Weigh in on Obamacare impact: Good or bad?

The jury is in, with a widespread view that the rollout of Obamacare has been “nothing short of disastrous,” as it was put on CBS News recently. But the rollout will continue, and Obama administration officials are  nervously promising that things will get better.

Will they? We’re anxious to find out.

Even liberal pundits have given a thumbs down to www.healthcare.gov since it was activated on Oct. 1. The main portal for signing up for Obamacare was hexed with all types of problems that prevented people from completing their applications.

One c quoted and qualified programmer, who happens to be sympathetic toward the Affordable Care Act that is Obamacare, said the site “wasn’t designed well, it wasn’t implemented well and it looked like nobody tested it.”

Early last week, media outlets were searching far and wide to find someone, anyone, who had successfully completed an application for health insurance through the website. Kind of like looking for unicorns. The administration was also coyly evading straightforward questions about how many people had signed up.

As of Friday, an Associated Press poll found that 7 percent of respondents said somebody within their household had tried to sign up for the program, which could represent up to 20 million people. But Britain’s Daily Mail was reporting that just 51,000 people completed applications during the first week. Not a good sign, considering the Congressional Budget Office says that at least 7 million enrollees are needed to keep the program financially viable. Not only that, the lion’s share of participants need to be young and healthy. If those folks find that insurance under the program is prohibitively expensive, or that getting signed up is too difficult, they may easily opt for the tax penalty that will be levied under the law for not having insurance.

“How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?” Speaker of the House John Boehner aptly observed.

But we shall see, and the Inter Lake is highly interested in hearing from people about how they’ve been affected by Obamacare one way or another.

In the weeks to come, we would like non-anonymous input of all types. If you’ve successfully signed up for insurance through the website, we would particularly like to hear from you. Did your health insurance costs go up or down?

If you tried but couldn’t sign up, we’d like to hear from you about your online experiences as well.

The State Auditor’s Office estimates that 145,000 Montanans qualify for Obamacare, and about 80 percent of those people qualify for tax credit subsidies. We’d like to hear how those subsidies are benefiting people.

We’d like to hear from young and healthy people about how their insurance costs have changed for the better or worse.

Although provisions of the law pertaining to employers have been delayed until the end 2014, many companies and even universities have already chosen to make adjustments in response to Obamacare.

Because the law requires employers with 50 or more full-time employees to provide insurance, some employers have either avoided hiring more than 50 employees, or they have converted full-time jobs to part-time jobs.

It is expected that rural areas like the Flathead Valley that have a preponderance of small businesses will be the most impacted by this provision.

We would like to hear from employers who have made business decisions in anticipation of the employer mandate or from workers who have gone from full-time jobs to part-time jobs as a result of Obamacare. Finally, we would like to hear from health-care providers as well as people in the insurance industry about their experiences with Obamacare.

Everyone knew that health-care reform was going to cut a wide swath across the economy. Now it is time to start measuring whether that impact is for the good or bad. You can help us out by sending your letters to Daily Inter Lake, Attn: Health Care Reform, PO Box 7610, Kalispell MT 59904. Emails can be addressed to edit@dailyinterlake.com with a subject line that includes the words Health Care Reform. You can also post comments at www.facebook.com/MontanaHealthCareReform

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.