…and ObamaMart isn’t even letting its victims customers get ObamaMart’s errors corrected.
Now it’s a variant on Catch 22: first ObamaMart hits its customers with errors, then it can’t—or won’t—allow customers (22,000 of them) to correct those errors. Those errors, so far, fall into three main categories. They
- charge too much for health insurance (quite apart from the fundamentally higher premiums compared to the canceled plans)
- steer customers to the wrong insurance plan (quite apart from shunting them into Medicaid for which they’re not actually eligible)
- deny customers coverage altogether (the ultimate insult: get the plan with which you were satisfied canceled by Obamacare, and then be told you’re not even eligible for Obamacare, the law that covers everybody)
Yet there is no mechanism in ObamaMart for dealing with these errors or correcting them. Even when customers mail in their corrections, those just get scanned in and fed to the same computer systems that don’t work for the customers directly. The backend that would allow Customer “Service” personnel to access those scanned-in customer-originated corrections in order to work them hasn’t been built.
ObamaMart’s workaround for one unlucky woman on a $22k per year salary whose erroneous Obamacare Plan is costing her $100/mo more on her premiums than she should be charged and a $4k higher deductible than she should be getting charged? Pay up. We’ll correct this later. Promise.
Notice that those overcharges alone come to nearly a quarter of her annual income. She’s supposed to pay an additional 25% of her annual income for ObamaMart’s error, and hope that, someday, she’ll get the right plan and her money back.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the HHS agency responsible for ObamaMart and for administering the Obamacare law, doesn’t care about this failure, either. According to The Washington Post (the above link) [emphasis added],
Three knowledgeable individuals, speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions, said it is unclear when the appeals process will become available. So far, it is not among the top priorities for completing parts of the federal insurance exchange’s computer system that still do not work.
And that’s just Obama’s store. Obama’s law is even more unworkable, expensive, and disastrous, as we’ve also been seeing, with the millions of health policy cancelations over these same last four months. As the “glitches” continue to get fixed, as I have no doubt they will, even more of the failures of Obamacare itself will become apparent.
It’s also typical of this administration. Wind it up, set it loose, and forget about it. Who cares if it doesn’t work? That’s someone else’s responsibility.
