Calamity: Despite repeated reassurances that ObamaCare website glitches were fixed, officials are frantically trying to repair massive problems that, by their own admission, could crush ObamaCare and the insurance industry.
Throughout December, administration officials said that they'd all but fixed the start-up problems with the ObamaCare exchange site, pointing to the sharp increase in enrollment that month as evidence. And as to those "back end" problems that sent erroneous information to insurers, they claimed to have cut the error rate to less than 1% by early December.
But hidden from view, administration officials were in a state of panic.
A procurement document posted on a federal website, but little noticed by the press, depicts an administration desperate to immediately replace CGI, the key contractor behind Healthcare.gov, with Accenture.
The need was so immediate, the document says, that the usual competitive bidding process had to be dispensed with. Why the urgency?
It turns out that after three years, CGI still hadn't built the "financial management platform" needed to track eligibility and enrollment, account for subsidy payments, and produce accurate "risk adjustment" forecasts.
As a result, the document says, "the entire healthcare reform program is jeopardized."
Failure to get this platform built in time, it said, could result in "erroneous payments to providers and insurers." And that, in turn, "could seriously put (health plans) at financial risk, potentially leading to their default."
In addition, the inability to forecast risk adjustment payments — a critical feature of ObamaCare — would put "the entire health insurance industry at risk." The officials' words, not ours.
Worse, they have only until mid-March — 31 business days from now — to get this "core functionality" built.
Yet even when announcing the contract switch earlier this month, the administration tried to downplay the situation, saying it had brought Accenture on mainly "to prepare for next year's open enrollment period."
Add to this ObamaCare's other monumental problems — its inability to sign up young people, the ongoing massive security risks at the website, the low payment rates among alleged enrollees — and you have a recipe for total disaster.
It may be too much to ask President Obama to put a stop to this madness. But at the very least, he owes the public a full accounting of the risks the health industry now faces thanks to his administration's incompetence.
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