Obamacare Is Working. It's Just the Worst. Video Game. Ever.

So Team Obama says it “fixed” Healthcare.gov. Their fix apparently did not include enabling the website to do what every other e-commerce site on the planet does — process payments. If there is one thing that you’d expect a government website to do, it would be processing payments. But not this government.

There’s still one hitch. HealthCare.gov doesn’t work, at all. Sure, it provides a remarkably realistic user experience, but as of now it’s basically a video game. A really, really boring video game. Call it Sim Healthcare.

There are apps for that. No one really expected that Barack Obama would blow hundreds of millions of dollars and divide the country making those apps official government policy.

This is because the so-called back end essentially doesn’t exist. That’s the part of the site that talks to the insurance companies, processes payments, and actually, you know, gets people enrolled on insurance plans.

Reports vary on whether it needs to be “fixed” or whether it still needs to be built. On November 19, Henry Chao, the administration official in charge of overseeing the site, told Congress that “the accounting systems, the payment systems, they still need to be” created. Going by the rosy version of Chao’s estimate, that was roughly 30 to 40 percent of the system.

“It’s not built, let alone tested,” one insurance executive told the Washington Postlast week.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported Sunday that the back-end systems “that are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers still have not been fixed.” I’m not clear on how you can fix something that hasn’t been built yet, but maybe in the eleven days between Chao’s testimony and the November 30 deadline, the “A Team” President Obama deployed built the back end enough for it to be recognizably broken.

Eh, it’s ok. Captain Smokescreen and his back-up band of anonymous human props are busy talking the problems away. The going gets tough, so Obama gets out of the office and gets to campaigning. Again. They’ll have everything fixed, by, oh, 2017 or so. Until then, America, can you just not get sick? That would be great.