HealthCare.Gov Now Delivering . . . Incorrect Plan Pricing

This morning, CBS reported that a new feature on the Affordable Care Act website allows users to get quotes for their premiums — but is often delivering false information. Are you 49 years old? You may be getting prices for a 27-year-old, meaning your actual costs could be twice as high as what the website is telling you. And those pricing problems extend to shoppers of just about every age.

This could be the result of a few things: lazy programming, bad programming, and/or purposefully bad programming. The underlying dataset the tool uses is probably based on this data, which I downloaded from HealthCare.Gov on Oct. 1. Notice that of the columns divided by age, the two ages are . . . 27 and 50. Programmers probably just split the population into the two groups they found in the spreadsheet and dropped everyone into these pricing categories, even though those prices only applied to two ages of people.

Obviously, a 27-year-old’s insurance is not priced the same way as a 37-year-old, or a 45-year-old, or a 49-year-old. Why the government’s “experts” would put out demonstrably false information — information that anyone who knows anything about insurance pricing would know is wrong — is just beyond me. Are these really the people we want running our health care system?