Some 25,000 people in New Jersey who think
HealthCare.gov successfully submitted a Medicaid application to the state on
Their behalf
Have "** idea"
Their applications are "unusable." A
stunning report from the
Bergen Record uncovers glitches that destroyed applications and broke communication between the state and federal government.
The Obamacare individual mandate is forcing
Thousands of lower-income individuals without insurance to apply for coverage through Medicaid in New Jersey. Directed by the federal government to use HealthCare.gov, many residents did just that and
Have ** idea
Their application did **t go through. According to the
Record, about 25,000 applications are simply "unusable"; applicants
Have "** idea"
Their applications are **t being processed because the website is so laden with glitches the information can**t be read.
Furthermore, the information that New Jersey officials were assured would reach them from the federal government is stuck with the federal government, so even if the applications were usable, New Jersey wouldn't
Have them. Officials
Have **t offered any scheduled date in which to expect the problem solved.
Some New Jersey residents who found the site too confusing to even submit
Their applications (to
Have them disappear) saved themselves by abandoning
HealthCare.gov and turning to the state Medicaid website. One applicant told the
Record she eventually
Used the state website because
HealthCare.gov did **t give her the option to submit an application, **r could she find the Medicaid-specific program application anywhere. New Jersey found
a 35% increase in applications through the state website since the individual mandate threatened to take effect.
The woes of New Jersey's poor in the face of the Affordable Care Act website debacle are merely the latest in a string of problems with a website so badly constructed it is apparently chronically in disrepair. While the White House relaunched the website at the beginning of the month after its initial launch
sent the media on a wild goose chase to find the one person who had been able to successfully use it,
the new version was still 40% unbuilt, and continued flaws led federal officials to warn citizens to use the site during the early morning or late at night to avoid overloading with traffic.
One report found that the federal website's budget tripled in the months before the initial rollout but did little to improve the situation. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told the press in **vember that the White House considered an 80% failure rate for the website
acceptable for the time being because phone lines were open to accept applications as well. The rollout was such a disaster that MSNBC analyst and
Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein
called the entire operation "terrible" and wondered why ** one had been fired.
The website also suffers from
major security issues, which mean users of the site risk
Their private information entered to apply to the program (and the
extremely private information security questions ask of users) every time they use it. The site is both vulnerable to attack that would render it even less usable and to information theft.
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