Transparency, Obama Style - Civitas Institute

Contractors charged with creating and launching the disastrous federal health insurance exchange website healthcare.gov answered questions yesterday on Capitol Hill.

Contractors who built the web portal for the Obama administration’s health insurance marketplace said Thursday the site’s crippling problems trace back to insufficient testing and changes that government officials made just prior to going live.

What “changes” were made at the last minute?

But questions were also raised about a decision by the administration to not allow window shopping, as e-commerce sites generally do. Requiring consumers to open accounts and calculate subsidies before they could shop greatly increased the volume of traffic. That precipitated the crash of an accounts registration feature that became an early bottleneck. The site is now allowing limited window shopping.

Of course, this was done so that those logging on wouldn’t be turned off by the sticker shock of the dramatically higher premiums being offered courtesy of the Unaffordable Care Act.

In short, the “most transparent administration in history” decided to hide the true costs of their signature policy to those seeking to sign up as part of the program.

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