Health Care

Working website or not, ObamaCare’s still a disaster

The verdict is now in on the White House deadline for fixing HealthCare.gov: Good to go on the front end. The problems are all on the rear — er, back — end.

So on the one hand, Americans can now log in and open pages and move around without having the whole thing crash. On the other hand, when it comes to the substance (getting people insurance), we learn the fixes are only cosmetic.

The insurance companies are not getting what they need to get people policies. In particular, insurers aren’t receiving information on the level of subsidies individuals signing up will receive, making it impossible to figure out what to charge a customer.

In other words, when it comes to what HealthCare.gov is supposed to do — “make the right payment for the right people to the right insurance plan,” as Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s put it on Fox News on Monday — the “fixes” are mostly for show.

As Americans are figuring out, the difficulties with HealthCare.gov are but one small part of a much larger problem: a law that is not going to deliver as advertised. That’s why the White House continues to selectively delay pieces of ObamaCare.

This includes the decision made just before Thanksgiving to push back for a year the small-business health exchange, which now joins the employer mandate in Affordable Care Act limbo.

Sooner or later, these delayed provisions will kick in. And when they do, expect millions more Americans to discover they can’t keep their insurance plans either.