Former Rep. Martin Frost (D-Texas) tried to throw many Republican governors under the Obamacare bus on Monday, saying that placing their constituents on the federal exchange instead of running state-based exchanges contributed to the failure of the HealthCare.gov system.
Appearing on MSNBC‘s The Daily Rundown along with former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), Frost tried to point fingers at GOP governors in states such as Arizona, Oklahoma and his own state, Texas.
“You have an interesting thing here — you had a lot of Republican governors who opted to throw all their people into this federal website, whereas some of the governors who opted to have their own websites — those have operated ok in some of those states,” he told host Chuck Todd.
Only 17 states — including D.C. — decided against being part of the federal exchange, choosing instead to run a state-based exchange.
“The exchanges that have been run by the states have done pretty well,” Frost added.
Some states running their own exchanges, like Kentucky and Washington, have online systems that have implemented the Affordable Care Act effectively, with more than 45,000 enrollees in each state.
But some of the state-run exchanges are seeing a comparable number of glitches to the federal system. Problems marred the opening of the healthcare exchange system in Maryland, and Hawaii’s marketplace relaunched two weeks after Oct. 1, thanks to major technical problems.
Frost did admit, however, that regardless of the number of states doing their own exchanges, the federal system should have worked — and he’s right.
The federal government gave states until Dec. 15, 2012, to officially announce whether they would be launching their own exchanges or using the federal exchange. When that deadline passed, only 17 states — including D.C. — had chosen to run their own exchanges, as The Boston Globe reported. At that point, the federal government should have known that millions of Americans would be relying on the federal website.
And from the start, President Barack Obama sold his signature healthcare law on that fact it would help millions of people. In November 2011, the President said 30 million people would be able to get healthcare under the ACA, a claim he was repeating just days prior to its 2013 launch date. His administration should have therefore expected millions of Americans to need to use the federal Obamacare website.
Additionally, governors had very little say in Obamacare. It was an unfunded mandate passed down by the Obama administration, and they had only two choices: 1) Whether or not to do a state exchange and 2) whether or not to accept the Medicaid expansion. They were not sitting in Congress, voting on the legislation. They simply had to accept the results of Congressional approval.
For Frost to put the failures of the federal Obamacare website on the Republican governors is disingenuous at best. The Obama administration knew what it was getting itself into — and it should have been ready.
