The WSJ echoes what's been bandied about on the 'net for at least a few weeks.
...There are two key technological flaws in ObamaCare. First is the
"hub"—the software to link servers at the Treasury Department, the
Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security and state agencies to verify
the income and health-insurance status of enrollees and ensure that
they are eligible for subsidies. The other flaw is the "portal"—the
federally run IT platform that is supposed to let consumers compare
health plans and select one that best suits their needs.
In planning ObamaCare's IT
infrastructure, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
dawdled for more than a year under Administrator Donald Berwick until
Marilyn Tavenner took over in December 2011. Even then the agency was
slow to outsource key contracts and turned to what insiders say were not
top-quality programmers. CMS did not sign a contract for a backstop
system to process paper verifications and do paper verifications of
online applications until July.
The Health and Human Services
Department did not begin testing the chief pieces of this IT system
until August. The testing found that states couldn't consistently link
to the federal portal (a problem that persists in some states), and that
the hub couldn't reliably verify if a person is eligible for a subsidy,
or accurately calculate how much the applicant is eligible to receive.
HHS prevented independent watchdogs, including its own inspector
general, from examining the systems before they go live on Oct. 1. The
result is a host of troublesome gaps and dangers.
Some techies have opined that to set up the network that ObozoCare requires, it would take between 3 and 5 YEARS, not least because vast amounts of new physical infrastructure must be built, acquired, and wired-in.
But the system will run, eventually. It will also be open to fraud, security gaps big enough for an army to march through, and routine "fails" such as enrollment failures, unsubstantiated benefit-denials, etc.
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