The 7% and the $500 million
And what a success the exchanges have been, numbers-wise! In Iowa, a whopping five people have signed up. In North Carolina, Charles Schwab of Charlotte paid $228 a month for his family’s $10,000 deductible policy pre-Obamacare. He recently received a letter from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, informing him that his policy was being canceled at the end of the year. In its place will be an Obamacare compliant policy, costing Schwab $1,208 a month, some $980 a month more.
The cost of the exchanges, both the federally facilitated exchanges and the HealthCare.gov website, runs into the $500 million range. By the end of the first day, though the Obama Administration had touted 4.7 million hits in the exchanges, the number of people who purchased insurance through the federal exchanges was in the single digits according to an insurance industry official quoted by the Washington Post.
By contrast, the Obama Administration’s entire 2012 online campaign operation, designed to handle some 10,000 hits per second on its websites, barely cost more than $11 million. The difference between $11 million and $500 million? Anyone who went to the Obama campaign’s sites to organize or to donate encountered a working website.
As Digital Trends points out in its devastating critique of HealthCare.gov, the exchanges cost more than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Spotify in their first half decades or so of existence. Those sites all work for their customers; HealthCare.gov does not. In fact, HealthCare.gov and its affiliated federally facilitated exchanges (FFEs) managed to sign up a whopping 51,000 Americans according to internal HHS sources. That would put HealthCare.gov and the FFEs on pace to top 2 million enrollees the first year, far lower than the 7 million projected and needed for Obamacare to remain viable.
Simply put, the exchanges represent a vast money pit, with HHS projecting $2 billion in costs to build out and operate the FFEs in 2014 alone. The GAO’s own report outlines $303 billion spent so far among just 10 contractors, including $88 million to GGI Federal to build the HealthCare.gov website and its related sites. When contacted by the Daily Caller for comment on a story about the failures of HealthCare.gov, CGI Federal’s response was typical: “No comment.”
No comment on the $88 million that went down the drain, no comment on the abysmal failure of the website designed with that $88 million, no comment at all. When Digital Trends contacted Health and Human Services for comment, they got no reply at all, not even a “No comment.”
Still, with over $500 million in costs, and a failed website to show for it, HealthCare.gov and its backers have a higher approval rating for their site than Congress does for the job it’s doing.
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