Administration Lowers Expectations for Obamacare’s Second Year

The administration’s confident, determined
approach to messaging Obamacare didn’t work out so well last year,
at least in the sense that it was proven to be bluster totally
unsupported by reality, so this year it’s trying a less-aggressive
strategy: Don’t promise so much.

In a somewhat amusing article, Politico
describes the new approach as an attempt to “undersell” the
health law prior to its second open-enrollment period, which begins
next month:

Gone are the promises that enrolling will be as easy as buying a
plane ticket on Orbitz. The new head of HHS is not on Capitol Hill
to promise that HealthCare.gov is on track. And no one is embracing
Congressional Budget Office projections of total sign-up
numbers.

Sobered — and burned — by last fall’s meltdown of the federal
website, the administration is setting expectations for the second
Obamacare open enrollment period as low as possible.

Officials say the site won’t be perfect but will be improved.
They refuse to pinpoint how many people they plan to enroll,
instead describing general goals of reducing the number of
uninsured and providing a positive “customer experience” — not
exactly metrics that can be immediately judged.

What this approach amounts to, then, is a refusal to publicly
adopt any performance metrics by which the law and its backers
might be held accountable. This administration is more or less
explicit about not wanting to be judged by any hard and fast
measures, instead preferring assessments based on softer, less
easy-to-define standards about the customer experience. Back to
Politico: 

“What we have said is that the experience will be better,”
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell told
reporters on Thursday. “It will not be perfect. We know that, and
we know that there will be issues that will be raised as we go on
in the process.”

Andy Slavitt, principal deputy administrator for the Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services and one of the people responsible
for HealthCare.gov’s technology, wouldn’t make any projections on
how the website would operate when open enrollment begins Nov.
15.

“We are much more comfortable talking about results than
expectations,” Slavitt said Wednesday. “We are extremely focused on
meeting our milestones. We’re very focused on making sure that
everyone has a good customer experience.”

Judging by last year’s selective approach to publishing health
law data—you know, the “results” of the health care law—and the
reluctance to say whether
it will continue issuing similar reports on the law’s
outcomes this year, the administration does not seem to be
particularly comfortable talking about results either. 

The administration’s strategy, in other words, is rather like
that of a darts player who throws one against the wall, draws a
target around where it stuck, and then claims to have hit a
bullseye.