Does anyone have a clue what's going on in DC..... From my recent post as a backdrop....
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/19/it-begins-wh-edging-away-from-keep-your-doctor-promise/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/19/uh-oh-carney-wont-say-specifically-whether-obama-knew-about-healthcare-govs-problems-back-in-march/
Guess the notion that Obama is a serial liar just isn't news ?
An unconfirmed rumor says president Obama himself will be the lead singer in a musical play remake.
Lending credence to the story, administration insiders gave me an advance mock-up of the flyer.
Musical Tribute "Promises, Promises"
Link if video does not play: Promises, Promises
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://freebeacon.com/hearing-security-flaws-in-obamacare-website-endanger-americans/
( Security flaws which endanger theft of personal info at healthcare.gov have wider implications - the same security flaws could endanger security at IRS , DHS , Credit agencies such as Experian. How much evidence do we need this has not been thought through carefully ? Even at this late date. )
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/19/video-wh-argued-in-court-that-majority-of-group-plans-would-end-despite-grandfathering/
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/obamacare-so-what-could-go-wrong-next-99957
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=245_1384840750
Secondary Source: http://weaselzippers.us/2013/11/19/delirious-obama-tells-ofa-recruits-on-conference-call-100-million-have-signed-up-for-obamacare/
President Barack Obama told a conference-call audience of progressive volunteers on Monday evening that 'more than 100 million Americans' – in a nation of less than 314 million – have successfully signed up for health insurance via the Affordable Care Act.
And at a time when his signature legislative initiative's website has made the White House the butt of jokes, the website hosting the conference call was plagued with its own connection errors and other malfunctions.
A weary-sounding Obama made his gaffe during the call, hosted by Organizing For Action, the nonprofit successor to his campaign organization Obama For America. The group claimed 200,000 people managed to listen, aided by an RSVP process that included a fundraising solicitation.
'I just wanted to take a few minutes to speak to everybody because you guys are the ones who are in the trenches, day-in, day-out,' Obama said, complaining of 'misinformation' that has circulated about his health insurance overhaul law.
But 'problems with the website ... have created and fed a lot of this misinformation,' he admitted.
Boasting of his administration's skill in encouraging taxpayers to buy health insurance policies through public marketplaces, he claimed that 'in the first month alone, we've seen more than 100 million Americans already successfully enroll in the new insurance plans.'
That number is att odds with reality, but Obama didn't skip a beat or make any effort to correct himself, and his next comments did little to clear up the mistake.
'You've got a million Americans who've completed an application for themselves or their families,' he continued. 'And that represents about a million-and-a-half people.'
'And of those million-and-a-half people, you've already got a whole bunch of folks who have successfully signed up to get coverage, and you've got almost 400,000 folks who could gain access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.'
'So effectively, in a month,' he said, 'we've already got half a million Americans who will likely have the security of health care – for the first time, in some cases, in their lives – as soon as January 1.'
It's likely Obama meant to initially take credit for 100,000 success stories, rather than 100 million. But his mangling of the statistics put him off-track by a factor of 1,000.
Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=245_1384840750#g2fySKq8Ytrs8EQR.99
UPDATE – It looks like Landrieu and Gillibrand are gal-pal sister Senators. Why didn’t Gillibrand have the decency to warn her red state friend about the faultiness of Obama’s pledge before it was too late? Why??
Monday, November 18, 2013
Does anyone know what the heck is going on in DC - Foreign policy
? Domestic Policy ? What the heck gives ?
With the above questions in mind , consider these mind-blowers on ObamaCare !
