HealthCare.gov: Five questions about the problem-riddled rollout (+video)

Nobody, including President Obama, is sugarcoating the problem-riddled launch of HealthCare.gov, where uninsured Americans can buy health coverage. Here are five questions about what’s happened.

4. Has anything gone right with HealthCare.gov?

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/AP
This screenshot made Monday, Oct. 28, 2013 shows the main landing web page for HealthCare.gov.

Many have successfully bought insurance via the site – some for the first time in years and others at rates much lower than what they were paying before. In the first year, the Congressional Budget Office predicts 7 million people will enroll in the online exchanges, both federal and state-run. Perhaps 80 percent will get a subsidy.

Almost 60 percent of enrollees will get insurance that costs less than $100 a month, including tax credits, the Obama administration calculates.

HealthCare.gov has also won praise for clear writing and intuitive placement of information.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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