Although other issues with the law—particularly Obama’s false statement that all consumers would be able to keep their insurance plans if they liked them—have taken center stage, it all began with the botched rollout of the website. Toward the end of October, the White House promised that the website would “work smoothly” by the end of November. The administration is already beginning to walk back on its self-imposed end-of-November deadline:

On Friday, the man tasked with the digital fixes said the site “remains a long way from where it needs to be” as more and more problems emerge.

“As we put new fixes in, volume is increasing, exposing new storage capacity and software application issues,” Jeff Zients told reporters on a conference call.

And at Tuesday’s White House Press Briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney again said there was “more work to be done” on repairing HealthCare.gov.

Carney, along with Zients and other administration officials, have repeatedly said the November 30 deadline is to get the health care website working for a “vast majority” of Americans looking to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges.

Fixed

While the Obama administration struggles to fix the website, three 20-year-old programmers from San Francisco have already developed their own website that has already fixed a major problem with the government’s page.

From CBS News:

With a few late nights, Ning Liang, George Kalogeropoulos and Michael Wasser built “thehealthsherpa.com,” a two-week-old website that solves one of the biggest problems with the government’s site.

“They got it completely backwards in terms of what people want up front,” said Liang. He added: “They want prices and benefits, so that they could make the decision.”

Liang showed CBS News how it worked. “You come to our website and you put in your zip code — in this case a California zip code. You hit ‘find plans,’ and you immediately see the exchange plans that are available for that zip code.”

The programmers explained how they were able to make the website:

Using information buried in the government’s own website built by high-priced government contractors, they found a simpler way to present it to users.

“That’s the great thing about having such a small team,” said Kalogeropoulos. “You sit around a table and say, ‘Okay, how does this work?’ There’s no coordination meetings, there’s no planning sessions. It’s like, ‘Well, let’s read the document and let’s implement this.'”

And they’re also able to update it frequently:

And the features keep on coming. CBS News looked at the team’s website Thursday and pointed out that the tax subsidy wasn’t in there, which is supposed to be one of the most complicated parts of the HealthCare.gov site. But as Liang explained: “Yes, we added this last night…the subsidy calculation is fairly complicated, but it wasn’t too bad.”

You can’t actually enroll on the HealthSherpa site, but they do provide contact information for companies offering the plans. Users who find a plan they like can go directly to the insurance companies without ever using HealthCare.gov.

How?

The question then becomes: How was a small team without much experience able to produce a website that had—in some ways—better functionality than the government website, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars? Most observers, and the president himself, have pointed to the broken federal procurement system.

The Wall Street Journal explains:

Today, any company looking to work with the government must navigate an obstacle course of niggling, outdated regulations and arbitrary-seeming requirements. For instance, your technology must be Y2K-compliant just to get in the door. The process locks out all but a tiny handful of full-time contractors—companies who also happen to be big federal lobbyists. (Note how CGI Group Inc., which won the largest contract to build Healthcare.gov, lobbied on behalf of the health-care law.)

And there’s another problem: the entire project was run by bureaucrats who simply don’t understand IT. Three 20-year-olds with freedom can act a lot faster than an army of programmers constrained by federal politics and procedures.

The pathetic excessive paternalism of this judgment is bad enough; you American idiots don’t know what’s good for you, etc. But objectively speaking, it’s just not true that the people with cancelled plans all had “bad” policies with high deductibles and little coverage. The 160,000 policies that Kaiser Permanente cancelled in California reflected a big range of coverage, including at least 30,000 policies that could never be depicted as “crappy” or “cut-rate.”

ProPublica offers a telling example of such a policy in a story headlined “Loyal Obama Supporters, Canceled by Obamacare”:

“San Francisco architect Lee Hammack says he and his wife, JoEllen Brothers, are cradle Democrats.’ They have donated to the liberal group Organizing for America and worked the phone banks a year ago for President Obama’s re-election.

