Listening to a congressional hearing last week via radio on
the way to… guess? Quick
lunchtime shopping break to relax my brain…
and all I hear is “why don’t you know how many people have signed up? Are
eligible? How many signed up and are using a plan in October? How come you
don’t know? You should know. How come you can’t answer this?”
Maybe my retail background can be of some assistance in
explaining the reporting time issue, which I call the “I need instant
gratification to prove to my constituents that I’m doing something here in DC,
and I love to hear myself talk” issue.
When a national chain store, say Nordstrom, wants to know
how their entire US-based chain did for the month of October, it takes AT LEAST
two weeks. Two weeks? Who has two weeks? Why does it take so long?!?
In this case, let’s look at each individual silver Nordstrom
tree, rather than the entire Nordstrom forest. Let’s look at just one store:
Each and every department in that store has to tabulate October sales and
report those sales figures to the management office/store manager, who then
must double check those numbers. Once those are reviewed several times for
accuracy, that individual store manager funnels their final sales report to
their district manager. The district manager then must double check each of
her/his numbers for every store they are responsible for, then send those
reports further up the funnel to the corporate HQ. Lots of number crunching… Lots of time.
Let’s flip this over to ACA. Once you sign up online, you
are supposed to “shop” for a plan and (hopefully) sign up for one. So thousands
enter one “funnel” then are broken up into several more funnels. It takes each
of those separate funnels time to tabulate solid numbers, which they then send
back up the funnel. The “funnel manager” must double check, ok, quadruple
check, these numbers, then compare it to what was projected, in order to know
if the ACA online sign up/registration is on track or not. Lots of number
crunching…. Lots of time.
I could be completely off base here, but if I was sitting in
a congressional hearing and asked those same questions I mentioned earlier, I wouldn’t
speculate. I’d give the facts. Let’s not blast what we don’t know until we know
it folks.