December 2013

Insurance companies are still waiting for key parts of HealthCare.gov to be built -- and still having trouble with the parts that are in place.

Important pieces of the Obamacare site are still glitchy, or missing altogether. And the site’s botched rollout is hardly boosting confidence in the vital components that still need to be built, including the systems for processing payments to insurers and squaring away the details of who has enrolled in which plans. Both systems are crucial to the insurance industry, which needs to collect premiums so it can pay out claims. And carriers are still waiting for the delayed process of reconciling their enrollment information with the federal government’s data. As the rest of HealthCare.gov struggles to get off the ground, people in and near the insurance industry are nervous about the delays and about how well those systems will work once they’re in place.

[Commentary] Now that he's in office, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is only slightly less inscrutable than he had been in the months leading up to his nomination by President Barack Obama and approval by the Senate. That's probably as it should be: It's unwise for a regulator to get too specific on particular issues before handing down actual rulings.

But we can draw some insights from his first big policy speech, given at Ohio State University. In it, Chairman Wheeler lived up to the reputation he gained during the nomination process as a policy wonk and a tech nerd who is supremely careful about regulation. In a nutshell, he's not against imposing rules on the communications industry, but he seems hesitant to do so unless those rules are meant to foster more competition, and hence more choices and lower prices for consumers.

The Obama Administration is privately raising concerns with officials in South Korea about their plans to let a Chinese telecommunications giant develop the country's advanced wireless network, expanding a quiet campaign to warn key allies against integrating the Chinese technology into their systems.

The US effort in South Korea, which followed a similar push with close ally Australia, shows the extent to which the Obama Administration is concerned about the expansion of China's Huawei Technologies. in building critical telecommunications networks for key allies. Washington sees as a risk that the company's equipment could be used for spying on communications among its partners, US officials say. The move in South Korea could add to rising tensions with China. US military and intelligence officials have long warned that China poses a cyber-espionage threat to US defense systems and companies. US officials said the South Korea telecommunications network is particularly sensitive because of the presence of US forces there to help defend the country against North Korea.

Google’s plans for stretching its TV and light-speed Internet service across the Kansas City market include deals with more than a dozen cities, but gaping holes exist -- especially in the Missouri suburbs.

In Overland Park (KS), Google responded to a momentary hesitation from the city council by putting off, indefinitely, efforts to stitch the prosperous suburb into the fold of Google Fiber. The other unmistakable gap in the market is marked by working-class Independence. The Jackson County suburb’s 115,000-plus residents could go a long way toward giving Google a better return on the investment it’s made to build a network and string fiber optic lines directly to homes. Yet Google says it never opened talks with Independence officials and is not on the verge of doing so. “We hope to be able to expand to more communities in the future, but for now we’re focusing our energy and resources on engineering, designing, and building a new fiber network for the communities” that already have deals with Google, company spokeswoman Jenna Wandres said.