“So, very early reports are that Obamacare exchanges are, as expected, having some technical glitches on the first day — maybe even a bit worse than expected, because it appears that volume has been much bigger than predicted. Here’s what you need to know: this is good, not bad, news for the program…. Lots of people logging on and signing up on the very first day … is an early indication that it’s going to be fine, that plenty of people will sign up for the first year of health reform.” — Paul Krugman, “Good Glitches“, October 1, 2013
“So the glitches of October won’t matter in the long run. But why are they actually encouraging? Because they appear, for the most part, to be the result of the sheer volume of traffic, which has been much heavier than expected…. So Obamacare is off to a good start, with even the bad news being really good news for the program’s future.” — Paul Krugman, “Reform Turns Real“, October 2, 2013
“This morning I talked to someone who successfully signed up for Obamacare — with great difficulty, but she did succeed in the end. Since New Jersey is one of the states that defaulted to a fed-run exchange, this shows that people are starting to trickle through. I know, one example — but the plural of anecdote is data.” — Paul Krugman, “Obamacare Success“, October 14, 2013
“I haven’t been writing about the healthcare.gov thing, for the simple reason that I have nothing to say. What’s going on isn’t a policy question…. Instead, it’s about an implementation botch, which is an incredible mess, and reflects very badly on Obama. But the future of the reform depends not on policy per se but on whether the IT issues can be fixed well enough soon enough, a subject on which I have zero expertise. Of course, that hasn’t stopped other people from breathlessly commenting on every twist and turn… But at this point there’s enough information coming in to make semi-educated guesses — and it looks to me as if this thing is probably going to stumble through to the finish line…. And healthcare.gov, while still pretty bad, is starting to look as if it will be good enough in a few weeks for large numbers of people to sign up….” — Paul Krugman, “The State of Obamacare“, November 20, 2013
“It goes without saying that the rollout of Obamacare was an epic disaster.“ — Paul Krugman, “California, Here We Come?“, November 24, 2013
