Despite reports to the contrary, the White House still claims that Healthcare.gov will work well by the end of the month. Ezra suspects that “that no one knows for sure whether the Web site will be repaired by the end of the month.” How much damage would missing the deadline do?
The answer depends on two things. First, does the White House’s evident inability to repair the Web site in a timely fashion (or even, at this point, an untimely fashion) lead congressional Democrats to panic and support bills — like a yearlong delay in the individual mandate — that make it harder for the law to succeed even once its digital infrastructure is fixed?
The second question, of course, is how far off-schedule the White House really is. If HealthCare.gov is working smoothly for the majority of users on December 1st but it only works smoothly for the “vast majority” of users on December 15th, that won’t matter much. If the Web site remains more or less unusable into 2014, that’s obviously a much bigger problem for the law.
Cohn outlines contingency plans:
For starters, the marketplaces could rely more heavily on alternative methods of enrollment, particularly “direct enrollment” from insurers and through online brokers like ehealthinsurance.com. From the get-go, Obama Administration officials assumed that at least some people would get insurance this way. And they designed healthcare.gov with that possibility in mind. It is supposed to have a special portal—in effect, a side door into the federal online system for people buying insurance directly from insurer websites. As I understand it, the idea is that you’d apply for insurance at a company website or broker, you’d get sent over to healthcare.gov to figure out whatever financial assistance was available to you, and then you would take that determination back to the insurer or online broker—where you’d be able to enroll and buy a policy, potentially at a discounted price.
Why this hasn’t already been done:
The danger with direct enrollment through insurers is that applicants will check out one company’s options and never realize other companies might have better alternatives. That’s obviously not such a problem with the online brokers, but officials had separate worries about relying too heavily on those sites. For example, could they be counted upon to make sure consumers understood what they were buying?
At this point, however, transforming the existing, opqaue market into a more competitive, transparent one must come second to making sure everybody can get coverage on time. That’s why administration officials have been huddling with insurers about how to make more use of direct enrollment.
The Dish 