“Since 1995, Hammack and Brothers have received their health coverage from Kaiser Permanente, where Brothers worked until 2009 as a dietitian and diabetes educator. ‘We’ve both been in very good health all of our lives – exercise, don’t smoke, drink lightly, healthy weight, no health issues, and so on,’ Hammack told me.

“The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been paying $550 a month for their health coverage — a plan that offers solid coverage, not one of the skimpy plans Obama has criticized. But recently, Kaiser informed them the plan would be canceled at the end of the year because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The couple would need to find another one. The cost would be around double what they pay now, but the benefits would be worse.”

Reporter expected horror story to be false

ProPublica reporter Charles Ornstein, in a bit of unusual but still telling candor, admits he was inclined to doubt the truth of Obamacare horror stories. But he found the Hammacks’ tale credible.

“I tried to find flaws in what Hammack told me. I couldn’t find any.

“—The couple’s existing Kaiser plan was a good one.

“—Their new options were indeed more expensive, and the benefits didn’t seem any better.

“—They do not qualify for premium subsidies because they make more than four times the federal poverty level, though Hammack says not by much. …

Ornstein notes the basics of the Kaiser plan being cancelled vs. the plan Kaiser recommended in its place:

“It carried a $4,000 deductible per person, a $40 copay for doctor visits, a $150 emergency room visit fee and 30 percent coinsurance for hospital stays after the deductible. The out-of-pocket maximum was $5,600.” …

“[The] new Kaiser plans  would cost nearly $1,300 a month for the two of them (more than $15,000 a year).

“And for that higher amount, what would they get? A higher deductible ($4,500), a higher out-of-pocket maximum ($6,350), higher hospital costs (40 percent of the cost) and possibly higher costs for doctor visits and drugs.”

No, Covered California did not offer relief

At this point in stories of this type, defenders of Obamacare will always say, “But under the ACA, they have options. What about the other options?” And if reporters are worth a damn, they will look at the other options — and almost always find out what Ornstein did: Other options are very costly, too.

“When they shopped around and looked for a different plan on California’s new health insurance marketplace, Covered California, the cheapest one was $975, with hefty deductibles and copays.”

Read Ornstein’s entire story for plenty more details about the latest chapter in “Obamacare Lies: The California Edition.” It’s going to end up a really, really long book.

Much of the early media coverage focused on the rollout of the federal health care exchange website, which was designed for Americans without health insurance to shop for different plans in a central location. Depending who is speaking, the rollout has either been an unmitigated disaster or a rocky start for a complex new system — though the former is certainly a more popular descriptor.

Either way, liberals and conservatives both acknowledge that the federal website needs serious improvement. The Obama administration has endured sustained criticism over the website, and it doesn’t look much better for many state websites.

As CalWatchdog writer Joseph Perkins explained last week, the California exchange website is also experiencing glitches. Stories abound about other states and their website problems (though Kentucky has notably done well).

President Obama, who has staked much of his presidential legacy on the success of the new health care law, insists that the law will become broadly popular once the website failures are resolved. But new reports have shed light on other aspects of the law which threaten to overshadow the already significant problems associated with the websites.

Rates

First, consider the rate shocks. The great pitch behind Obamacare is that it would lower insurance premiums for most Americans. Many Americans would see their rates go up, and poorer Americans could qualify for subsidies to help cover their costs. Now that those changes are beginning to take effect, many are having second thoughts about the law.

The LA Times has done an excellent job reporting on rate shocks:

Thousands of Californians are discovering what Obamacare will cost them — and many don’t like what they see.

These middle-class consumers are staring at hefty increases on their insurance bills as the overhaul remakes the health care market. Their rates are rising in large part to help offset the higher costs of covering sicker, poorer people who have been shut out of the system for years.

Although recent criticism of the health care law has focused on website glitches and early enrollment snags, experts say sharp price increases for individual policies have the greatest potential to erode public support for President Obama’s signature legislation.

“This is when the actual sticker shock comes into play for people,” said Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “There are winners and losers under the Affordable Care Act.”

