The Wall Street Journal reported in their Washington Wire that administrators managing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act are switching to paper applications to get individuals to sign up for insurance due to the technical difficulties still plaguing the Healthcare.Gov website.
The deadline for individuals to sign up for coverage was in February of 2014, though it will likely be pushed back to March, or even April, due to the obstacle course individuals need to undertake to get their insurance.
Health officials working on implementing Obamacare are responsible for making it easier for individuals to sign up, some have suggested that paper applications be implemented for customers frustrated by the glitchy website. Do the paper applications have any purpose? Not really no, according to the WSJ report:
“Navigators are seeing people very frustrated and walking away, so they are turning to paper applications to protect their reputations as people in the communities who can help, even though paper applications will not have a quicker result necessarily,” the Oct. 15 notes read.
So essentially, in order to assure the public’s confidence in management, the government is pretending to be competent by switching to Plan B (not the contraceptive kind.) To give off the illusion of efficiency, paper applications are being presented to individuals as an alternative for those frustrated by the website. Whether or not one fills out the application on paper today, or miraculously a few weeks (or months) from now when the website will, hopefully, work, not much really changes; the time required to process paper applications and the complexity of flipping through various pages of insurance policies and prices will still take time.
As if this isn’t enough to test the patience of the public, yet another issue has come up, people with pre-existing plans are experiencing changes in their insurance prices and coverage. An estimated 10 million people are expected to lose insurance plans despite the President’s promise that those who already were covered could keep their plans.
The controversy surrounding the implementation of the Affordable Care Act has some skeptical about the quality of the medical care they will continue to get under the new insurance policies. The public is losing patience but prefer Obamacare be mended instead of completely dismantled.
Nazzy S. is an editor for The Libertarian and writer for The Midnight Zone. Find her on Twitter.