It begins: White House edging away from “keep your doctor” promise
POSTED AT 9:21 PM ON NOVEMBER 19, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM
Allahpundit called it during the last press conference:
Uh oh: Carney won’t say specifically whether Obama knew about Healthcare.gov’s problems back in March
POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 19, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
One of the interesting things to me about the “what did Obama know and when” subplot to the Healthcare.gov Chernobyl is how little anyone on either side seems to care whether he’s telling the truth. He’s sworn up and down, as recently as last week during his big White House presser, that he had no idea how profound the site’s troubles were, which is almost impossible to believe. Either he’s lying his ass off again, hot on the heels of his Big Lie about people keeping their plans having been exposed, or he really is so far out to lunch even on his highest domestic priorities that he was blissfully clueless about the state of the health-care Manhattan Project for more than three years. That should be a big story — “Obama: Liar or Grossly Incompetent?” — but it’s more of a curio. Why?
Now that WaPo’s revealed that the White House had reason to believe six months before launch that the site was in deep trouble, Carney’s being cagier about what the man in charge was aware of:
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Carney said, “The president received regular briefings on various aspects of implementing the [health care law], including the recommendations from this review and the steps that [agencies] had taken to address those recommendations.”Carney did not say if the president learned the details of the [March] assessment, which included warnings that the call-in centers would not work properly if the online system was malfunctioning, and that insufficient testing would make it difficult to fix problems after the launch.“As we have said many times now, I myself many times and others, and this has been frequently reported, flags were raised throughout the development of the Web site, as would be the case for any IT project of this size and complexity,” he said. “Those issues, including the ones from six months before the launch, were in turn taken up by the development team housed at [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid]. But nobody anticipated the size and scope of the problems we experienced once the site was launched, as we’ve discussed repeatedly.”
Why isn’t this a bigger story than it is? Lots of reasons. Mainly it’s because O-Care’s implementation is so disastrous in so many ways — the website, the “rate shock” horror stories, the “if you like your plan” fiasco, the palpable panic among Democrats on the Hill — that it can’t help but overshadow Obama’s personal culpability. Plus, there’s little “gotcha” to be had in proving that O knew all along that the launch would be catastrophic. Arguably it’s even worse if he really didn’t know; politicians lie all the time about their personal responsibility for policy failures, but the lack of oversight Obama’s been copping to is genuinely shocking on an agenda item this big. His thinking, I guess, it’s that it’s always better to be seen as well-meaning and negligent than incompetent and deceitful but I’m not sure that rule holds in a matter as momentous as remaking the health-care system. Beyond all that, though, the bloom is far enough off the Hopenchange rose that there’d be no shock value left in proving that O’s lying about the extent of his awareness of the site’s problems. Everyone knows by now that he’s willing to lie, repeatedly and without qualification, about ObamaCare; the lie about people keeping their plans was, by any measure, a bigger lie than the one he’s probably guilty of in claiming now he didn’t know how badly off the website was. Two years ago, this would have complicated his Bambi-esque image. Today, after the IRS scandal, the NSA surveillance revelations, and the “if you like your plan” debacle, it’s just not that important. After all of that, either you’ve already changed your mind about O or you never will. Proof positive that he knew Healthcare.gov was a trainwreck but approved it anyway won’t move the needle.
Via Mediaite, here’s a beleaguered Jay Carney finding comfort in mocking his new antagonists. Oh, by the way — you’ll be pleased to know that the subsidies calculator for the federal website should finally be working by … mid-January, just two short months away. God willing, as Joe Biden would say. Click the image to watch.
Guess the notion that Obama is a serial liar just isn't news ?
Tuesday, November 19, 2013 5:30 PM
30-40% of Healthcare.Gov Not Built; Payment and Back Office Pieces Missing; Musical Tribute "Promises, Promises"
Drumroll please..... It's T minus 11 days and counting before the fully functional healthcare website president Obama promised by the end of November will be up and running.
Here is the exact Obama quote from a speech in Dallas as noted by the Washington Post
"The web site is already better than it was at the beginning of October, and by the end of this month, we anticipate that it is going to be working the way it is supposed to, all right?"
Sinking Titanic
My favorite comment to the article comes from Jeff1962 who replied "At least the Titanic made it out of port before it sank..."
30-40% of Healthcare.Gov Not Built According to Official
You can count the end-of-November pledge as another promise that cannot and will not be met.
