OBAMACARE : ‘Glitches’ hit Obamacare paper, phone applications too
By PAIGE WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM | 10/25/13 5:34 PM EDT
Trying to sign up for Obamacare the old-fashioned way — paper, pen or telephone?
Good luck with that
With the supposedly state-of-the-art $600 million HealthCare.gov portal malfunctioning, President Barack Obama is urging Americans to go ahead and try to get health coverage by mailing in a paper application, calling the helpline or seeking help from one of the trained “assisters.”
But the truth is those applications — on paper or by phone — have to get entered into the same lousy website that is causing the problems in the first place. And the people processing the paper and calls don’t have any cyber secret passage to duck around that. They too have to deal with all the frustrations of HealthCare.gov — full-time.
(See POLITICO’s full Obamacare coverage)
“I feel like we’re sort of back in the era of control-alt-delete where we’re trying to figure out the different tricks that facilitate people’s enrollment,” said Jennifer Ng’andu, director of health policy for the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group that has been helping to publicize the Affordable Care Act.