The Obama administration will consider the new federal insurance marketplace a success if 80 percent of users can buy health-care plans online, according to government and industry officials familiar with the project.But one in five can't, as opposed to "won't". Isn't that about the number who were uninsured prior to the passage of the bloated monstrosity?
The goal for how many people should be able to make it through the insurance exchange is an internal target that administration officials have not made public. It acknowledges that as many as one in five Americans who try to use the Web site to buy insurance will be unable to do so.
The internal 80 percent target is the basis of a promise that has become an administration mantra in recent weeks: HealthCare.gov will "work smoothly for the vast majority of users" by the end of November.
Doesn't anybody in the Administration understand that most Americans know that's two weeks away? Has anybody told Champ?
The catchphrase was coined by former presidential management official Jeffrey Zients shortly after the White House assigned him to oversee the Web site's repairs, according to a government official with knowledge of the project who spoke anonymously about matters that are not public.
Former official? Retired, did he? No, apparently promoted to Repair Czar.
But Zients also said that "new bugs and other glitches will surface" in December and beyond that and will need to be fixed. Even if the site works well, he said, "that doesn't mean that the site will be sufficient for 100 percent of users or consumers to use for enrollment."
But Jeffrey, why is that? Too complicated for conservatives?
According to a government official familiar with the new target, the 20 percent who are unlikely to be able to enroll online are expected to fall into three groups: people whose family circumstances are so complicated that the But the problems are gonna hamper waaaay less than the 20% of the users. The Obamanauts optimism never wanes!
When HHS in 2011 invited contractors to bid on the chance to build HealthCare.gov, the department's "statement of work" did not include requirements typical of many IT contracts in which interested companies must spell out how the system would perform, according to an industry representative close to the project. The agreement that CGI Federal, the company chosen as the main contractor, signed on Sept. 30, 2011, also did not contain specific performance criteria, success measures or response times.
Well, hardly any open-ended, no-bid, reward for campaign contributions has ... well, controls.
At a meeting late in the month at CGI Federal's offices in Herndon, White House presidential innovation fellows assigned to help repair the exchange presented estimates of how quickly people would need to get from one Web page to the next in order to reach the 80 percent goal, according to
So how long could it take to get from "trash" to those metrics? Two weeks? Two years? Two geologic epochs?
But there are still no concrete goals for the site's accuracy, including whether users are correctly informed whether they are eligible for federal help in paying for health plans or whether insurance companies are given correct information about their new customers.Well, I am certainly going to lie to get my big subsidy, just like everyone else! It's gotta be easier and safer than cheating on your taxes!
Administration officials have talked publicly in recent days about one of the measures: a reduction in errors that freeze Web pages or otherwise hinder the ability to sign up for insurance. They have said the error rate has dropped from up to 6 percent a week ago to less than 1 percent now.
And if you can't believe Administration Officials, who can you believe?
On the other measure -- which assesses how quickly people can move through any part of HealthCare.gov -- one official said that the Web site has performed close to the half-second on most days.
Certainly, this official is as trustworthy as any of the others...
But the current load on the system is light because many people are staying away following the rollout problems. Even then, the official said, "swings from good performance to bad performance have been frequent."
Except no one knows how to measure the performance.