Obamacare

As the mystery surrounding the disastrous roll out of Obamacare unfolds two salient points are rising to the top. First a decision to keep the details hidden until after the November 2012 elections caused a delay. This resulted in the loss of valuable time to get the project completed and caused later errors in trying to catch up. The second was a last minute decision not to allow users to see the cost without the subsidy. There was concern that if someone saw the cost before the subsidy they would get turned off and not buy. This is particularly important for low income people. For example a family earning less than $30,000 might well qualify for free health care but without the subsidy the cost might be $300 per month. A young family man checks out the site and finds the cost is too high and decides he cannot afford health care not realizing that there is a subsidy. In order to determine the subsidy the person must impute a lot of personal data, like social security numbers, family income and ages. Only then can the government determine the subsidy that this family is entitled to but this additional step caused a lot of hang ups in the system.