President Obama Fails To Explain Tech Glitches And Solutions In ACA Speech

Monday at 11:30am EST, President Obama spoke in the Rose Garden about the recent troubles with health insurance exchange enrollment and websites. With a team of young people standing behind him and Janice Baker at his side, the first person in the state of Delaware to successfully enroll in the exchange, President Obama said he was speaking to every American wanting to get affordable health insurance. He claimed that in the last three weeks, despite the horrific technological problems with the websites, that “half a million consumers across the country have submitted application through federal and state marketplaces.” He further touted that the “federal site alone has been visited 20,000,000 times” in the last three weeks. Unfortunately for those American’s who are really interested in signing up on the exchange sites, he glossed over the depth and breadth of the current troubles, giving a speech that sounded more like a State of the Union address with small-business examples and reading letters written to the White House.

President Obama also alleged that no one wants to see the exchange sites improve more than the federal government, noting that, “the website has been to slow, and people have been getting stuck during the process.” He also said that it is the mission of the administration to make them “more better,” with visible cringing from the audience, but claimed failures were due to response rates. He said the public response was “overwhelming, which has aggravated the underlying problems.”

However, he failed to go any further to explain what those other underlying problems were or when specifically they will be fixed. He did say that while HHS and contractors such as CGI Federal are working out the “kinks,” American’s should be patient. He claimed that “if the product is good, [American people] are willing to be patient,” suggesting that there will not be a delay for the individual mandate.

Nevertheless, he followed this by assuring the public that unlike Black Friday sales, the insurance plans will not run out like purchasing a new PlayStation – adding to the list of items the administration has compared exchange sites to, including iPhones and travel websites.

Despite his promises of improvements and putting the “best and brightest” on the job, CNN and other sites have insisted that the inherent technological and platform problems with Healthcare.gov will not be resolved anytime soon. This begs the question, that if the federal government is now searching for the best and brightest to correct the estimated 5,000-5,000,000+ lines of coding that need to be fixed on the federal site alone, who was working on the original platforms?

As he continued his speech, the President reminded the American public that although the websites for enrollment are not as, “quick, consistent or efficient as we want,” that the exchange sites are far more than “just a website.” He noted that many pieces of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are already in place and being utilized by millions of Americans. He addressed pre-existing conditions, youth under the age of 26 and several other provisions that are already being rolled out by federal law, and the successes they have seen there.

He noted more examples of ACA triumph in Oregon, where he maintained that the exchange, “has cut the number of uninsured people by 10% in three week,” which is about “56,000 more Americans” with health insurance coverage.

During the speech, President Obama also tried to clarify the exchanges or marketplaces by describing them to the public as becoming part of a “big group plan… that bargains on your behalf for the best deal in health care.” He said that by doing so, insurance companies have created new products and options that strengthen market forces, leading to better deals.

He went on to say that without a doubt, “prices have come down,” further claiming that “when you add the next tax credits (those not yet implemented)… then the prices come down even further.”

The President rounded out his talk by noting the Republican party’s opposition to the ACA and how willing they were to “shut down the global economy” to fight against the ACA. A move, he claimed, that shows just how unwilling Republicans are to negotiate on legislation intended to, “free families from the pervasive fear that one illness one injury will cost you everything.”

While that may be the goal of the Affordable Care Act, the underlying technological and coding problems may prove to make that impossible.

 

Would More Americans Support Health Reform If Obama Was White?

Would more Americans support health reform is President Obama was white? According to a recent study conducted by Michael Henderson of the University of Mississippi and D. Sunshine Hillygus of Duke University, the answer is yes. The researchers modeled changes in support of health reform between 2008 and 2010, and what they found was striking. According to Henderson and Hillygus, among a group who supported health reform in 2008, whites were 19 percentage points more likely than blacks to be opposed to health reform by 2010. Keep in mind that this race effect is seen after controlling for party affiliation and political ideology. It also controls for income, age, gender, education, and worry over the cost of health care. Said another way, this race effect isn’t likely to be biased by the usual suspects.

Moreover, the researchers included a measure of racial resentment, and those with the highest levels of racial resentment were 29 percentage points more likely to go from supporting health reform in 2008 to opposing it in 2010. These effects are additive. That means that whites with high levels of racial resentment are a whopping 48 percentage points more likely to switch from supporting to opposing health reform in the course of two years, compared to their black counterparts with low levels of racial resentment. That’s a big deal, to paraphrase Joe Biden for a general audience.

That doesn’t mean that people’s concerns over health reform aren’t legitimate. It’s perfectly reasonable to be opposed to an individual mandate, for example. The question opponents of health reform need to ask themselves, though, is how they would feel about the Affordable Care Act if the man who signed it into law looked like them. I don’t think opposition to reform would disappear–after all, when Clinton tried to pass reform legislation in the 1990s, it failed spectacularly–but I do think the tone of the debate would have been a little different, and I don’t think we’d be seeing the continued opposition after passage that we’re seeing now. Just look to the recent past for proof: Medicare Part D is all the evidence you need that a white President can pass a budget-busting piece of legislation without so much as a second glance from the American people. If George W. Bush had been black, perhaps America’s seniors would still be without adequate prescription drug coverage.