Ignore Star-Ledger Editorial Plea: “Crunch Time for America”

In an editorial which appeared in today’s The Star Ledger  (S/L) under the headline quoted above, the writer is cautioning all those who are eligible to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that they had better do it before the March 31^st deadline, or face “fines” which “are higher than many people think.”

Take a deep breath and relax.  That editorial is wrong.

 
 A column on page three in the same print version of today’s  The Star Ledger features an abbreviated version of a Washington Post article heralding that the “White House extends the deadline to sign up for health care.”

Looks like some S/L editors may not be reading their own newspaper.

Information that the White House had extended the end-of-March deadline was easily obtainable as early as yesterday, when I came across it independently in  an online story  by FoxNews.com which also credited the Associated Press, as well as referring to the primary source for this information, an article posted early yesterday by Amy Goldstein in  The Washington Post.

 In what is now appearing to be the S/L’s default editorial attitude toward Chris Christie, the writer of “Crunch Time for America” proceeded to blast the governor for his presumed culpability in messing things up for New Jerseyans, because Christie declined to establish the state’s own health care web site exchange for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 

Well, by golly, we are finding out almost daily just how well the roll-out of the ACA is coming along under the auspices of the Feds and even many of the state-run exchanges.

Look, a person merely has to read  the few links in this article (there are many more) to find out just how well things are working out within some of the states that have chosen to implement their own web sites for ACA enrollments.  Here’s a sample:

Oregon, Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Nevada are all in deep doo-doo over the implementation of their own web sites. 

The “executive director and two officials [of Oregon State’s health exchange] who oversaw the early technology development resigned” because enrollment projections are way behind what was anticipated.  Similarly in Nevada, “exchange executive director Jon Hager announced his resignation to pursue ‘new opportunities.’” 

In both cases, the problems are the same:  people simply are not signing up as expected by Beltway and state officials.  And so it goes:

In Maryland, health exchange director Rebecca Pearce was out after only “two months into open enrollment, and last month Maryland fired the state’s prime information technology contractor, Meridian Healthcare Solutions, after paying $65 million.”

Vermont, a bluest of blue states, was one of the “early supporters of the Affordable Care Act.”  Yet, “its state-run exchange also continues to be plagued with problems” and is barely at half of Washington’s official projections for that state’s enrollment numbers.

Massachusetts – the ostensible source for the ACA concept envisaged by the Feds – is also in trouble with its own health care exchange.  It is “cutting ties with CGI Group Inc., the “Montreal-based firm [which] also was the lead contractor on the troubled federal health care website that operates in 36 states.”   

Governor Christie must not have been that foolish in passing up the chance to implement New Jersey’s own health care web site exchange, since only 28% of states (14 out of 50) have chosen that route, much to their chagrin, it now appears.

As the famous radio personality Paul Harvey was fond of saying towards the end of his broadcasts, now you have the rest of the story.

Thanks for reading.