What’s up with the federal health insurance exchange website?

Air Date: October 23, 2013

Guests: Alexander Howard and Tom Baker

For residents of the 36 states who are eligible to get health insurance through federally-run exchanges, navigating and signing up through the website healthcare.gov has been quite a challenge. The President acknowledged the long waits to log on and technical difficulties in a speech from the Rose Garden on Monday. He said there was no excuse for the glitches and promised that the “kinks in the system” would be repaired quickly. Meanwhile, in the 14 states running their own online marketplaces, the technology is better with according to one estimate some 50,000 people enrolled. The online health care exchanges were promised to be an easy convenient way for people to comparison shop for insurance and then sign up, so why after all this time and planning, aren’t they working? ALEXANDER HOWARD covers the intersection of government and technology and has been following the problems with the federal website. University of Pennsylvania law professor TOM BAKER has been studying the role of state health exchanges. We’ll talk to them both about the causes and impact of the healthcare.gov website failures.

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