Dr. Tim's 'Truth About Obamacare' Podcast: Failure Of Management, Or Worse?

This week's "Truth About Obamacare" podcast begins with an update on the state of the bedeviled HealthCare.gov website: In brief, the front-end is looking good, the back-end may still be messed up, meaning that it's not certain that people who sign up for health insurance will actually have policies.

Then our host, Dr. Timothy Johnson, retired medical editor for ABC News and author of ”The Truth About Getting Sick in America,” moves on to the big question, as posed by Paul Krugman of The New York Times: Given that the Obamacare rollout was an acknowledged debacle, was it a failure of management, messing up the initial implementation of a fundamentally sound policy, or was it a demonstration that the Affordable Care Act is inherently unworkable?

The discussants are Dr. Tim's regular podcast guests: John McDonough, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health; Dr. Gail Wilensky, a health official under the first President Bush; and Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.