President Obama now says he had no idea that Obamacare’s rollout was going to be such a disaster:

“On the rocky launch of the health care exchange system, Obama said he anticipated problems with the rollout of ObamaCare in October, particularly with the HealthCare.gov website because computer programs have glitches.

“ ‘But neither I nor anybody else anticipated the degree of problems with HealthCare.gov,’ he said.”

This isn’t exactly true. Plenty of people knew that the system was nowhere close to ready.

It crashed during tests. Outside experts warned the administration months before that it wouldn’t be ready. A month before launch, insurers who’d have to work with the system were invited to test it. They warned “agency officials not to launch it nationwide because it was still riddled with problems,” the Washington Post has reported. Henry Chao, the official in charge of the technology, told Congress a month and a half after the launch that 30% to 40% of the system still wasn’t built – the parts that handle accounting and payments.  The president had even met with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at least a couple times before the launch. Maybe she might have passed along a hint. However you look at it, quite a few people anticipated a train wreck.

So many people did anticipate the degree of trouble that it’s surprising the launch went forward anyhow – no phase-in, gradual launch, delays for more testing. We already know why. Even the New York Times had to admit it, in October:

 “Chao’s superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services told him, in effect, that failure was not an option, according to people who have spoken with him. Nor was rolling out the system in stages or on a smaller scale, as companies like Google typically do so that problems can more easily and quietly be fixed. Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics.”

 Now, the latest news is that people find they cannot appeal the mistakes that the Healthcare.gov website makes about their eligibility. The Washington Post reports that about 22,000 people contend that “the new federal online marketplace charged them too much for health insurance, steered them into the wrong insurance program or denied them coverage entirely.”

 “For now, the appeals are sitting, untouched, inside a government computer. And an unknown number of consumers who are trying to get help through less formal means — by calling the health-care marketplace directly — are told that HealthCare.gov’s computer system is not yet allowing federal workers to go into enrollment records and change them.”

 The paper relates the story of Addie Wilson, who makes $22,000 a year. She’s being overcharged $100 a month for insurance and her deductible is $4,000 too high, all because the site wasn’t calculating her subsidy correctly. She can’t fix it, and neither can anyone else in the federal government, apparently. The Post writes:

  “Three knowledgeable individuals, speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions, said it is unclear when the appeals process will become available. So far, it is not among the top priorities for completing parts of the federal insurance exchange’s computer system that still do not work. Those include an electronic payment system for insurers, the computerized exchange of enrollment information with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust people’s coverage to accommodate new babies and other major changes in life circumstance.”

President Obama said that neither he nor anyone else could have anticipated that the system would crash – and that it still, four months later, can’t fix problems, pay insurers, exchange information with states or understand that people have babies. Only we know that plenty of people knew and were waving red flags – only the administration was not listening, for political reasons.

I spent 31 years as a manufacturer. I’ve seen technology glitches and I also understand that we have only just begun to see the tip of the disastrous iceberg called Obamacare. This is more than a management failure.  

Obamacare is fundamentally flawed from start to finish.  President Obama and the geniuses who devised this Rube Goldberg health care scheme have no idea the harm they have done — and will do to — real people.  

And when the president says he couldn’t have seen these troubles coming, it means that the past four months have taught him nothing.  

The sooner we restore freedom and choice to our health care system, the sooner we can start repairing the damage already done by Obamacare — the sooner we can start limiting and preventing future damage.