ObamaCare's Black Box: Why the exchanges are worse than even the critics imagined

Click here to read this editorial from the 10-17-13 WSJ. Excerpts:

"Now that traffic has abated, HHS concedes there were built-in information technology and structural defects. Some of Healthcare.gov's automatic operations mimic hacker denial-of-service attacks meant to disable a site."

"Consumers must set up a complex account with sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers before they are allowed to browse health plans. The government wants to show consumers only their net out-of-pocket premiums minus subsidies, not the true underlying cost of insurance."

"HHS continues to claim that the exchanges are all about competition—they're even trying to rebrand them as "marketplaces." But real marketplaces are transparent and let consumers know what they get for what price. ObamaCare's exchanges are intended to obscure price and service options."

"HHS still refuses to disclose how much taxpayers shelled out for this exchange lemon. The money came from several ObamaCare, general HHS and Medicare accounts and flowed to more than 50 outside vendors, with several no-bid contracts awarded outside the normal procurement process."

"...the HHS-run exchanges are designed to make daily reports, seven days a week.

These reports are known in industry jargon as 834 transactions and they may represent the most serious ObamaCare breakdown. Insurers and the exchanges are supposed to swap electronic files every 24 hours that track the policies consumers select and their subsidies and check their lists against each other. The problem is that the exchanges rarely generate accurate 834s.

Our sources in the insurance industry explain that the 834s so far are often corrupted or in the wrong syntax, and therefore unusable unless processed by hand. In other cases the exchanges spit out multiple 834s enrolling and unenrolling the same user and don't come with time stamps that would allow the insurer to identify the most recent version.

The upshot is that the exchanges, the insurers and the consumers will often have different records on file."