“So far, the Affordable Care Act’s launch has been a failure. Not ‘troubled.’”

Ezra Klein - WaPo Obama cheer leader deluxe. Very gratifying to see one of the founders of the progressive think alike ‘journolist’, actually REPORT fact. I have been saying this since, oh, day 3 or 4. Yesterday to our faces, Mr. Carney insisted they were working day and night to ‘make the experience better’. Do they realize the cynicism this kind of word abuse causes in the public?

Indeed as I discovered quickly last night, certainly my ‘account’ is in no other condition than that of day 1. I cannot see any plans (except through the Maine information site). I cannot purchase anything. I am incomplete.

What if this continues?

What about the entire structure?

RCP:

Klein notes that the rollout of the Medicare prescription drug program was also rocky two weeks into the process. But later it got smoothed out.

Klein fears Obamacare won’t. It’s not just a problem of overloaded servers. Everyone knew there would be lots of traffic in a nation of 312,000,000 people. Information technology folks say it’s easy to add servers.

It’s harder to get software systems to communicate. And as Klein quotes insurance consultant Robert Laszewski, “the backroom connection between the insurance companies and the federal government is a disaster.”

The reconciliation system isn’t working and hasn’t even been tested, Klein reports. Insurers are getting virtually no usable data from the exchanges.

Bloomberg.com columnist Megan McArdle, who unlike most Obamacare architects actually worked at an IT firm for a couple of years, sees the possibility of even more trouble ahead.

She points out that the administration delayed writing major rules during the 2012 campaign to avoid giving Republicans campaign fodder.

The biggest contractor did not start writing software code until spring 2013. They were still fiddling with the healthcare.gov website in September.

Instead of subcontracting the responsibility for integrating the software of the multiple contractors, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services decided to do it in-house — “a decision,” she writes, “equivalent to someone who has never even hung a picture deciding they should become their own general contractor and build a house.”

"If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon," she writes, "they could destroy Obamacare." You need the exchanges to enroll enough young healthy people to subsidize those who are sick and old, which is one of the central features of Obamacare.

Otherwise, premiums shoot up and up, pushing others out of the system — a death spiral that can continue year after year.

Republicans, LET IT HAPPEN. Focus instead on HOW you would REPLACE IT. Maybe, oh„… use the 10th Amendment to enforce that if an insurance company wants to sell outside it chartering state, they must allow purchase in all 50 states. This is close to what McCain proposed in 2008. Thus you are only compelling REAL competition (not the govt masquerading as a competitor) among the 1310 health insurance companies (of course, that was before Obamacare .. I don;t know the number today).

Today, in Maine, there are 2 choices of health insurance providers, and they offer catastrophic ($8k deductible/out of pocket), bronze ($6.5k deductible/out of pocket), Silver ($2k deductible/out of pocket), Gold ($0.85 k deductible/out of pocket). Platinum is not offered in Maine. Gold is not available to anyone contemplating subsidies.

Last year at least there were 4 companies offering 9 different plans of varying sort. I have a feeling most rural states are seeing the same thing.

The federal exchange keeps bandying about the number 36,000. Is that registrations or plan purchases? Either way it’s a number that DOOMS Obamacare. For it means if the same ratio of (non-unique? They are not saying) page loads to purchases maintains, then 90K or so people will be purchasing plans if everyone Obama claims has no insurance, actually buys it. Now there are 24 states running their own systems, and I have no idea how that’s going. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of talk out there. But if more than half the states are going to follow this page load to purchase ration (assuming the 36k are actual purchasers), Obamacare is a failure before it provides insurance.

Republicans should spend 100% of their efforts on a replacement plan NOW. Not for political reasons, but because the aftermath of this market and conscience warping experience will leave the people looking for an answer.

Every American would benefit if 1310 competitors operated in all 50 states.

RCP:

"At what point," she asks, "do we admit that the system just isn’t working well enough, roll it back and delay the whole thing for a year?" She suggests that if the system can’t enroll 50 percent of its users by November 1, such a hugely drastic step would be in order.

That sounds like a nightmare of the first order — for individuals, for insurers, for employers and for the Obama administration. A far worse nightmare than when Congress in 1989 repealed the Medicare prescription drug plan it passed the year before because of widespread dissatisfaction.

Of course it’s possible this nightmare will not happen. Things will get ironed out somehow.

But if they don’t, who’s responsible? First, a president who is not much interested in how government works on the ground. As a community organizer he never did get all the asbestos removed from the Altgeld housing project.

Politico reports that his “universal heath care” promise was first made when his press secretary and speechwriter needed a rousing ending to a 2007 campaign speech to a liberal group.

Second, lawmakers and administrators who assume that, in an Information Age, all you have to do is to assign a task to an IT team and they will perform it. Cross your fingers, and it gets done.

Third, government IT procurement rules are kludgy. Apple didn’t bid on this. The IT work went to insider firms that specialize in jumping through the hoops and ladders of government procurement rules.

The Obama experience so far (OBL excepted) has been one of poor huge ideas, poorly executed.

It happens.

Repubs who are thinking of 2016 … GET YOUR REPLACEMENT PLANS IN ORDER, AND FORGET OBAMACARE.