From Twitchy...... Happy Halloween !
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November 1....... More Twitchy
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In case there was any remaining doubt that the Obama White House thinks we’re all stupid, check out this tweet:
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http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/01/max-train-wreck-baucus-on-obamacare-if-humpty-dumpty-cant-be-fixed-soon-we-might-have-to-delay-the-mandate/
Max “Train Wreck” Baucus on ObamaCare: If Humpty Dumpty can’t be fixed soon, we might have to delay the mandate
POSTED AT 4:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 1, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Amazing words from the man who’s often described as the “architect” of the giant health-care fartburger that’s now landed on America’s plate. Contrary to popular belief, he didn’t call ObamaCare itself a “train wreck” back in the spring; his point at the time was that the law’s success depended upon convincing young, healthy, middle-class people to sign up. If HHS did that, everything would be grand. If they didn’t, it’d be a train wreck due to adverse selection: Insurers would be stuck with an influx of sick people signing up and no way to pay for it without healthy people handing over their premium money each month. The train wreck was conditional.
Six months later, he’s starting to see the train lights in the distance. What’s amazing about this clip is that Baucus, as “architect” of the law, surely understands as well as anyone that delaying the mandate would increase the risk of a wreck — and yet here he is, casually tossing the idea out there. No wonder insurers are getting fidgety:
The health care law essentially strikes a deal with insurance companies: They are required to cover people with preexisting conditions, and they can’t charge people more based on those conditions. Both of those policies will cost insurers money—potentially, a lot of it. So the law also includes three tools to minimize their financial risks: the individual mandate; subsidies to help people afford insurance; and a defined window to buy coverage.If lawmakers start fiddling with those incentives, the equation gets worse for insurers. There are minor changes that the industry could probably weather, maybe easily. But just the idea of weakening those safeguards is enough to make insurers nervous. A handful of states tried in the 1990s to enforce guaranteed coverage, but without the safeguards that Obamacare includes for insurers. Premiums in those states skyrocketed, growing by double digits each year until they were so expensive that the reforms ended up increasing the number of uninsured people…Although it sounds like a minor adjustment, the fact that there’s a defined open-enrollment period is a big deal for insurance companies. Extending the window would be “destabilizing” for insurers, Zirkelbach said.Their primary goal is to cover as many people as possible who won’t file big claims. It’s the defined enrollment window, not the individual mandate, that prevents people from waiting to sign up for insurance until they’re on their way to the emergency room. So extending the window could make it easier for young, healthy people to go without insurance until they absolutely need it. “If these vital enrollment incentives were to change, the premiums health plans filed for next year would have to increase,” Zirkelbach said.
If the premiums next year increase so much that healthy people with insurance decide it’s cheaper to drop their coverage and just pay the fine instead, then voila — you’ve got your first downward turn in the fabled industry death spiral. And here’s Baucus, hinting that he might vote for a mandate delay a few months from now that would make that more likely. Even more amazing, he has nothing to gain personally from pushing delay. He announced months ago that he’s retiring at the end of this term so, unlike other red-state Dems like Pryor, Landrieu, et al, he doesn’t have to worry about being tossed out on his ear by angry voters in an anti-ObamaCare backlash. Given his role in crafting the law and his unaccountability to voters, he’s actually perfectly positioned to be the White House’s Senate point man in explaining that delay is potentially very bad and that such things shouldn’t even be spoken of until months have passed and it’s the only option left. As it is, he’s helping to mainstream the idea of delay by floating it as a possibility, which not only puts Obama in a tougher spot later but gives the GOP a foothold in arguing that the whole law should be put off so as to minimize the adverse selection problem. Mystifying. And proof, I guess, of just how toxic ObamaCare’s suddenly become. Even a guy who has no reason to distance himself from it is inching away.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/31/new-glitch-if-you-like-your-hospital-you-might-not-be-able-to-keep-your-hospital/
New “glitch”: If you like your hospital, you might not be able to keep your hospital
POSTED AT 5:21 PM ON OCTOBER 31, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
How bad has it gotten? Dude.
On how he would evaluate the Obama presidency so far:
[Jimmy Carter]: “He’s done the best he could under the circumstances. His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.”
At best. And so, perhaps inevitably, we reach the Carter-nostalgia phase of the Obama presidency:
Americans who sign up for Obamacare will be getting a big surprise if they expect to access premium health care that may have been previously covered under their personal policies. Most of the top hospitals will accept insurance from just one or two companies operating under Obamacare…Regulations driven by the Obama White House have indeed made insurance more affordable – if, like Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, you’re looking only at price. But responding to Obamacare caps on premiums, many insurers will, in turn, simply offer top-tier doctors and hospitals far less cash for services rendered…“Many companies have selectively entered the exchanges because they are concerned that (the exchanges) will be dominated by risky, high-using populations who wanted insurance (before Obamacare) and couldn’t afford it,” said Wilsensky, who is also on the board of directors of UnitedHealth. “They are pressed to narrow their networks to stay within the premiums.”Consumers, too, will struggle with the new system. Many exchanges don’t even list the insurance companies on their web sites. Some that do, like California, don’t provide names of doctors or hospitals.
