Obamacare's Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn't Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are

Via the usually reliable Forbes:

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.

HHS didn’t want users to see Obamacare’s true costs

“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.” Why was it delayed? “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.”

Read the whole thing.

 

This sounds eminently believable. ObamaCare was designed to include coverage for things that most people don't want. For example maternity care is not on the "want" list for young single men (a growing category). Neither is mental health coverage or drug dependency. But all these mandated coverages make the basic insurance policies more expensive. But if 50 million people are uninsured today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier?  Because that's not really the object.

The answer is that Obamacare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions.

Bud Norman brought the Forbes article to our attention:

Those who are paid to do so directly by the administration are still arguing that it’s all a matter of too much traffic and therefore proof of Obamacare’s overwhelming popularity, but more objective observers have offered two plausible explanations for the problems. The admirably geekish writers at the Infoworld.com web site blame it on cronyism, citing a number of computer experiences who contend that the companies awarded the contract to devise the site are better known for their political connections than their technical expertise, which strikes us as entirely believable. The writers at the usually-reliable Forbes Magazine theorize that the program was deliberately sabotaged by its all-too-shrewd designers, lest the folks trying to log onto the system discover that their health care costs under Obamacare will be far greater than they had been led to believe, and this also seems well within the realm of possibility. Some sorry combination of both explanations could also be true, given how often the government is both inept and nefarious.

If people were allowed to shop the ObamaCare exchanges before the system figured out their subsidy, the sticker-shock would drive everybody away.  So the system is designed to find out what subsides you are eligible for, which is by far the most difficult thing to do because the program needs to search a large number of other governmental data bases which clogs up the system and causes it to simply crash.  Of course, despite subsidies, most people will still pay vastly more for insurance than they want or need. 

So the liars who told us that the attack in Benghazi was the result of a video no one saw are now telling us that the ObamaCare computer roll-out is not working because too many people love them some ObamaCare. And thanks to the stranglehold that the left has on the dinosaur media, not enough people will learn the truth.

 

I guess it's up to the Internet to do the educating.