Perhaps no group of officials is happier that the federal ObamaCare website is such a dismal failure – because it allows them to look almost functional by comparison – than the folks at the Washington Health Benefit Exchange.
That is certainly one reading of yesterday’s front-page story in the Seattle Times, which deserves re-visiting just to remind people of the sheer arrogance of Washington exchange officials.
The Times story highlighted the news that the insurance applications of some 15,000 Washingtonians were “stuck”. But to the executive in charge of the exchange’s operations, the goal is to hopefully avoid having a human actually speak to these people trying to get insurance: “We don’t think it’s a good solution to have all these applications require a manual touch.”
Further, in the view Charles Kwak everything is OK because “we haven’t had a single outage that was not intended (referring to the oft-malfunctioning website). From a stability and operations point of view, it is rock solid.”
Of course, perhaps the public isn’t as aware of the health exchange’s “sticky” problem because their rapping advertising duo isn’t doing fake interviews with people who are having problems. They are only offending the public with their interviews of those that have allegedly successfully navigated the website.
But fortunately for Kwak, who admits that “the exchange has not kept records on the numbers of accounts that have problems”, the public will have to wait awhile to find out how deep the problems run at the Exchange. Perhaps they are pinning their hopes on the federal website continuing to struggle, and keeping the spotlight off them.
After all, according to the Times, “the exchange also tracked 100 applications made on Feb. 14 and found that only five involved an error.”
Because evidently a 5% error rate is fine for the leaders of the Washington Health Benefit Exchange, and a reason to celebrate.
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