Sally Pipes: No ‘Progress’ under Obamacare

Sally Pipes is the president and CEO of CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank, the Pacific Research Institute. She already has written three books about Obamacare, the latest being “The Cure for Obamacare,” only a couple of months old. So she knows this policy.

Her new article in Forbes updates the reader on the latest developments, “Don’t Be Fooled By Kathleen Sebelius’s Healthcare.gov ‘Progress’ Report.” Excerpt:

This month, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius trudged up to Capitol Hill for her second public grilling over the flaws with the Obamacare healthcare exchanges. Sebelius was insistent that HealthCare.gov has vastly improved since its October launch, noting that about a quarter of a million new people signed up in November.

That brings total site enrollment to about 365,000. That’s nowhere near the White House’s initial enrollment projection for 2014 of 7 million. But the administration would have you believe it represents a profound step-up from the glitch-plagued weeks of the initial rollout.

But these sign-up numbers are deceiving. Don’t let them fool you. Just because someone has successfully submitted an application through an exchange doesn’t actually mean he or she will have health coverage come January. The exchange network is still so opaque and plagued by operational flaws that many applicants are likely to get their plans covertly cancelled….

Tony Felts, a spokesman for Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, has a particularly politic way of describing the situation: “As far as the quality of the data that’s coming in, I can’t say that everything has been completely accurate.”

Truth be told, the government is hard at work fixing this mounting mass of 834 errors — by hand. Literally. During her congressional testimony, Secretary Sebelius said — proudly and publicly — that “we are in the process of actually hand-matching individuals to insurance companies.”

Yes. You read that right. In an age of iPhones, self-driving cars, and interstellar space exploration, that’s the sophisticated problem-solving tool now deployed by public healthcare bureaucrats.

Come January 1, millions of exchange enrollees are likely in for a rude awakening. They thought they’d signed up for coverage. But government incompetence led to that plan getting cancelled. And they’re still uninsured. This is life under the liberal lunacy of Obamacare.

Read the rest here.