WaPo:
The Obama administration said Wednesday night that it will give Americans who buy health insurance through new online marketplaces an extra six weeks to obtain coverage before they risk a penalty.
The announcement means that those who buy coverage through the exchange will have until March 31 to sign up for a plan, according to an official with the Health and Human Services Department.
It doesn't affect the individual mandate, just the time frame. There are major problems with the web site, but major efforts to fix it are underway. And that's the key to coverage. Those who are not interested in fixing it are only interested in hyping the problems (which don't need hype, since there are real problems.)
Here's a great discussion of the issues from the Roosevelt Institute:
People are naturally asking about the practical and political implications of this disaster. Is it a problem for the Affordable Care Act as a whole, with its mixture of individual mandates and risk-pooling? Is it a political disaster for President Obama and the Democrats? Does this show us major problems in the way that government procures its contractors?
These are important questions, but some are asking a bigger one: is this a problem for liberalism as a political governance project? Does this rollout failure discredit the core goals of a liberal project, including that of a mixed economy, a regulatory state, and social insurance?
Conservatives in particular think this website has broad implications for liberalism as a philosophical and political project. I think it does, but for the exact opposite reasons: it highlights the problems inherent in the move to a neoliberal form of governance and social insurance, while demonstrating the superiorities in the older, New Deal form of liberalism. This point is floating out there, and it turns out to be a major problem for conservatives as well, so let's make it clear and explicit here.
Longer term view from
Hootsbuddy's New Place, via
Maggie Maher:
While the media on all sides continue yammering away about glitches in the ACA Exchange, there is plenty of background reading to do. What we are witnessing now is just the second act in a drama with at least three, four or more acts. It's too soon to predict how long it will last, but here is my take on the whole picture. Reading links follow. Act One starts right after World War Two when the Blues were created. (Blue Cross/ Blue Shield)
More politics and policy below the fold.
Speaking of Maggie Maher, here's a more recent history reminder:
But Didn’t the Administration Capitulate On the “Public Option”?
Skeptics on the Left also believed that reformers agreed to quash the “public option”—a government insurance plan that would compete with private sector carriers.
The truth is that Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman ( sometimes known as “the Senator from Aetna”) almost single-handedly killed “Medicare for Everyone.” When Lieberman said “I’m not going to let this happen,” Congress was on the verge of passing legislation that would let Exchange shoppers choose between a public option and private sector insurance.
Then, in the fall of 2009 ,Lieberman, who was supposedly a Democrat, stood up and brazenly announced that if reformers didn’t drop the public option from the plan, he might join the Republicans in a filibuster that would stop the health care reform bill come to the Senate floor. In other words, he was threatening tote kill reform.(At that moment in time, Lieberman could have drummed up just enough votes from moderate Democrats to help him do this.)
Maggie's piece is a discussion of how ACA was not in fact a windfall for insurers, making the following piece from
CNN of interest:
After years of characterizing the insurance industry as the bad guys in the health reform debate, the White House on Wednesday invited insurance company executives in to deliver a clear message: we need your help.
At a session led by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, insurance executives gave the administration “a picture of what’s going on on the ground” and offered to help fix the problems.
Back to politics with
Nicholas Goedert:
David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report estimates that it would take a 6.8 percent lead in the national vote for Democrats to win control. And if ranked by vote share, the Republican candidate won the 218th seat by a similar amount (6.3 percent) in 2012. But the 2014 electoral landscape might not mirror the 2012 congressional results, when Democrats concentrated so much more of their campaign efforts on retaining the Presidency and Senate. If the House appears more competitive at a national level in 2014, it is likely that Democrats will field higher-quality candidates and devote more resources to these new swing seats.
Under two alternate methods, I estimate that Democrats could win the House with an even smaller lead in the generic ballot — a lead closer to 5 percent. But there is still much uncertainty as to how much the bias from a previous cycle will carry over into future elections.
Norm Ornstein looks at where Obama's governance weaknesses lie:
Michael Gerson, the Washington Post columnist channeling his inner Friedrich von Hayek, says this is the inherent flaw in a huge system run by government—an obviously false conclusion given that the health care systems in France, Canada, the Netherlands. and, yes, Great Britain work smoothly and are immensely popular, and that in several states running their own exchanges, the implementation has been quite smooth.
Putting aside the fact that the federal exchange is much larger to start than anyone anticipated, because so many Republican governors opted out of creating their own exchanges, and that the demand has been strikingly high, I view the problem in a broader way. It is the larger failure of public administration that has been endemic in the Obama White House, and is probably the president's most significant weakness...
Some would argue that Eisen's stiff restrictions on lobbyists entering the administration is to blame here. There is no doubt that a number of qualified people were kept out or frightened away by the restrictions. But there were plenty of qualified people remaining in the job pool. It was the remarkable lack of concern with managing the government, seeing the effective implementation of the laws as important as their passage, that is the key here. And the buck starts and stops with the president.
Ornstein has been scathing in criticizing Republicans for their "no governance at all" stance, so keep that in mind.