This is both less and more than it sounds.
Two U.S. government officials warned on Wednesday that the launch of new state healthcare exchanges could potentially be delayed, raising further doubts about the implementation of President Barack Obama’s signature legislation.
Alan Duncan, an auditor with the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, an Internal Revenue Service agency that monitors performance, said testing the systems needed to implement the exchanges “will be difficult to complete” by the October 1 start date.
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At the same hearing, Government Accountability Office official John Dicken said the amount of work the federal government needs to do in each state has yet to be determined, raising the risk of missing deadlines. He added that the federal government and the states have already missed some deadlines.
It’s less because, yes, the exchanges will be declared “finished” by October 1st. It won’t matter if the site merely consists of an online questionnaire where people can leave their basic information and get called back later by people with a tentative quote; the White House will proclaim success and pretend that this is what they intended, all along. And the media will largely go along. In short, there’s a lot of PR going on, here. Continue reading Federal Officials: #Obamacare implementation ticking along, right behind schedule.