…it seems we have Potemkin enrollments:

Obama administration officials acknowledged today that some of the roughly 126,000 Americans who completed the torturous online enrollment process in October and November might not be officially signed up with their selected issuer, even if the website has told them they are.

Technical problems surrounding the transfer of an applicant’s personal information from the federal marketplace to the selected insurance company have plagued the system since its launch, making it difficult for insurers to finalize some enrollments. The 834 forms that issuers receive from the system have been riddled with errors, including often duplicate or incomplete information.

While the front-end of the website has been vastly improved, the back-end glitches remain a serious concern, IT experts and industry officials say.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The whole thing seems to be about PR at the moment, and has been for quite some time. We have a president who can’t manage to do much except undo things (such as, for instance, the health insurance system in America) going out to sell what he can’t manage to do: create a functional alternative health insurance system and a website on which people can actually buy it.

The title of that Politico piece to which I just linked, “White House returns to Obamacare sales mode,” seems a bit in error. After all, has Obama ever left Obamcare sales mode? He’s been selling it for four years, with no end in sight, although it has become a harder sell over time:

President Barack Obama will launch a coordinated campaign Tuesday by the White House, congressional Democrats and their outside allies to return attention to why the Affordable Care Act passed in the first place.

So Obama wants to return attention to the Cornhusker Kickback and all the other wheeling and dealing, including the use of reconciliation to get around the problem in the Senate? No, of course not; it turns out he wants to emphasize the benefits Obamacare affords:

After two months of intense coverage of the botched HealthCare.gov rollout, the president will host a White House event kicking off a three-week drive to refocus the public on the law’s benefits, senior administration officials told POLITICO.

The White House will take the lead in emphasizing a different benefit each day until the Dec. 23 enrollment deadline for Jan. 1 coverage. The daily message will be amplified through press events and social media by Democratic members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee, congressional campaign committees and advocacy organizations, officials said.

I got a new slogan for them: “A benefit a day keeps the doctor…away.” No, I guess that one won’t do.

I would think that if there actually were benefits from Obamacare, then people could perceive them and judge for themselves. Obama is afraid that won’t happen, and that it certainly won’t happen before the all-important 2014 election, so in the absence of felt benefits I guess we must have rhetorically-stated benefits. I would also imagine that those benefits will continue to be ones that are lied about, just as they were before the last election.

Some of those lies will be that the cancellations will only affect a tiny percentage of the population. Others might be about keeping your doctor; how many people will notice the narrowness of the networks right away, or realize what effect Obamacare will have on the US healthcare system as a whole over time? Other lies will involve not just the supposed benefits, but will misrepresent and exaggerate the previous problems with health insurance, including the oft-repeated one about how insurance companies were always cancelling policies when people got sick.

Lies all the way down.