It seems that 30-40% of Healthcare.Gov is not built yet according to Henry Chao, CIO of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that operates HealthCare.gov.
CNBC reports Obamacare bombshell: IT official says HealthCare.gov needs payment feature
Here is the exact Obama quote from a speech in Dallas as noted by the Washington Post
"The web site is already better than it was at the beginning of October, and by the end of this month, we anticipate that it is going to be working the way it is supposed to, all right?"
Sinking Titanic
My favorite comment to the article comes from Jeff1962 who replied "At least the Titanic made it out of port before it sank..."
30-40% of Healthcare.Gov Not Built According to Official
You can count the end-of-November pledge as another promise that cannot and will not be met.
It seems that 30-40% of Healthcare.Gov is not built yet according to Henry Chao, CIO of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that operates HealthCare.gov.
CNBC reports Obamacare bombshell: IT official says HealthCare.gov needs payment feature
Another day, another big, bad black eye for HealthCare.gov.Obama Personally Sings in Musical Remake
A crucial system for making payments to insurers from people who enroll in that federal Obamacare marketplace has yet to be built, a senior government IT official admitted Tuesday.
"We still need to build the payments system to make the payments [to insurance companies] in January," testified Chao, deputy chief information officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that operates HealthCare.gov.
That so-called financial management tool was originally supposed to be part of HealthCare.gov when it launched Oct. 1, but officials later suspended its launch as part of their effort to get the consumer interface part of the site ready. The tool will, when it works, transmit the subsidies that the government is kicking in for many enrollees to offset the costs of their monthly premiums.
Chao on Tuesday said other areas that need to be built include "the back-office systems, the accounting systems."
He testified that the consumer interface part of that website, which enrolls people in Obamacare insurance plans, is totally built.
The revelation that the insurers' payment tool wasn't yet built startled some observers. "That's like setting up an online bank without setting up a way to make deposits," an industry source told CNBC.
Chao and other Obama administration officials have been lambasted since Oct. 1 for the glitch-laden launch of HealthCare.gov, which with just 27,000 people enrolled in 36 states over one month has grossly underperformed original expectations. The administration had originally estimated that 7 million people would enroll in Obamacare insurance plans by March 31, but that goal remains in peril.
An unconfirmed rumor says president Obama himself will be the lead singer in a musical play remake.
Lending credence to the story, administration insiders gave me an advance mock-up of the flyer.
Musical Tribute "Promises, Promises"
Link if video does not play: Promises, Promises
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://freebeacon.com/hearing-security-flaws-in-obamacare-website-endanger-americans/
( Security flaws which endanger theft of personal info at healthcare.gov have wider implications - the same security flaws could endanger security at IRS , DHS , Credit agencies such as Experian. How much evidence do we need this has not been thought through carefully ? Even at this late date. )
Hearing: Security Flaws in Obamacare Website Endanger Americans
Experts say they would not use HealthCare.gov due to risks
Reuters
BY:
A panel of IT experts had one answer for Congress when asked if Americans should use the Obamacare exchanges on Healthcare.gov in light of its security concerns: “No.”
A quartet of experts testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology cited numerous security flaws within Healthcare.gov. They attributed the risks to the complexity of its 500 million lines of code and a rushed rollout that failed to properly test the website.
David Kennedy, the founder of TrustedSec, an online security firm, said that the risks were easy to ascertain.
“Just by looking at the website we can see that there is just fundamental security principles not being followed, things that are basic in nature that any security tester, like myself or anyone that we hire to test these sites, would actually test for prior to being released,” Kennedy, formerly of the National Security Agency and a one-time cyber-intelligence analyst for the U.S. Marine Corps, said.
The experts said the personal information of millions of Americans is at risk, including Social Security numbers, birthdays, incomes, home mortgages, and addresses. Rep. Mo Brooks (R., Ala.) called it the “mother lode for identity theft.”
“Americans should be scared to death,” said Rep. Chris Stewart (R., Utah).
