The Obama Administration quietly mandated an extension of the "deadline" to get health insurance that would start on January 1 by one day, giving those without insurance the chance to use Healthcare.gov on Christmas Eve to try to find insurance.
Fat lot of good that a one-day deadline extension will do for Americans without insurance.
Healthcare.gov is still plagued by software problems, poorly-built infrastructure and a stunning lack of tech support. One of the original goals of Obamacare was to make sure - by mandate - that Americans would maintain "continuous coverage," so that they'd never lose insurance, even for a single day.
The website's problems yesterday were catalogued by Buzzfeed's Jon Passantino, who saw hours worth of errors before, late last night, receiving this email:
10 and 1/2 hours after first logging on, the email has arrived pic.twitter.com/XWODHCyQOa
— Jon Passantino (@passantino) December 24, 2013If Passantino got through, he was probably lucky, because at 11:30 p.m., the website was still down:
Still can't get on the http://t.co/mm1rKLzk4O website. At 1130 PM the night before the deadline, this is what I get pic.twitter.com/2QsYDavY9b
— Terry Anderson (@tander123) December 24, 2013At 3 AM, the phone lines were busy and the online chat was broken:
@HealthCareGov 3am and still the phone lines too busy? Also, your chat is one-way. pic.twitter.com/EJ8q8AE8d2
— Michelle Dennis (@mmarieden) December 24, 2013
The errors have continued today:
NOT what #Obamacare supporters want to see today - "Technical problems." Ut oh. @charlesornstein @healthcaregov pic.twitter.com/CER6xUKHqn
— Steve Friess (@SteveFriess) December 24, 2013
Ya, @healthcaregov is busy but they're giving visitors a "live" online help the phone op's script? @charlesornstein pic.twitter.com/0RSmSHZakh
— Steve Friess (@SteveFriess) December 24, 2013This is the story of Healthcare.gov: Americans who have been kicked off their insurance plans by Obamacare's mandates now mandated to buy insurance themselves from a glitchy, broken website. Exemptions handed out by the Obama Administration to corporations and politically favorable constituencies, all while trying to pass the blame for problems on to insurance companies.
Delays, glitches, cancellations, and disastrous websites have made the "continuous coverage" goal a complete failure. The number of insurance cancellations has been estimated at five million nationwide while the Obama Administration said that for the first two months of Healthcare.gov's existence there were only 300,000 people who "selected" a plan. Even if we were to grant that those were full sign-ups, that would leave the federal government woefully short of merely the number of people whose plans were cancelled, much less those who never had insurance in the first place.