Tipsheet

Need to Appeal an ObamaCare Mistake? Good Luck!

It's not just that the Obama administration allowed state-controlled programmers in Belarus (a country adversarial to the US) to create a lot of the ObamaCare software (which, reportedly, has been spiked with malicious code).

The Washington Post is reporting that the appeals system for the online ObamaCare "marketplace" hasn't even been created as of yet:

The Obama administration has not made public the fact that the appeals system for the online marketplace is not working. In recent weeks, legal advocates have been pressing administration officials, pointing out that rules for the online marketplace, created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act guarantee due-process rights to timely hearings for Americans who think they have been improperly denied insurance or subsidies.

Here's the problem:

The exchange is supposed to allow consumers who want to file appeals to do so by computer, phone or mail. But only mail is available. The roughly 22,000 people who have appealed to date have filled out a seven-page form and mailed it to a federal contractor’s office in Kentucky, where the forms are scanned and then transferred to a computer system at CMS. For now, that is where the process stops. The part of the computer system that would allow agency workers to read and handle appeals has not been built, according to individuals familiar with the situation.

In other words, who-knows-how-many forms are sitting in some kind of computer purgatory in Kentucky, ignored by everyone. Oh, and according to the Post, fixing the appeals process isn't even among the "top priorities" for getting the site fully operational.

How like Big Government in the age of Obama. You must get on and sign up, or risk a fine. But if the government makes a mistake, well -- too bad for you. Right now, ObamaCare officials are just advising everyone to go back to the site and try again. Nice.