One of the implications of Obamacare that I should have paid a little more attention to is the child support enforcement system. In a previous article, I mentioned that Obamacare will effectively extend child support to the age of 26 through the parental insurance provision. Judges will doubtless use the new law to justify ordering men to continue to pay for their children’s insurance until the option expires. Anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration should spend an afternoon in family court.
However, I never took into account the fact that child support enforcement and welfare, being essentially tied together, will now have to be integrated with Obamacare into one big mess.
I found that out recently when attempting to pay some child support. While I used to be able to pay with a separate account that wasn’t tied to other agencies, they are all being integrated now, and it’s a big clusterf*** down at WA DSHS. There’s no way to figure it out for now, and the phone lines are all jammed. I just hope I don’t get my license revoked in the meanwhile.
What’s behind this giant Obamacare mess is the ill-conceived idea to push a paper system online when the vast majority of public sector workers – including the politicians themselves – don’t know the next thing about managing databases, encryption, website maintenance, online transactions, etc. It all sounds so nice and easy in theory: you have a simple, automated system anyone can use online. But that isn’t how it works in the real world — especially not a real world that includes over 300 million Americans. In order for the system to work properly, it would have to be incredibly complex to respond quickly and correctly to all the changes in circumstance, errors, court orders, prescriptions and so on.
Just running this blog as a fully-hosted WordPress installation is quite a task sometimes (I’ll probably have to overhaul it soon), and I don’t have to deal with many variables at all compared to, say, a medical clinic.
So, naturally, there are problems with healthcare.gov. Big problems. I suppose anyone who has worked in IT should have been able to see this coming, but I doubt many of us considered the broader implications, such as integrating child support enforcement and state welfare agencies. But how about fraud? This is going to be a real killer. Intelligent, technologically capable people with no scruples will be able to manipulate this monstrous system for all sorts of nefarious purposes. If someone doesn’t get on the ball, this is going to turn into a looting fest we haven’t seen since the former Soviet Union fell apart in the 90s.
America, get ready to get ripped off.