Losers

One of the “losers” of the health care law is a writer for the ultra-liberal Daily Kos blog, who expressed his dismay with the new law once he realized how much his insurance premiums would be going up:

My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don’t go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe.

Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife’s rate is [going] to $302 per month and mine is jumping to $284.

I am canceling insurance for us and I am not paying any f***ing penalty. What the hell kind of reform is this?

Second, many people are losing the health care plans that they had before the health care law was enacted. (President Obama had promised repeatedly on the campaign trail and while selling the law that those Americans who liked their health care plan would be allowed to keep it.)

Asked by Fox News’ Ed Henry to explain why so many Americans were losing their plans, when the President had insisted for years that they wouldn’t, White House spokesman Jay Carney said:

“So, it’s true that there are existing health care plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”

Lost coverage

And, as it turns out, the White House has known for years that between 40 percent and 67 percent of individual policy holders would lose their coverage because of the new health care law and the standards it created.

Meanwhile, a new report from CNN Money also suggests that Obamacare might not actually reduce the federal deficit as it was supposed to — another major selling point of the law which is seemingly failing to come to fruition.

But, with all of these problems, it’s important to keep perspective. Most Americans don’t follow the news closely, and they’re out of the loop with day to day developments. In fact, according the Memphis Business Journal, 47 percent of uninsured Americans aren’t even sure where to get information about Obamacare and how it will affect them.

It seems the ultimate popularity of the health care law might just rely on how uniformed Americans are.

The next day, at the White House press briefing, Obama administration spokesman Jay Carney told a room of reporters that traffic to statewide exchange sites and healthcare.gov “exceeded” what they had anticipated and that it was a “good problem to have.” Carney added:

“I think what we are confident of is that the high volume we've seen around the country, the 4.7 million unique visitors in the first 24 hours to healthcare.gov, reflects the extreme interest in the opening of the marketplaces and the opening of the opportunity for individuals to shop for and select affordable health insurance for the first time.”

That’s the spin. From MSNBC to the White House, the message is forming that the only reason online marketplaces experienced so many glitches was because they were so popular. This may be true; growing websites often experience major glitches when they get waves of traffic. It happened to eBay, Twitter, Google, Facebook and just about every other major website.

California lies

But here in California, it might not be fair to blame traffic on the cause of glitches. First, though, some perspective: California has been hailed as a leader in Obamacare implementation. Given that the state has deep blue majorities in both chambers of Legislature and is controlled by a Democratic governor, California has long been seen as a leader. Democrats in the state have done everything they can to cooperate with the federal government to set up their exchange. Gov. Jerry Brown, just this week, signed more legislation to help with implementation.

This has been a mixed bag for California, as the state has also become a poster child for sloppy implementation. But the state also  posted impressive numbers for its website. On Tuesday, state officials reported that the Covered California website had received around 5 million hits — more than the national website. The number was jaw-dropping; it was also wrong.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

“State officials said the Covered California website got 645,000 hits during the first day of enrollment, far fewer than the 5 million it reported Tuesday.

“The state exchange had cited the 5 million figure as a sign of strong consumer interest and a major reason people had so much difficulty using its $313-million online enrollment system.”

A spokesman for Covered California explained the error, claiming, “Someone misspoke and thought it was indeed 5 million hits. That was incorrect.”

Indeed.

The Times story continues:

“Meantime, Californians were still running into computer problems and long hold times during the second day of enrollment under the federal healthcare law.

“Those glitches have prompted Covered California to shut down its online enrollment system twice. …

“People calling for information continued to face wait times of 30 minutes or more. Some call-center representatives at the exchange told people they were having trouble accessing the state system themselves, further slowing down the enrollment process.”

The federal government has said it doesn’t know how many people have actually signed up for coverage. The state of Maryland, though, had less than 100 in the first day. It’s unclear how far along California is in registering its goal of 2 million people, though one estimate said that only a few thousand people had applications pending.