Turns out you can’t expand coverage, cap patient costs, and expect providers to work for less, just like you can’t create the conditions for a major adverse selection problem and expect insurers to flood into the new market. “Some hospitals and doctors don’t even know if they are in the network,” says one expert, a point also made in the WSJ story I flagged this morning about consumers often having no idea who’ the providers are in each plan offered on the state exchanges. That’s not a newly discovered “glitch,” either; the NYT noticed two weeks ago that asking people to comparison-shop among dozens of different plans without telling them which doctors accept which ones leaves them in the dark about a key consideration of their coverage. Essentially, if you’re trying to decide between three or four different plans, the only way to tell if a provider accepts any or all of them is either to call various doctors you’d like to see and run through it with them (imagine being the receptionist fielding hundreds or thousands of those calls) or go to the individual corporate website, find the plan you’re interested in, and then hunt around on the site to see if a particular doctor carries it. This is, of course, the opposite of what the online exchanges were supposed to do; the whole point was to allow for simple, one-stop shopping where you can compare the particulars of different plans side by side.
From what I can tell, the feds’ solution to the provider problem thus far has been simply to not talk about it. Which makes sense from a PR standpoint: Given all the other flaming wreckage they have to deal with, why force the issue of coverage networks being smaller than everyone anticipated until it’s absolutely necessary, i.e. on January 1, when coverage takes effect? It’s irresponsible, though, insofar as they’re pushing consumers to focus on the cost and comprehensiveness of the coverage they’re buying on the exchanges and that’s going to lead them to overlook the provider-network component, which will end up being a nasty surprise later in some cases. You’ve got middle-class people deciding to buy Plan A instead of Plan B because the former’s a bit more affordable and meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, the fine print says that Plan A includes far fewer providers than Plan B does. If you think the media’s been tough on O-Care lately, wait until January when “rate shock” segues into “provider shock.”
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/31/did-hhs-estimate-that-93-million-americans-will-lose-their-insurance/
Did HHS estimate that 93 million Americans will lose their insurance plans?
POSTED AT 12:01 PM ON OCTOBER 31, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY
Ever since NBC reported on Monday that HHS knew that their ObamaCare regulations would force the cancellations of “40 to 67 percent” of all insurance plans in the individual market, the White House and its allies have insisted that only a small percentage of Americans overall would lose their current health insurance plans. David Axelrod specifically cited the difference between the individual market and employer-based health insurance to argue that “most Americans” will keep their plans, a claim that Politifact laughably rated as “mostly true.” Jay Carney himself drew an explicit contrast to defend the “keep your plan” lie:
So let’s step back. If you are one of the 80 percent of the American people who receive insurance coverage through your employer or through Medicaid or Medicare or the Veterans Administration, this conversation doesn’t apply to you. These reports do not apply to you. If you’re one of the 15 percent of the American people who are uninsured entirely right now, this conversation does not apply to you. So what we’re talking about here is the 5 percent in the country who currently purchase insurance on the individual market.And that market has been like the Wild West. It has been under regulated. It is the place where Americans have most keenly felt the challenges posed by the insurance system in this country, where, for example, insurers could deny you coverage if you have a preexisting condition, or they could offer you coverage that in its fine print excluded benefits specifically related to your preexisting condition. So if you have hypertension or you’re a cancer survivor, they could carve out coverage on those specific issues and then give you a plan that would cover you on other things.They could also, and did, routinely, change your plan or eliminate it altogether, annually. They could throw you off. They could jack up your premiums. They could change your coverage. And one of the issues that the Affordable Care Act was designed to address was the need to provide greater security to those Americans who had no other option but to seek insurance on the individual market.So that’s the universe we’re talking about: 5 percent of the population. And I think it’s important to know that, because in some of the coverage of this issue in the last several days, you would think that you were talking about 75 percent or 80 percent or 60 percent of the American population. So there’s that.
Except that this conversation actually does apply to all Americans, and not just those on the individual markets, argues Avik Roy at Forbes. The HHS analysis of the markets and the impact of ObamaCare on plan offerings was not limited to just the individual markets. When the employer mandate gets enforced for the 2015 enrollment, as many as 93 million Americans may find that their job-provided coverage will go the way of the individual plans this year:
But Carney’s dismissal of the media’s concerns was wrong, on several fronts. Contrary to the reporting of NBC, the administration’s commentary in the Federal Register did not only refer to the individual market, but also the market for employer-sponsored health insurance.Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34552. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and get canceled. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and get canceled, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market. (Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.) The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.
