Fox’s Jim Angle got ahold of internal Obama administration documents that cast the government’s internal deliberations over Obamacare in a new light. While the administration offers moderately happy talk that everything is fine, in the background there is terror that Healthcare.gov’s flaws could bring the entire healthcare law down.
To justify a no-bid contract with Accenture after firing CGI as the lead contractor, the administration released documents from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that offered a rare glimpse of its worst fears, saying the problems with the website puts “the entire health insurance industry at risk” … “potentially leading to their default and disrupting continued services and coverage to consumers.”
Then it went even further, saying if the problems were not fixed by mid-March, “they will result in financial harm to the government.”
It even added that without the fixes “the entire health care reform program is jeopardized.”
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Shortly after the website went live,one official told Congress a critical part of the system – what is known as the “back end” — had not even been built yet.
Doug Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, says “the back end — that information is supposed to be transmitted to an insurance company, the insurance company knows who you are, they know what policy you’ve picked.”
But the back end still hasn’t been built, so insurers are dealing with massive confusion, missing information on who’s signed up and what subsidies they get.
Holtz-Eakin says that the web site can’t match policies and people to the subsidies — the most important thing it is supposed to do. If the site can’t do that in two months, Obamacare could collapse.
Healthcare.gov cost more than $319 million to build with a total of $677 million obligated, according to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who keeps saying that everything is fine and there’s nothing to worry about.
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