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The Good News for Obamacare: The White House Knows the Bad News

"It would be one thing if problems with the government's new health-care Web site had been unknowable. But they weren't. Staff at HHS and CMS saw this coming for months. Insurance companies began predicting a mess long ago. But the bad news was shaded and spun as it made its way up the chain of command. The alarming failures seen in the (inadequate) load tests were written off as bugs that would soon be fixed.... The new health-care law has a chance because those management failures are over."

New Insurance Rates in California Bring Good News for Obamacare

"The California exchange will have 13 insurance options, and the heavy competition appears to be driving down prices.... California is a particularly important test for Obamacare. It's not just the largest state in the nation. It's also one of the states most committed to implementing Obamacare effectively"

Is Obamacare Turning the Corner?

"The worry, at this point, is that the site is working in ways that are visible but broken in ways that are harder to see. The Obama administration won't answer direct questions on the percentage of '834s' -- the forms insurers need to sign people up for the correct policies at the correct prices -- that are coming through with errors. Robert Laszewski, a health-industry consultant with deep contacts among the insurers, told the National Journal the problem is getting better, but that his clients are still seeing a five percent error rate. That's still too high."

As Obamacare Starts, Health Insurers Are Just Guessing

"Insurers have to decide now how much they'll charge next year.... The problem is that insurers don't know what their costs will be next year. So they're guessing. They're guessing who will enter the exchanges. They're guessing who will choose to buy their coverage. They're guessing whether healthy, young people will obey the individual mandate or pay the penalty. They're guessing what price they'll need to be competitive against other insurers, given differences in the networks, benefits, etc.... If they get it wrong by being too cheap, they'll lose money."

Obama Shouldn't Apologize for Blowing Up the Terrible Individual Market

"Obama was wrong to promise that everyone who liked their insurance could keep it. For a small minority of Americans, that flatly isn't true. But the real sin would've been leaving the individual insurance market alone. The individual market -- which serves five percent of the population, and which is where the disruptions are happening -- is a horror show."

Can Obama Fix Obamacare?

"HealthCare.gov probably has about a month before the problems of the web site infect the product itself. The nightmare scenario looks something like this: The web site continues to be a mess through the fall. As such, only the people who need insurance most -- older, sicker people -- go through the trouble of signing up. Younger, healthier people come once or twice and then never again. The risk pools fill with more expensive applicants and, in year two, premiums spike."

How Obamacare's Fear of Further Failure Is Becoming an Impediment to Success

"Forcing the system to do the heavy lifting of registration and verification before people could even read the site crashed the servers. So the Obama administration decided to open up window shopping.... It might be working fine. But it's a horrible user experience.... Fight through it, and, finally, after all that, you can browse some plans. There's no estimate of subsidies, or of the way your age will affect your premiums. And this simple, not-particularly-helpful information is only accessible after navigating, by my count, eight separate pages, each covered in intimidating explanatory text and discouraging warnings. It's a mess. And it doesn't need to be."

Insurers Will Spend More Than $500 Million to Get People to Sign Up for Obamacare

"Insurers look at these next few years as a gold rush. Tens of millions of people will be buying private insurance of the exchanges. It's a swarm of customers like nothing they've ever seen. And they plan to capture them -- even if they need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do so."

Seven Reasons Obamacare Isn't Facing a 'Death Spiral'

"Obamacare is protected from an actual death spiral by interlocking failsafes. Some kick in if not enough healthy people sign up. Others give healthy people reasons to sign up. Others make sure insurers don't raise premiums too fast. But together, they offer substantial protection against an actual death spiral."