Remember Sharyl Attkisson? The ace investigative reporter who left CBS news because the more investigative reporting she did on the Obama adminstration – particularly Operation Fast and Furious – the less CBS liked it?
Now Ms. Attkisson has a website called dailysignal.com, where she does…the investigative reporting that CBS – if it cares about its product (a big “if”) – should be wishing it still had.
Here is part of her report on the godawful – and virtually unreported – mess ObamaCare is in California (but there is plenty more, which you will miss if you do not use the link I\’ve provided and read it all):
California\’s health insurance exchange, established under the Affordable Care Act, has been held out as a national model for Obamacare.
Now, several senior-level officials integral to the launch of Covered California-who enthusiastically support the Affordable Care Act-are speaking about what they view as gross incompetence and mismanagement involving some of the $1 billion federal tax dollars poured into the state effort.
In March 2013, (Aiden) Hill was hired as project manager over Covered California\’s massive $120 million call center effort. In just six short months, it would face an avalanche of customers seeking insurance mandated under the new law.
But five months on the job converted Hill from avid supporter to disenchanted whistleblower. He says the secretive and dysfunctional culture was more interested in cheerleading than real results. After he persistently raised concerns, Covered California abruptly terminated his contract.
Covered California declined comment on Hill\’s allegations.
“They started this way too late for what they needed to do,” says the official who was hired in April 2013, five months before the website’s launch. He has since left that position and asked not to be named to protect his current job status.
“This program had to touch 58 counties, 11 federal agencies, all medical carriers and all advocates. To have a system that would be integrated seamlessly-somebody must have been smoking something if they thought that was going to happen.”
As recently as last fall, the official says, California hoped to increase enrollment by 500,000 this year. But only an additional 7,098 have “selected a plan” for 2015.
Another telling statistic is Covered California\’s poor retention rate. Even though people are required by law to have health insurance, only 65 percent of Covered California\’s 2014 customers reenrolled in 2015. The rest dropped off.
Covered California would not address our questions about lackluster retention and growth.
So what do we learn? We learn that ObamaCare, which started as a disastrous, embarrassing mess, and progressed as a disastrous, embarrassing mess, remains – at least in California – the disastrous, embarrassing mess it always has been.
Thank you, Ms. Attkisson, for doing what your former employer, and the rest of what passes for mainstream media these days, will not: reporting honestly on a disastrous, embarrassing mess that they should have been covering as such all along.
And shame on the media venues which had access to this exact same information, but decided to forego professional journalism by burying it in the Partisan Discard Pile, with Operation Fast and Furious, Benghazi, etc. etc. etc.
