The District of Columbia’s Obamacare exchange said yesteday that it won’t be fully functional by next week’s roll-out date.
Though DC Health Link says its website will open next Tuesday, Oct. 1, it will not deploy a function that computes how much people may receive in tax subsidies to purchase private insurance and determines the eligibility of new Medicaid applicants (the website will accept applications and get back to applicants in mid-November).
In a posting on its website, the exchange says that it is delaying that function because of “a high error rate discovered through extensive systems testing.” A spokesman told the Washington Post that the error is unique to the D.C. exchange.
President Obama predicted in April that there would be “glitches and bumps” as the exchanges went online; this is the second such glitch to come to light in as many days. The so-called “family glitch,” which gained national attention Monday, results from an oversight in the law and could leave 500,000 children without health-care coverage as well as drive up health-care costs for families.