The White House is moving forward with part of its ObamaCare fix designed to promote the law's benefits to consumers. The administration unveiled a letter that will be sent to people who have the option of continuing health policies that would otherwise be canceled under ObamaCare for one year. Most of the policies will not meet the law's new coverage standards, a fact the White House wants to highlight to the public. "Consumer protections are an important part of the Affordable Care Act," said deputy press secretary Josh Earnest on Thursday. "This letter includes very important information for individual consumers."
A week after President Barack Obama urged insurers to renew policies that don't meet all the requirements of the health law, it remains unclear how many people might be affected by the proposed fix. That's because regulators in at least a half dozen states say they won't allow insurers to do it and many more have yet to decide. Even if states give insurers a green light to reinstate the policies, many insurers say they're not sure if they can pull it off in time and no one knows how many customers who received the cancellations will want to renew.
President Obama's healthcare law, struggling to survive its botched rollout, now depends more than ever on insurance companies, doctor groups and hospitals — major forces in the industry that are committed to the law's success despite persistent tensions with the White House. Many healthcare industry leaders are increasingly frustrated with the Obama administration's clumsy implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Nearly all harbor reservations about parts of the sweeping law. Some played key roles in killing previous Democratic efforts to widen healthcare coverage. But since 2010, they have invested billions of dollars to overhaul their businesses, design new insurance plans and physician practices and develop better ways to monitor quality and control costs.
Technology experts say healing what ails the Healthcare.gov website will be a tougher task than the Obama administration acknowledges. "It's going to cost a lot of tax dollars to get this done," says Bill Curtis, senior vice president and chief scientist at CAST, a French software analysis company with offices in the U.S. Curtis says programmers and systems analysts start fixing troubled websites by addressing the glitches they can see. But based on his analysis of the site, he believes the ongoing repairs are likely to reveal even deeper problems, making it tough to predict when all the site's issues will be resolved.
Nearly 80,000 people have enrolled in health plans through California's online marketplace, at a rate of several thousand a day in November — a sizable increase over a month ago, state officials said on Thursday. Especially encouraging, officials said, was the enrollment of young people, who are considered essential to the success of the Obama administration's health care law. Shortly after the numbers were released, the board of Covered California, the state exchange, voted against going along with a proposal by President Obama to consider renewing previously canceled plans, saying the move would undermine the state marketplace's growing success.
Should the embattled HealthCare.gov website be shut down until the White House proves it's secure? That was one approach advocated by several security experts, testifying Tuesday during the House Science, Space, and Technology committee's "Is My Data on HealthCare.gov Secure?" hearing. Ever since the October 1 launch of the federal HealthCare.gov portal, which implements the Affordable Care Act and is used by 36 states, security experts have been warning that the site is vulnerable to a number of different types of attacks. To date, would-be hackers appear to have paid scant attention to the site, but many security experts -- and legislators -- have voiced their concerns over the hack-attack potential for a healthcare portal that handles people's personal information, including social security numbers, income levels, and medical details.