Kennedy demonstrated an attack in the hearing room, showing how on Finder.Healthcare.gov a hacker could breach into a computer, monitor its webcam, and steal passwords.
Hackers from Russia or China could “absolutely” breach the online marketplace, he said.
The problems could only get worse since the president’s team is trying to fix the website while it is still up and running.
Morgan Wright, a cyber terrorism expert and CEO of Crowd Sourced Investigations, LLC., said attempting to fix one line of code could open up a “Pandora’s box.”
“You create an unintended series of cascading events you have no control over because you don’t have a grasp of what the code is actually doing,” he said. “You think you’ve changed one thing, by doing that you’ve opened up a Pandora’s box of vulnerabilities on the other side.”
Kennedy said he has never seen anything like it.
“To be honest with you, I have not seen—and I’ve worked for Fortune 10, Fortune 50, Fortune 1,000 companies, as well as on the government side—I have not seen an application that pales in comparison to 500 million lines of code, including some of the largest applications you would ever see in the history of man.”
Because of the sheer amount of code, it is impossible to conduct a complete end-to-end security assessment on the website, the panelists said. Just reviewing it for security risks could take six months.
Fixing the flawed code will also be extremely expensive. The market value of high-end website code is about $50 per line, Kennedy said.
“That’s where I’ve been trying to get my head around, just—half a billion lines of code, particularly when you’re reaching out and pulling it out of other databases and then standardizing,” said Rep. David Schweikert (R., Ariz.). “Does something seem almost absurd?”
“Well, there’s also another paradigm, too, that it costs you $1 to fix it before you launch, it will cost you up to $100 to fix it after you launch,” Wright said.
Another concern is that the website is integrated with other federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
“It hooks into the IRS, it hooks into DHS, it hooks into Experian, which is a third party,” Kennedy said. “You have all of these trusted connections, all these things that make up the site itself, but the pieces that actually make up Healthcare.gov are multiple areas.”
“Given Healthcare.gov’s security issues, and assuming for the moment that you would be personally responsible for all damages incurred from your advice, would any of you advise an American citizen to use this website as the security issues now exist?” asked Rep. Brooks.
Every witness said no.
Kennedy offered three recommendations to Congress. The best option, he said, is to create “Healtcare.gov 2.0,” a completely redesigned second website that will work in conjunction with the original. He estimated it would take about six months to complete.
The other options are to take the website offline to fix it, which could take four to six months, or introduce new code while it’s still running, which could take years.
“I’m not a political person, I’m not here to talk politics, but if you’re asking me from a technology standpoint, it would be easier to start over again, lay the foundation of security, and start from the beginning,” Wright said. “The security has to be the foundation of this site. Period.”
“Unfortunately the personal information that has already been entered into Healthcare.gov is vulnerable to online criminals and identity thieves,” Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas) said. “President Obama has a responsibility to ensure that the personal and financial data collected as part of Obamacare is secure. It is clear this is not the case.”
“There is only one useable course of action: Mr. President, take down this website.”
