State exchange wouldn’t have solved Georgia’s woes

You can tell Obamacare has Democrats worried, because they’ve shifted from telling everyone how wonderful it was going to be to blaming Republicans for how bad it’s turned out.

President Barack Obama suggests the law’s problem is not that it was badly drafted, poorly understood and a giant overreach of government power. Rather, it’s that congressional Republicans are “invested in failure.”

GOP governors, meanwhile, have come in for criticism from the left for not expanding Medicaid and for declining to create their own state exchanges. Had more Republican governors created their own exchanges, as U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., put it in one comment typical of the argument, “we wouldn’t be putting so much burden on the federal system.”

That last part may be true. Instead, we could have seen more state-run exchanges have the kind of technical problems that have plagued the online marketplaces for Maryland (which, like the federal website, had to resort to paper applications), Oregon (which is finally working, but only on one browser), Hawaii (which didn’t launch until well after Oct. 1 and still suffers breakdowns) and Vermont (which, like the federal site, still can’t accept payments).

And even the state-run exchanges rely on slow federal databases to determine if an applicant is eligible for Obamacare subsidies. That’s led to problems for many of their residents.

A state-run website hasn’t necessarily guaranteed success. Georgia, which let the federal government run its Obamacare exchange, had a higher percentage of its uninsured population complete online applications than California, Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada or Oregon. Georgia’s 3.04 percent application rate in October ranked 30th nationally, just seven-hundredths of a point below the U.S. average.

But the entire premise that the website is Obamacare’s biggest problem is flawed anyway.

The website isn’t the reason millions of Americans who bought insurance on the individual market are receiving cancellation notices after being presidentially promised they could keep their plans if they liked them. It’s somewhat ironic Obama’s solution to this problem — advising people they can renew those plans for one more year — was already being touted weeks ago by Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens, who otherwise is bashed by liberals for his perhaps-unwise public admission he’s an Obamacare “obstructionist.”

The website isn’t the reason half of all Americans with employer-sponsored coverage, according to the Obama administration’s own estimate, may receive similar cancellation notices next year.

The website isn’t the reason many Americans will pay higher premiums for plans with fewer benefits and higher deductibles. That includes a number of people who previously bought coverage through state high-risk pools that are now disappearing.

The website isn’t the reason a large nationwide shift of people from the ranks of the uninsured to the rolls of Medicaid won’t eliminate the cost of uncompensated care. Rather, that cost will be divided between higher government spending on Medicaid and continued cost-shifting onto Americans with private insurance, because Medicaid’s reimbursement rates are 20 percent to 25 percent lower than those of private plans.

Nor is the website the reason many Americans will find their new Obamacare plans are only “affordable,” to the extent they actually are, because insurers are restricting the number of doctors and hospitals they can visit. That will reveal another of Obama’s broken promises: that you can keep your doctor if you want.