Wednesday, 2 October 2013

Sebelius: Obamacare, It's Like a New iPhone - Wall Street Journal (blog)

 

Forget glitches and bumps. The Obama administration has a new metaphor for the rollout of the health law: It'll be like the iPhone upgrade.

"I clearly have an iPad, and I also have an iPhone, and about ten days ago got the prompt that the operating system had changed and did I want to upgrade to the new operating system, and so I did, on both my iPad and my iPhone," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hours before the new insurance exchanges went live, building on a metaphor tested late last week by one of her top deputies, Gary Cohen, and then other senior administration officials in briefings with reporters.

Prescribed: An Interactive WSJ Tour of What Obamacare Means for You

"And then about five days after that, I got the second prompt saying, 'Well, there's a little problem with the iOS 7 system and now we have a 'new' new upgrade and why don't you re-upgrade your upgrade,'" the secretary said.

OK, we think we know where this is going.

"Apple, you know, has a few more resources than we have to roll out technology, and a few more people who've been working on the system for a while, and no-one is calling on Apple to not sell devices for a year or to, you know, get out of the business because the whole thing is a failure."

Wait — the federal government is comparing itself to Apple?

"Everyone just assumes 'Well, there's a problem, they'll fix it, we'll move on,' said Ms. Sebelius. "And like many of their customers I put the 'new' new system on my phone and went on my merry way, but it was just a reminder that we're likely to have some glitches. We will fix them and move on. Is this a sign that the law is flawed and failed? I don't think so. I think it's a sign that we're building a piece of complicated technology, we want it to work, we want it to work right. We've got an incredible team working 24/7 to do just that."

"Hopefully they'll give us the same slack they give Apple," she finished up. "If there's not quite the operational excellence right away, we'll continue to press for that."

There are limits, though. When a reporter pointed out to Ms. Sebelius that Apple has had tech rollouts that started too soon, and asked her to identify the point at which the administration would consider backing away, the secretary responded less enthusiastically.

"I can't possibly do that. I don't know. We haven't gone through 85,000 DEFCON scenarios. I can tell you that we have anticipated a variety of ways that people can enter the system, a variety of ways that we can get people enrolled, and that we have backups and redundancies for most of the systems in place.

"Having said that, we're focused on going forward and recognizing that frankly, this is a brand new launch, a brand new opportunity, and for a lot of people, I think the biggest challenge is getting them information about what really is out there."

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