Joel Ario Provides Commentary to Bloomberg on Exchanges' First Numbers

"Obamacare Demand Signals Potential Success for Exchanges"
Bloomberg

October 2, 2013 - Manatt's Joel Ario, a managing partner with Manatt Health Solutions, spoke to Bloomberg about the first numbers recorded after the launch of health exchanges.

Bloomberg reports that Obamacare's opening day drew millions of consumers to the law's core insurance exchanges. New York officials said their exchange had 2.5 million visitors in its first half hour, while California reported as many as 16,000 hits a second. U.S. officials recorded 2.8 million visitors to the federal website, healthcare.gov, despite technical problems throughout the day. However, opponents of the startup said the delays and frozen websites were calamitous, and it remained unclear how much the wave of interest would translate into enrollments.

Ario told the publication that after the initial rush, things will settle down and the law will see the kind of gradual enrollment that occurred with the rollout of the Medicare Part D prescription drug program in 2005, said Ario.

"It's still too early to tell how serious the glitch problem will be," Ario said. "But one of the beauties of online systems is the ability to continually improve them, not like printing a million inaccurate brochures that have to be tossed."

Read the article here.