The Forbes article came out on October 14. The author bills himself as an expert in health care policy. He has to have known about it by then, or at least been informed soon after the article came out. There is no excuse to not at least acknowledge that the criticism is no longer true. And the article wasn’t just complaining that the prices are not there, it’s assigning nefarious motives, which is the most insidious part.
There is no excuse for essentially lying about the increase in “average” individual insurance plan cost either.
Actually, if a major complaint is that a helpful but not critical functionality was not rolled out for 10 days while the federal government was shut down, I think ACA is actually doing quite well.
To answer the original question: as I type now, Obama is explaining what the ACA is. Some implacable opponents will say he’s being misleading or dishonest, because what he’s saying about it doesn’t match their preconceptions – but I fail to see how this is Obama’s fault.
This makes Avik Roy look a little better. One of the contractors is testifying that the administration did indeed want to make people register before seeing prices:
Prepared testimony from contractor Optum/QSSI blamed in part a “late decision” to require customers to register before browsing for insurance, which could have helped overwhelm the registration system.
“This may have driven higher simultaneous usage of the registration system that wouldn’t have occurred if consumers could window-shop anonymously,” said Andy Slavitt, representing QSSI’s parent company.
Since Roy researched his article, things changed, probably because the administration realized how badly they’d screwed up.