Ezra Klein, has done a good job in expressing how the media is viewing the Nov. 30 deadline, but I think they are missing a large part of the administrations strategy for setting the deadline. Now I like Ezra Klein, and he does a good job of reporting, but on the problems of Healthcare.gov he's fallen in to the trap of the media news cycle and has overdone the coverage. There are plenty of other very important news events happening around the world that are not being covered in order to repeat for the gazillionth time that Healthcare.gov has software problems. Yes, we know, we get it.
Ezra has a good piece about the administrations promise to get Healthcare.gov in good order by the end of Nov. But I think he gets it wrong about the consequences of not having a bugless website on Nov. 30.
Here's how Ezra sees it:
Now they are. Or, at least, they think they are. As Jonathan Chait writes, there are basically three possibilities here:
1) They know what they're doing.
2) They have fooled themselves into thinking they know what they're doing, but don't.
3) Meteor.
...
Well, there's one more possibility: That the White House is simply buying time. Saying they can this done by the end of November takes some of the pressure off until then. And if they fail, well, that's such a disaster for the law that adding the extra hit to credibility that would be lost from failing the timeline is almost irrelevant. It's like skinning your knee after cutting off your foot.
Yes, the administration is trying to prevent the efforts for delay, which will give the Tea Baggers time to rally the forces and lie their butts off about the "train wreck", by the likes of
Joe Manchin and some other
foolish Democratic Senators.
Now the problem I have with this is the apocalyptic description of failure. Software development is all about incremental progress. You go through numerous iterations of:
1) write some code
2) test the code
3) debug and test again
4) put working code in production
So it's not like on Nov. 30 they flip a switch, cross their fingers, and it either works or the universe gets swallowed up by a black hole.
The people working on Healthcare.gov are going to identify a problem, change the code, test it, debug it, and then put it into production. With each problem fixed, the site will get just a little bit better and a few more people will sign up.
So by the end of Nov. there still may be problems with the site, but I am 99.9% sure (leave that .1 for some wiggle room) that it will be much better than it is now and the number of people purchasing policies on a daily basis will be much greater than now. During the entire month of Nov. more and more people will be getting through on the site. And while they're working on the site, the state exchanges will continue to get more and more people insured.
The administration has said that 700,000+ "applications" have been received across the country. The biggest problem appears to be verifying their eligibility for tax credits. I would hope that that is one of the first things the tech surge is going to fix. If they get that fixed, there will be a surge of policies that get bought through the exchanges.
If by Nov 30, a million people have purchased plans, and there are 2 million applications being processed, it will be almost impossible to make any major delays or postponements without causing a huge mess that would cost $billions to try and unwind. Those Republicans, and foolish Democrats who are supporting delays now, will have a MUCH harder time justifying their delaying tacticts when millions of people are moving through the system with far less difficulties than today.
I think this was a very, very smart move by the administration to delay the delayers until it will be too late to do anything but move forward.