Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Molly Ball

White House Delaying Obamacare's Small Business Online Exchange for a Year

Molly Ball, The Wire — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 15:04:01 -0500

Welcome to the Thanksgiving Wednesday news dump, Obamacare edition. The administration was set to announce a one-year delay of the online health insurance exchanges for small businesses on Wednesday, meaning employers with staffs of 50 or under need to work with an insurance broker to buy employee coverage.

As The Washington Post explains, this means that small businesses are still eligible to buy insurance through the exchanges, just not online, as they have been since October 1. Thanks to a previous delay, the Small Business Health Options Program (or SHOP), didn't go live with the individual exchange sites on October 1. It was originally delayed for a month.

Since then, the problems with individual sign-ups on the HealthCare.gov site have dominated talk of the federal exchange roll-out. Small businesses have been able to apply for coverage through paper applications since the exchanges opened last month. Here's the note from the Department of Health and Human Services (via Politico):

We’ve concluded that we can best serve small employers by continuing this offline process while we concentrate on both creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace and adding key new features, including an employee choice option and premium aggregation services, by November 2014."

The notice references another delayed portion of the small business marketplace: a "consumer choice" feature that will allow employees of small businesses to pick their own plans. That feature was delayed until the 2015 open enrollment period. In July, the White House delayed the "employer mandate" provision of the health care reform law, giving medium and large businesses an extra year to provide affordable health insurance to their employees.

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Will Republicans Save Obamacare?

Molly Ball, The Atlantic — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 11:32:57 -0500

The unrelenting disaster of the Obamacare rollout has invigorated Republicans in Congress. Suddenly, their years of warnings about the law's terrible effects seem vindicated; GOP lawmakers and commentators have turned into crusaders for the system's victims who are seeing their insurance policies canceled, having their premiums hiked, or just can't get through that darned healthcare.gov website.

The sudden outbreak of Republican concern about getting everybody insured has raised a tantalizing possibility: What if the party that has been Obamacare's most unremitting critic ended up getting carried away and saving it instead? Congressman Fred Upton, a Republican from Michigan, has proposed a bill aimed at letting people keep the insurance plans they had before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, something President Obama long promised would be the case that has turned out to be rather dramatically untrue. A Democratic Senator, Mary Landrieu, has proposed a similar (but more mandatory) fix; conservatives have begun to worry that the merged bill might actually pass, work, and make Obamacare look like less than a failure (although health-reform experts are skeptical of both would-be fixes).

But reports of an outbreak of health-reform bipartisanship appear premature, to say the least. The joint appearance of a Republican and Democrat at Wednesday's Washington Ideas Forum, Senators John Hoeven of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, was supposed to be a demonstration of bipartisan comity, but on health care, the pair ended up showing how unbridgeable the gulf between the parties remains.

Manchin, who frequently bucks his party, supports a GOP-backed delay in the individual mandate as well as Landrieu's bill. He said he believes in the goal of getting Americans insured and wants to be constructive in fixing the flawed legislation. "There are people who are just totally opposed to it and want to repeal it," he said. "I just think that we can do better as a nation than having people facing being one illness away from being bankrupt," or uninsurable because of a birth defect or other condition. Those goals ought to be universal, he said, but when some are focused only on getting rid of the law, "we can't even agree on the time of day."

Hoeven said he and Manchin have been good friends since their time as governors of their respective states. But when it came to health care, he sounded like one of those stubborn antagonists Manchin warned about.

"I think that, from the viewpoint of our side of the aisle, and I think most conservatives, this really is a law that doesn't work and does need to be repealed and replaced," he said, "because it takes you to government-run health care." Republicans believe that individuals should choose their own health care without being "funneled through government exchanges," he said. Instead, he proposed a series of piecemeal reforms, such as giving states more flexibility to implement Medicaid, beefing up state-based high-risk pools, and tort reform. Experts say such measures would not come close to creating universal health insurance.

So there you have it: A Republican and a Democrat who call themselves the best of friends, who are otherwise eager to cross party lines, part ways on whether the health reform law ought to be rescued or abandoned. If Hoeven and Manchin are any indication, a bipartisan agreement to rescue America from Obamacare is not in the works.

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The community organizing geeks who could revolutionize campaign tech

Molly Ball and Nancy Scola, The Atlantic — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:05:49 -0400

The websites for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney look practically the same: sleek, snazzy, red-white-and-blue. But peel back a layer, and there's a difference -- the fundamental difference, in fact, between how Democrats and Republicans use technology.

Obama's site was custom-built starting in 2008 by the consulting firm Blue State Digital. It's a fully integrated platform for everything from fundraising to social networking -- the Rolls-Royce of campaign tech, complete with price tag. Romney's interface, on the other hand, didn't even originate with the campaign; it was based on a platform purchased off-the-shelf from a corporate customer-service vendor called Salesforce.com, then modified (also starting in 2008) to meet the needs of a political campaign.

In short, Team Obama has home-grown its tools, while Team Romney has bought commercial products and taped them together. But both approaches are labor-intensive and hugely expensive, and neither approach is really optimal. One requires devoting a big chunk of the campaign's energy to essentially functioning as a tech start-up; the other requires settling for off-the-shelf tools that don't have politics in their DNA.

Now, two visionary geeks want to change that.

Joe Green and Jim Gilliam, the founders of a new software platform called NationBuilder, envision a world where any campaign -- from local school board to issue-based protest movement, without regard to ideology -- could access the same versatile, inexpensive suite of software and instantly have at its fingertips the ability to connect with voters and donors online, a capacity that was supposed to reshape American politics in the age of the Internet, but has yet to be fully realized.

Read the full story at The Atlantic.

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