Several months after President Barack Obama issued a postponement of the employer mandate, allowing companies to put off adjusting their employee benefits for another year, the commander-in-chief considered scrapping the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act altogether due to the flawed rollout, according to a new report.
When HealthCare.gov was experiencing a host of glitches, preventing people from shopping for plans through the federal-based exchange website, Obama contemplated abandoning the fundamental construct of the health reform law and starting from the beginning, Time magazine reported recently.
Speaking to CBS News This Morning, the author of the 7,000-word piece, reporter Steven Brill, indicated that there were a lot of mixed messages about whether HealthCare.gov was up and running or not. For instance, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were giving indications to the White House that there weren't any major problems, despite there being numerous reports from media outlets that people were running into dead-ends when logging on.
"Can it be patched and improved to work, or does it need to be scrapped to start over?" Brill described Denis McDonough, White House chief of staff, as saying. "[Obama] wanted to know if this thing is salvageable."
Though many of the glitches that HealthCare.gov was known for in October have been ironed out, there are still reports that people are encountering problems. However, despite these errors, many Americans are in favor of at least some elements of the health care law. For example, 50 percent of respondents in a recent poll said that they liked certain components of the ACA, but believed changes were necessary to make it better, according to new survey data from CBS News and The New York Times.
