Remember when the grotesquely misnamed “Affordable Care Act” was going to “bend the cost curve downward”? Next year, it’ll bend upward, the Washington Post reports:

“With the results sure to affect politics as well as pocketbooks, health insurers are preparing to raise rates next year for plans issued under the Affordable Care Act.

“But how much depends on their ability to predict how newly enrolled customers — for whom little is known regarding health status and medical needs — will affect 2015 costs.

“ ‘We’re working with about a third of the information that we usually have,’ said Brian Lobley, senior vice president of marketing and consumer business at Pennsylvania’s Independence Blue Cross.”

On top of the uncertainty, The Obamacare website still isn’t fixed. The “back end,” the part that sends information to insurers and is supposed to calculate how much taxpayer subsidy each enrollee gets, isn’t built yet. Still. Brietbart reports:

“Last December, HHS Secretary Sebelius told Members of Congress that the back-end was ‘due to go into effect in mid-January.’ But by that point, HHS was not only not done with the back-end, it was announcing a rush $91 million contract to find someone new to get the job done by mid-March. … The new contractor, Accenture, was not able to complete the back-end by March. In fact, the government is still relying on an ‘interim’ accounting process which Politico describes as ‘pretty much a spreadsheet and some informed estimates.’ That process is expected to be in place until September.”

So the administration still can’t say how many people really have signed up. The numbers the president crowed about are an estimate at best. It cannot say how many have actually paid, either.

So insurers can’t say how sick their new patients are. The Post reported on a nonprofit insurer in Iowa that said many of its surge of enrollees in January scheduled costly surgeries, including transplants, as soon as they could. No insurer can say whether this is normal – or, then, how much premiums will have to further rise:

“What economists call the cost trend — how high prices rise per procedure and how many procedures Americans get this year — may be the biggest variable in setting prices for 2015, experts said.

“And the trend seems to be up. After several years of relatively tame increases that many tie to a sluggish economy, medical spending accelerated late last year.”

Obamacare simply wasn’t ready. It was rolled out according to a schedule that served political purposes. This is an ominous sign of how much bungling and politicking we can expect as the federal government involves itself more deeply in our health care system.