So the national embarrassment known as Healthcare.gov and the 36 federal ObamaCare exchanges won’t be fixed by the end of November after all, notwithstanding a month of assurances from the White House.
In updates for reporters on Thursday and Friday, the Affordable Care Act’s lead repairman Jeff Zients more or less conceded that the website three years in the making won’t work until sometime after the end of this month. He explained that every problem that is resolved and taken off the “punch list”—already several hundred items long—reveals new problems that the tech people didn’t know about. “Where we are is not where we want to be,” he said.
The tech squeeze is apparently so bad that chief U.S. technology officer Todd Park is too busy to testify before Congress. The House Oversight Committee is probing what went wrong in the development process, but Mr. Park can’t attend the Wednesday hearing because he’s “occupied full time on the critically important work of improving the website,” according to a White House letter rebuffing the invitation.
Is Mr. Park personally rewriting code? Chairman Darrell Issa issued a subpoena compelling him to appear, and maybe he can also address the emerging problem of ObamaCare fraud. That includes the way the law was sold and rolled out, but especially the profusion of identity thieves and scam-artist pages that are now pretending to be Healthcare.gov and are tricking people into divulging sensitive information or buying fake products. Important consumer warning: If an insurance shopping website is usable, it’s not the federal government’s.
