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In 10 days Healthcare.gov has to work. By January, the Obama administration has to figure out how to send subsidies to insurance companies and deal with the upcoming "You Can Keep Your Doctor" PR crisis. And at some point Obamacare needs some rebranding — not for the sake of President Obama, but so people who might enroll on state-run exchanges aren't scared off. If we were running the free world, our Obamacare to-do list might look something like this:
By December 1
- Get Healthcare.gov working, "god willing": Eventually, working will mean everyone gets all the way through the enrollment process 100 percent of the time, but for now that just means 80 percent. Henry Chao, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' deputy chief information officer, told the House Energy and Commerce Oversight subcommittee on Tuesday that the site is experiencing a less than 1 percent error reading, though there are still problems with the 834 EDI transmissions being sent to insurers. An 834 is data file that contains a person's enrollment information. If that information isn't clear or is inaccurate, then the enrollee probably isn't getting insurance.