Obamacare's Phony Success Story - Reason.com
After year one, the health care overhaul is riddled with problems.
It could have been worse.
In the first weeks after Obamacare's health insurance exchanges launched on October 1, 2013, almost nothing worked. The main federal exchange, which served as an insurance hub for 36 states, was down more often than it was up, and when it was online, it didn't work. Many exchanges run by state governments were in disarray as well. Millions of people with individual health insurance policies received letters indicating that their existing coverage would be canceled. The law's mandated small business exchange had been delayed, as had its Spanish language website. Thousands of applications were stranded inside the glitchy exchange systems. It seemed entirely plausible that between the cancellations and the website failures, Obamacare's expansion of insurance coverage-the main selling point of a $2 trillion overhaul of the health care system-might end up making no meaningful dent in the uninsured rate at all.
The rollout was bad enough that the Obama administration was gritting its teeth in full crisis-P.R. mode, assuring Americans that, despite a few bumps in the road, all was okay. "This system is not failing," embattled White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told CNN in October. "Hundreds of thousands of Americans are submitting their applications successfully to get into the system and enroll in Obamacare, and they are doing it through a variety of means, through state exchanges and through the call-in centers and that's going to continue."
Behind the scenes, however, the White House was terrified. Reporting would later come out that top officials were actively considering scrapping the health exchange system they had spent three years building, and starting over from scratch. More than a few Republicans in Congress confidently predicted that the law would soon collapse under its own weight. Obamacare looked doomed.
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