Connecticut’s Epic Fail
I’ve grown accustomed to stories exposing the staggering incompetence behind HealthCare.gov and the various state exchanges, but this story (via Instapundit) stands out. Turns out that the allegedly successful Connecticut exchange gave 2,408 purchasers inaccurate information about every single individual health-care plan they looked at:
More than 2,400 Connecticut customers who bought health plans on Access Health CT were given incorrect information about their insurance plans, in one case underestimating the maximum out-of-pocket by at least $4,000.
The website for Access Health CT, the state’s new health exchange, had incorrect information online about deductibles and co-insurance impacting all 19 individual health plans from the three insurance companies that offer those plans through the exchange: Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut, ConnectiCare, and HealthyCT. The 12 small-group plans were unaffected.
Bureaucracies can generate mandates (“failure is not an option” — how many times have those words been uttered within the bowels of government bureaucracies?), but they’re historically miserable at generating real-world results. For those citizens not ideologically invested in big government, the last few months offer a decisive rebuttal to the argument that the party of government is the party of compassion, or even competence.