ADVERTISEMENT

Ellison's Must Read of the Day

Ellison Barber
December 2, 2013

My must read of the day is "ObamaCare Mission Accomplished," in the Wall Street Journal:

The truth is that the White House is defining as a "success" however well or poorly the website actually works so it can declare political victory. The millions of people who've had their old coverage cancelled must re-enroll by Dec. 23 to avoid gaps in coverage by the New Year. So like the Keynesian multiplier for stimulus spending, the White House is revising its goals along the way and claiming success based on nonfalsifiable standards.

For instance, the progress report reveals that the website is functioning more than 90 percent of the time—excluding periods when it is shut down for maintenance. HHS won't say how often that is or for how long. Why not simply proclaim that it works 100 percent of the time, as long as you don't count the times when it doesn't?

The most fascinating part of this HHS report is the standards used to conclude "the system runs smoothly for the vast majority of users."

Rather than detailing the progress of all the technological errors the website has experienced, the report only focuses on the part you see. It doesn’t even discuss the problems with 834 report transmissions, which have led to the site sending inaccurate registration data to insurance companies.

Maybe they have fixed this issue, and this report simply didn’t focus on it (I highly doubt it). Without that information this report doesn’t provide insight into the big question: Is the website fixed?

An operational report is useless when it does not address half of the operations.

The only thing that can be ascertained from this report is that the website’s not as bad as it was two months ago. If you want to jump for joy on that, feel free, but it is grossly inaccurate to say the website is fixed or "running smoothly." Nor is there enough information in the HHS report to make that determination.

Published under: Obamacare