks it doesn’t have to follow the same rules of common sense is a mystery.”

Laszweski warned that unless the Obama administration moves fast to fix the technological glitches, people will lose confidence in Obamacare and the programme could fold.

Obama urges Congress to ditch politics of crisis

The US Congress must stop stumbling from crisis to crisis and join together to create jobs and get things done, President Barack Obama said yesterday in his weekly radio address.

Speaking just two days after Congress reached an 11th-hour accord to end a 16-day government shutdown and avert a debt default by extending the Treasury’s authority to borrow money, the president said lawmakers have little to be proud of.

“At a time when our economy needs more growth and more jobs, the manufactured crises of these last few weeks actually harmed jobs and growth,” he said.

Economists say the shutdown cost the economy billions as furloughed workers cut back on spending and tourism was sapped, among other effects.