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Obamacare bombshell: IT official says HealthCare.gov needs payment feature
- hga 13y agoThe big problem is that while they do have some time to get these payment features working, individual subsidies and, reinsurance, really, of insurers who get out of wack risk pools, how long will it be before these systems really work? With proper, traceable payments? The individual subsidies are much more complicated than one may realize. They should only be paid for people who are really enrolled, but determining that can be very difficult when a monthly payment from the consumer doesn't come in, or for the right amount (they get the weirdest things as you might imagine). Was that a mistake? Or is the consumer dropping the policy without giving notice? Etc. To the extent these back end systems constitute 30-40% of the system ... well, that suggests how difficult the tasks really are. Or how uncomplicated the customer facing stuff is, if it weren't for incompetent management by political types and government bureaucrats with no experience doing big IT projects or being the integrator of such a project, and the usual issues with contracting, and government contracting. And this spin is fatuous: "A set of software bugs on HealthCare.gov had, for more than six weeks, prevented individual insurance company websites and web brokers including ehealthinsurance.com, getinsured.com and GoHealthInsurance.com from interfacing with the federal site to verify enrollee's subsidy eligibility." Everyone has said that this was a very low priority; I doubt it would be available now if Healthcare.gov and so many state sites weren't in such poor shape.