The technical disasters of the Obamacare exchange debacle over the past two weeks are not an accident, but rather a way to disguise the costs of healthcare plans and weed out people who don’t qualify for a federal subsidy, Forbes reports.
Tech experts examining the Obamacare federal health exchange, Healthcare.gov, are becoming increasingly convinced that the traffic bottlenecks and site crashes experienced over the first two weeks were not by accident, wrote Forbes.
An HHS spokesperson recently told The Wall Street Journal that implementation of a feature enabling users with the option to preview premiums was delayed as a way to filter users.
“An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies,” wrote the publication.
The agency was worried that the spike in healthcare premiums under the new system would scare prospective buyers away, concluded Forbes writer Avik Roy.
The reasoning behind this, said Roy, was because Obamacare was not designed to help healthy people with average incomes.
“It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions,” said Roy.
The Obamacare website’s administrators later added a similar feature to the site last week, but it still fails to give users an adequate picture of what they will really pay – especially if they qualify for a federal subsidy.