Predictable

I don't know if folks remember the story yesterday with regard to the Winter Olympics. Putin's games were all about the Russian hockey team. And Russia lost to America. And then they lost to Finland. And Russia did not even make the quarter finals.

With Putin fuming, is there any wonder a Russian 17-y/o figure skater took gold, stealing it from the reigning grand champion, from South Korea? This is as predictable as the earth getting colder. LOL.

The judges:

One of the nine judges who picked a young Russian skater over two more refined competitors for the Olympic gold medal Thursday night was suspended for a year for trying to fix an event at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.

And another is the wife of the former president and current general director of the Russian figure skating federation. Another Olympics, another huge skating controversy involving the countries of the former Soviet Union.

So, two of the nine judges probably got personal phone calls from Mr Putin a couple of hours before the event. 

With hundreds of nations participating in the Winter Olympics, and I can name a dozen counties with an ice-skating interest, I find it amazing that Russia had two of the nine judges.

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Also Predictable

More and more stories will come out about the websites:

Last fall, when healthcare.gov was all but useless for two months, a handful of states that decided to build their own Obamacare enrollment websites grappled with their own problems. Home-grown exchanges in such places as Kentucky and California worked relatively smoothly, but in other states, including Oregon and Maryland, the insurance portals looked as bad as healthcare.gov, or worse.

The federal site has been in better shape since its Dec. 1 reboot. The same can’t be said for some of the states trying to repair their own malfunctioning sites. Cover Oregon has resorted to an analog solution, taking applications offline with paper applications. (A beta site that brokers can use opened Feb. 18 to mixed reviews.) The exchanges in Maryland and in Massachusetts—the state that was the model for the Affordable Care Act’s reform—have also been plagued with problems.

Congressional Republicans are calling for probes of the failures in these three blue states, which together were awarded more than $500 million since 2010 to establish new insurance marketplaces, according to grant data from the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the federal agency in charge of the portals. More than half of that went to Oregon, which in turn spent $40 million to hire contractor Oracle.

In the aggregate, the 14 states (plus the District of Columbia) that built their own exchanges are doing better than the federal marketplaces, according to recent estimates by consulting firm Avalere Health. The company gauged the latest public enrollment figures through the end of January against Avalere’s projection for each state exchange’s total sign-ups for 2014.

State-run marketplaces are 72 percent of the way to their target, compared with 48 percent for the federal site, according to Avalere’s data. But almost all that difference comes from California, the largest state and, by Avalere’s measures, the most successful. The Covered California exchange enrolled 728,000 by the end of January, which already exceeds Avalere’s projections. Take the Golden State out of the mix, and the other 15 state exchanges are about where healthcare.gov is: halfway to the target.

Despite its website woes, Oregon has also reached roughly half of Avalere’s projected enrollment. Massachusetts is the laggard, with a little more than 8,000 newly insured through its exchange, 17 percent of Avalere’s projection. Maryland, at 38 percent, lands somewhere in the middle. Besides California, a couple of states that enthusiastically embraced Obamacare, including Colorado and Washington state, have robust enrollment in their insurance portals to show for it.