Massachusetts and Vermont have suspended payments to CGI Group, the same contractor behind Healthcare.gov. A policy expert argues that CGI's failures are due to the complexity of the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare."
"The problem is the complexity of the laws," Ed Haislmaier, senior research fellow for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, told The Christian Post in an interview Friday. Haislmaier argued that Obamacare required excessive regulation for the subsidies, causing the famous Healthcare.gov backup and the state backups as well.
The scholar turned to Massachusetts as a prime example. "Massachusetts has been running a similar program for subsidizing people to buy coverage since 2007," and this program was "politically in sync with the administration." Nevertheless, the state's exchange allegedly experiences so many problems that it has decided to publicly reprimand CGI, withdrawing money from the company.
Haislmaier explained that under Obamacare, determining the right subsidy for each applicant required a massive amount of information. The process first requires documents from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and "various federal sites that don't work together." Then, the system has to calculate whether or not that person falls inside the poverty level, which in turn depends on criteria like the amount of people in the household.
Furthermore, those who already receive employer coverage – so long as that coverage meets the law's standards – cannot apply for a subsidy, even if their income is low enough to do so.
"Even the best IT vendor in the world is probably going to take a lot more work than has been put into this, to fix it," Haislmaier argued.