That’s not the worst of the issue for Obama and Democrats, either. The last question asked by Roy is whether employers will bother to make those changes at all. Employers will face a critical decision point by September 2014 of whether to pay the fine for non-coverage and force their employees into the individual exchanges, or absorb more of the skyrocketing premium costs we’re seeing this month. They may opt for an in-between solution of private exchanges, but even that will force employees out of their current plans, contra to the Obama promise that Americans can “keep their plans.”
Those decisions and actions will take place just weeks before the midterm elections. Take the headlines and outrage we are seeing now for the impact that ObamaCare has on the individual market and perhaps as many as 12 million Americans, and then multiply it by six as employers make the rational decision to get out of the health-insurance business altogether. The delay of the employer mandate may end up being the worst decision made by Barack Obama except for the hyperpartisan pursuit of ObamaCare itself.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/31/cbs-reveals-contrary-to-chiefs-testimony-cms-knew-obamacare-website-had-major-problems-before-launch/
CBS reveals: Contrary to chief’s testimony, CMS knew ObamaCare website had major problems before launch
POSTED AT 11:21 AM ON OCTOBER 31, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Via John Hayward, a scoop from Sharyl Attkisson. Alternate headline: “Blogger can’t believe we’re actually debating whether the government knew that it had a nonfunctioning website on its hands.”
How did CMS know? Simple: The employees there tested the site themselves and ended up in the same circle of 404 hell that the rest of the country landed in on October 1. And so, yet again, we return to the great unanswered question of the past month. How much of this was epic incompetence by HHS and how much of it was bad faith? When Marilyn Tavenner claimed she didn’t expect a meltdown on day one, was that a shameless lie or proof that HHS is so dysfunctional that her deputies withheld the results of the testing from her? If the latter, how many people are getting fired for this?
I can think of one person.
An agitated President Obama has expressed frustration to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the faulty ObamaCare enrollment website.A visibly annoyed Obama behind closed doors has made clear to Sebelius that it’s her responsibility to fix what has become an unwanted second-term blunder, according to senior administration officials.White House officials say the strong words from Obama don’t mean Sebelius is necessarily in the doghouse but that she’s responsible for fixing the problem.In the words of one senior administration official, “She’s in a tough spot. She’s on the hook.”
She’s got three weeks, realistically. If the “tech surge” team pulls a rabbit out of its hat and has the site functioning reasonably well in time for the expected post-Thanksgiving crush of enrollments, Obama will declare victory and that’ll be that. If it doesn’t — and I haven’t seen one credible outsider assessment this month suggesting that it will — then insurers will be screaming at him over adverse selection and Democrats will be screaming at him over a midterm apocalypse. The millions of people who’ve had their plans canceled will be screaming at him even louder than they are now because if they’re unable to sign up on the exchanges by December 15, they risk being without coverage of any kind on January 1. Someone will have to pay. There’s only one obvious candidate.
The latest “glitch,” by the way, isn’t so much a flaw in the website as it is a flaw in record-keeping by insurance companies that’s being made worse by the federal and state ObamaCare sites. Which doctors are included in the network for your new exchange-bought health coverage? It’s … not always clear:
Many new health exchanges don’t yet let shoppers see which doctors accept which insurance plans. Where exchanges do post the so-called provider lists, they often contain inaccurate or misleading information, some doctors say, including wrong specialties, addresses and language skills, and no indication whether providers are accepting new patients…The new health exchanges are supposed to offer a transparent shopping experience, including clear information on participating doctors. But in addition to providing wrong information, the lists may give consumers a false impression of how big the networks are, some physicians say. Several exchanges warn shoppers to ask doctors directly if they accept the new plans.
So, on top of rate shock and the giant question mark of whether a seemingly successful online application has been received by the insurance company due to the website’s back-end problems, consumers may be misled into buying coverage whose network of providers is much less conveniently accessible than they thought. And that’s on top of the fact that many of the new, supposedly superior post-ObamaCare plans being offered by insurers aren’t being accepted by some well-known providers, including certain hospitals in New York, Atlanta, and L.A. Second look at single-payer?
Hi Fred n Kev,
ReplyDeleteI still see Mick on Zero hedge posting in the comments,same line. citizen,ineligible,rule of law,,yada yada. He's right. Why doesn't somebody step up ? Is there no one who can stop this madness ? There is no Obama care,NDAA,Rural council, on and on and on, it all needs to be backed out and re set to a sane functioning system : of the people,by the people and for the people. End the FED,bust the big banks,clear all the property titles. Comprise equation to solution and implement ASAP.
Wish I could just go back to 1963 and just stay there. All this stuff goin on now is just freaking NUTS ;-)
NW
Evening NW , haven't seen Mick commenting at ZH , but I don't go through all of the comments on each post.... To my knowledge , the " birther " issue has been litigated , didn't go anywhere to my knowledge.
ReplyDeleteWe have a two party system ( so to speak ) serving one band of elites - as long this is accepted , nothing will change,
Yup, now Arnie is trying to get the law changed so HE can run. "Terminator '16" as if...
ReplyDeleteArnie can forget that one ! Lol !
ReplyDelete