TRANSPARENCY: ObamaCare’s New Metrics Clear As Mud.

All the vagueness probably helps the administration. When your project is having difficulties, the ideal performance measurement is a relatively easy metric that sounds like something much more stringent. I once did work for a client whose previous consultant had insisted that his promises of “less than 1 percent server down time” had been accurate because the server was on, even if it was refusing to let any users access its files. Amazingly, the client went along with this for almost two months before firing him. In its defense, the company was run by English majors.*

Ultimately, there’s only one metric that really matters: enrollment. Are a lot of people signing up? And does that number contain a good percentage of young, healthy people, or is it mostly the old and the sick? Is their information being correctly transmitted to insurers?

We’ll have a better idea about this when the next round of enrollment figures is released in December — well, unless the administration also chooses weirdly vague metrics for enrollment.

But even if we get hard numbers, early December is leaving it awfully late; folks who are losing their current policies need to buy new ones by Dec. 15. If the system is really and truly broken, there’s a real risk that we’ll only know that for certain long past the point where it’s too late to do anything about it.

Repeal, and pass a new bill featuring interstate insurance sales and HSAs.