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The president brags about how he's bringing smart, 21st century technology to government. But the news surrounding that talk provides a showcase for how inept his administration is when it comes to IT.
'We've made huge swaths of your government more efficient and more transparent, and more accountable than ever before," President Obama claimed Monday.
But the very next day, AP reported that a "computer system problem" has caused his administration to delay yet another piece of ObamaCare for at least a year.
The delay stems from a conflict between the law's premium penalties for smokers and its restrictions on insurance rates. While ObamaCare forbids insurance companies from adjusting rates based on health status, it does let insurers impose a significant premium penalty on smokers.
At the same time, the law forbids insurance companies from charging older people more than three times what they charge younger people. The problem is that the premiums for an older smoker can end up more than three times that of a young smoker once you include the penalties.
Late last month, Obama's tech-savvy regulators quietly told insurance companies that they simply couldn't figure out how to get their computers to square the two.
"The system currently cannot process a premium for a 65-year-old smoker that is more than three times the premium of a 21-year-old smoker," it explained.
And a fix could take at least a year.
Meanwhile, the administration tacitly admitted last week that its promise of real-time verification of a consumer's eligibility to buy subsidized coverage at an ObamaCare exchange wasn't exactly panning out.
Under ObamaCare, only those who don't have access to "affordable" insurance at work can buy coverage in an exchange, and only those below certain income levels are eligible for tax subsidies.
Rather than a high-tech instant check, the administration told states they could simply take the applicants' word for it when it comes to their employer-provided coverage, as well as their "projected annual household income," without the need for "further verification."
The reason Obama's regulators gave: There's still "a large amount of systems development on both the federal and state side, which cannot occur in time for Oct. 1, 2013."
The Government Accountability Office had warned in June that the administration was behind schedule getting the ObamaCare data hub up and running.
The administration also admitted earlier this year that — even with a nearly four-year lead time — it would have to put off a key piece of the small-business exchanges that was supposed to let employees at small firms pick from a range of plans best suited to their needs. "Operational challenges" was the excuse given for this delay.
To be fair, states aren't doing much better when it comes to "smarter" government. The Washington Post reported last week that Connecticut will delay almost a third of the functions they'd planned for its insurance exchange Web portal. Oregon, Nevada and other states are also cutting back on their ObamaCare websites.
But the stakes are much higher at the federal level, particularly when protecting personal data is involved. Here, too, Obama's "smart" government falls short.
Public.Resource.org revealed this week that the IRS inadvertently exposed the Social Security numbers of as many as 100,000 taxpayers on a government website. The group described the IRS' data security efforts as "unprofessional and amateur."
These are the same sort of government bureaucrats, mind you, who'll be in charge of securing vast amounts of the far more sensitive data ObamaCare will collect on millions of Americans once it goes into effect.
