The State Obamacre Exchanges: Much Worse Than You Thought

The State Obamacre Exchanges: Much Worse Than You Thought

 

by Hugh Hewitt

 

I interviewed the deputy director of California’s Obamacare exchange on Friday, Dana Howard. The audio and transcript are below. There is much to marvel at and be alarmed by in the conversation, but the most worrisome admission from Mr. Howard is that CovredCA.com has no projected model of success -it simply doesn’t know what demographic mix must be reached in order for the insurance policies being offered to be sustainable. You should also know that the numbers of “enrolled” are laughably low –less than 1,000 people who list Spanish as their principle language enrolled in October, for example– and despite some puff talk about the younger demographics, the number of people under the age of 35 who have enrolled to date is far below what needs to be accomplished for the program to be remotely viable.
(Mr. Howard sounded somewhat peeved with my temerity throughout, though my questions are straightforward and ought to have been asked of him or his boss Mr. Lee a hundred times by now. Evidently no reporter has, and Mr. Howard was unhappy with me for being the first. I shall have to send him a copy of The Happiest Life.)
You should also be alarmed by Mr. Howard’s inability to quickly respond to questions about the burn rate of the $190 million dollar marketing budget. There is no “cost per lead” just as there is no metric of necessary success when it comes to the demographics of overall enrollment.
The parts of my conversation having to do with the background checks of the 1,400 “navigators” and the 1,500 CoveredCA.com employees are disquieting to say the least. As is the imprecision with regards to the availability of benefits to the undocumented population who are dependents of documented. Conversely, the fact that CovredCA.com is running every social security number through the federal database may be deterring sign-ups of people with family members in the country illegally, even though Mr. Howard assured the audience that no immigration enforcement takes place via CoveredCA.com despite the fact that the social security check is done via a federal bureaucracy which, presumably, is obliged to cooperate with ICE. (There’s a story there as to which federal agency is or isn’t cooperating with which other federal agency in the age of Obama.)
The structure of the agency is also bizarre. 1,500 full time employees, but another 1,400 enrollment counselors working for independent contractors. Everyone gets fingerprinted according to Mr. Howard, but he would not say who reviews the “background checks” that come back from the Department of Justice. Only serious conviction disqualifies you, not arrests, and not, by the way, non-payment of child support. Evidently California has to hire deadbeat dads to do the jobs that child-support paying dads won’t do. Our exchange on security/background checks led me to conclude that they are going through the motions not doing serious background investigations, and the inevitability of compromise of the system is high.
Mostly though I (and people listening) were surprised to learn that CoveredCA.com is paying a bounty for enrollees. Mr. Howard rejected the description, but $58 per enrollee sounds like a bounty to me, and a big one. One listener said that if the enrollment counselors are being paid on commission basis they should be trained and certified as insurance agents, but we don’t know if the individual “counselors” are being paid on commission, only that their employers are getting the bounty.
There is much more to the conversation, including Mr. Howard’s dodginess about his boss Mr. Lee’s unwillingness to sit for extended, detailed interviews and Mr. Howard’s own availability for follow-up, though eventually he got around to committing to a follow up interview of 15 minutes on the marketing budget and security issues with me next week.
My takeaway: MSM journalism has wholly failed to focus on the cost and benefits of these state exchanges –the fact that they are operating on the wish fulfillment model not hard facts and strong, data-supported projections, and that the marketing budgets are huge and generally a black hole of hocus pocus while the ordinary operating issues of such a large and new bureaucracy have been kicked down the road. Much info is available online at www.hbex.ca.gov –but don’t count on it being there for long.
Bottom line: CoveredCA.com officials are saying it is working and the website in particular is “working great!” But neither the program nor the website are “working great.” They are actually failing spectacularly by any sane measurement, and the story is not being reported because a kept California media, led by the Lost Angeles Times doesn’t do basic reporting of the sort I did Friday for a mere 30 minutes. Faith based-reporting covering faith-based insuring equals millions of Californians without health insurance come 1/1/14. Crash. Burn. Surprise, however, should not be tolerated. The rapid, spiraling descent of the jalopy is visible to anyone who looks.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/interview-coveredca-com-deputy-director-dana-howard/?pr=y