Peter Suderman on Obamacare’s Phony Success Story

In the first weeks after Obamacare’s health
insurance exchanges launched on October 1, 2013, almost nothing
worked. The main federal exchange, which served as an insurance hub
for 36 states, was down more often than it was up, and when it was
online, it didn’t work. Many exchanges run by state governments
were in disarray as well. Millions of people with individual health
insurance policies received letters indicating that their existing
coverage would be canceled. The law’s mandated small business
exchange had been delayed, as had its Spanish language website.
Thousands of applications were stranded inside the glitchy exchange
systems. It seemed entirely plausible that between the
cancellations and the website failures, Obamacare’s expansion of
insurance coverage-the main selling point of a $2 trillion overhaul
of the health care system-might end up making no meaningful dent in
the uninsured rate at all. It could have been worse, writes Peter
Suderman in the August/September issue of Reason.

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