President Obama admitted the recently unveiled online health insurance exchanges have been a technological headache. He also insists once those problems are fixed people will discover that the exchanges offer wonderful health plans at affordable prices, but a prominent congressman says the facts are not on the president’s side.
“They’re still trying to sell a program that the American people know won’t work. And it won’t work because the same things that are wrong with the website, that is the challenge of getting into it and having it work are the same things that are going to be wrong throughout the entire healthcare system when Washington is running it,” said Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a former physician who authored a free-market version of health care reform that is still awaiting House consideration.
The exchange woes are very real in Price’s district as well. At a town hall on Monday, many constituents had tried to navigate the website with no success. Price stresses that whenever the online problems are fixed, the biggest problems will just be starting.
“The real problem is not that the website won’t work, it’s that the program won’t work because it puts Washington in charge and that’s not what people want,” said Price.
On Monday, Obama vowed swift attention to the exchange problems but spent most of his address touting 20 million hits on the healthcare.gov site and almost half a million Americans accounts created on the exchange. But Price says the lack of any actual enrollment numbers is a major red flag.
“It’s a complete lack of transparency by this administration that touted itself as the most transparent ever. I’m not certain if they won’t tell us how many have signed up because it’s such a paltry number or whether they don’t know. Both of them are awful problems to have by an administration that is trying to run one-sixth of our economy and all of our health care,” said Price.
Stopping Obamacare through defunding or delay was the goal of congressional conservatives during the recent standoff over government funding and the debt ceiling. And while Price supported those efforts, he says the wall-to-wall coverage of the shutdown obscured just how terrible the Obamacare exchange rollout really was.
“That’s because the mainstream media tend to focus on one big story at a time and they can’t handle more than that’s because the American people’s attention is difficult to have focused on more than one thing,” said Price.
Despite the failure of the GOP to slow down or derail Obamacare in recent weeks, Price believes its fate is sealed by its own massive flaws.
“This system won’t work because it can’t work. It doesn’t work for patients. It doesn’t work for families, doesn’t work for doctors and certainly doesn’t work for employers or employees. At this point, we’re seeing how it doesn’t work for states from an exchange standpoint or the federal government from a financing standpoint. I think the whole thing will implode. The sad thing about all this is there will be real people who will be harmed from a quality health care or accessibility aspect that wouldn’t have otherwise,” he said.
