Over at his blog, Bob Laszewski tells us what we should be expecting on the Obamacare front in the coming months. The short answer: lots of confusion and some big question marks.

He writes:

To say this fall’s 2015 Obamacare open-enrollment has the potential to be problematic is an understatement.
The HealthCare.gov backroom is not built yet––a year and counting after it should have been.
How many people are enrolled in Obamacare? Without a government to insurance company accounting system yet built, no one knows.
The administration says they are going to auto-renew existing Obamacare policyholders. But they don’t have a valid baseline census from which to start.
While the administration tells Obamacare policyholders their automatic renewal will go smoothly, the fact is every one of these subsidy-eligible people needs to go to the exchange website and re-enroll. . . .
Since the administration can’t automatically update a participant’s subsidy based upon 2015 changes in their local baseline Silver plan, the Obama administration’s assurances that the renewal will go smoothly, without existing participants having to re-enroll, is just plain bad information that is going to cause people lots of problems. . . .
Five to ten million people all trying to get through exchange websites between November 15 and December 15? . . .
Does this all sound confusing? Just wait until we approach the next open-enrollment with millions of people hearing about all of this complexity and having just four weeks to get their enrollment validated for January 1. The Obamacare anxiety index is going to be off the charts well before November 15th.
Add to all of this bigger deductibles for 2015 (those go up with cost trend as well as the rates) and more narrow networks as well as generally larger rate increases for the plans that got the most enrollment and there will be lots to talk about.
Then there is the still unanswered question: How many people are enrolled in Obamacare?

For the whole thing, go here. It contains more details than these bullet points. Shouldn’t we know how many people are enrolled at this point?

Over at Reason, Peter Suderman has a piece on the consequences of Obamacare’s incomplete federal exchange system. A big one: The federal government is cutting a lot of checks based on incomplete information from applicants.

For one thing, it means that a lot of enrollment and payment information that was supposed to be tracked and recorded by the system is hard to come by. The administration is paying insurers based on estimates, and the exact details will all be worked out later.
As Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant closely linked with the insurance industry,told Inside Health Insurance Exchanges (via Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute), “The Obama administration has no idea how many people are currently enrolled [in exchanges] but they keep cutting checks for hundreds of millions of dollars a month for insurance subsidies for people who may or may not have paid their premium, continued their insurance, or are even legal residents.”
Now, the administration has said it plans to cut off subsidies for as many as 310,000 people who did not verify their citizenship information by the end of last week. Only about 70,000 had responded, some unknown number of which remained unresolved. As it stands, some of those people will have to repay the government for the subsidies they mistakenly received come tax time next year.

This needs to be sorted out, and I doubt it will happen smoothly.

Meanwhile, John Merline puts out this chart showing that the share of government health-care spending has increased dramatically (up to 46 percent of all health-care spending) while out-of-pocket spending has collapsed, over the last fifty years or so.