Another day brought another spate of damning news for the nation’s health care portal Tuesday. According to a report leaked by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Senior White House Staff were warned back in March that the health care website would not be ready by the October 1st deadline if significant steps were not taken.
Among the problems with the site’s rollout at the time were “multiple definitions of success,” “significant dependence on external parties and contractors,” and “insufficient time and scope of end-to-end testing as barriers to a successful launch.”
Last night, the President addressed the glitches with typical aplomb, telling supporters, “There’s been a lot of misinformation and, frankly, there have been problems with the website that I think have created and fed a lot of this misinformation.”
But buried in the Republican leaks about website woes, millions of Americans are receiving health care coverage. Many of the states that are running their own exchanges are expected to meet or exceed enrollment targets. Nearly 400,000 people have successfully enrolled in expanded Medicaid coverage under the law. The expansion is also leading to something called the “woodwork effect,” — where patients who were already eligible for Medicaid come out of the carpentry to enroll in the federal plan.
As Kaiser Health News noted last week, about 91,000 of the new enrollees were already eligible for Medicaid coverage — they just didn’t know it until the law went into effect.
You can watch today’s discussion on NOW here.
Jeremy Slevin