Video: WH argued in court that majority of group plans would end despite grandfathering
POSTED AT 4:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 19, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY
We actually saw this three weeks ago from Avik Roy at Forbes, who perused the federal register and discovered that HHS noted quietly that the new mandates from ObamaCare wouldn’t just impact the individual market. They estimated that as many as 93 million Americans will lose their existing group plans provided through their employers, making mince meat of the “you can keep your plan” promise from Barack Obama — made repeatedly even after the HHS commentary. Andrew McCarthy upped the ante by finding a brief filed by the Department of Justice in Priests for Life v HHS that not only acknowledged that reality, but argued it in court:
It gets worse. My friends at the American Freedom Law Center (on whose advisory board I sit) are representing Priests for Life, a group aggrieved by Obamacare’s denial of religious liberty — specifically, the ACA’s mandate that believers, despite their faith-based objections, provide their employees with coverage for the use of abortifacients and contraceptives. On October 17, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services, represented by the Obama Justice Department, submitted a brief to the federal district court in Washington, opposing Priests for Life’s summary judgment motion. On page 27 of its brief, the Justice Department makes the following remarkable assertion:The [ACA’s] grandfathering provision’s incremental transition does not undermine the government’s interests in a significant way. [Citing, among other sources, the Federal Register.] Even under the grandfathering provision, it is projected that more group health plans will transition to the requirements under the regulations as time goes on. Defendants have estimated that a majority of group health plans will have lost their grandfather status by the end of 2013.HHS and the Justice Department cite the same section of the Federal Register referred to by John Hinderaker, as well as an annual survey on “Employer Health Benefits” compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2012.So, while the president has been telling us that, under the vaunted grandfathering provision, all Americans who like their health-insurance plans will be able to keep them, “period,” his administration has been representing in federal court that most health plans would lose their “grandfather status” by the end of this year. Not just the “5 percent” of individual-market consumers, but close to all consumers — including well over 100 million American workers who get coverage through their jobs — have been expected by the president swiftly to “transition to the requirements under the [Obamacare] regulations.” That is, their health-insurance plans would be eliminated. They would be forced into Obamacare-compliant plans, with all the prohibitive price hikes and coercive mandates that “transition” portends.Obamacare is a massive fraudulent scheme. A criminal investigation should be opened. Obviously, the Obama Justice Department will not do that, but the House of Representatives should commence hearings into the offenses that have been committed in the president’s deception of the American people.
Last night on The Kelly File, McCarthy called this deception “about as insidious as it gets”:
As I wrote at the time, this shows that the real damage from the ObamaCare rollout has yet to arrive. Thanks to the delay in the employer mandate, those plans won’t change until 2015 — but that means insurers have to force people out of their existing plans by the time open enrollment for 2015 starts, which is October 2014. That will just be a few weeks before the midterm elections, and the resultant outrage over the disruption of existing coverage will make the last few weeks look like a minor kerfuffle.
and.....
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/19/cms-tech-officer-roughly-30-40-of-the-obamacare-exchange-system-still-needs-to-be-built-including-the-payment-system/
CMS tech officer: Roughly 30-40% of the ObamaCare exchange system still needs to be built — including the payment system
POSTED AT 2:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 19, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Skip to 3:15 for the key bit. We’re 50 days removed from launch and Chao’s spent hours upon hours testifying about the website before Congress over the last few weeks. And somehow only now are we hearing about this.
Am I awake?
Obama Snubs 150th Anniversary of Gettysburg Address
Busted website, canceled policies, lousy early enrollment numbers. And that could be just the warmup.
Because the lesson of the last six weeks is that when it comes to the Obamacare rollout, if it can go wrong, it probably will.
The stumble-filled debut of President Barack Obama’s health care law is drawing new attention to the other risks that have been on the radar screen of health care wonks for months. Think health insurance plans sinking under the weight of sick customers, newly insured people being stunned that they still have to spend on health care, and possibly another wave of canceled policies — right before the 2014 elections.
They’re mostly worst-case scenarios, and an Obamacare recovery in the next few months could still prevent some of the biggest ones from ever happening. But health care experts are taking all of them a lot more seriously now — because at this point, why wouldn’t they?
A complete list of possibilities could be overwhelming, but here are the main ones to watch:
‘Death spiral’
This was always the worst of the worst-case scenarios: Only sick people enroll in the Obamacare health insurance plans, healthy people stay away, and everyone’s premiums rise out of control because there are no healthy people to cover the sick people’s costs.
That’s the dreaded “death spiral,” and it has been a possibility all along. But it was only a remote one — because health care experts have counted on the attraction of Obamacare’s subsidies, along with the threat of fines from the individual mandate, to lure enough healthy customers to prevent a meltdown.
But they were also counting on a functioning website. Now that HealthCare.gov has tripped up all but the most committed customers, health care analysts are taking another look at the “death spiral” scenario — and some are worried that it’s already playing out before their eyes.
“This is not a political attack — I think we’re already there. I really do,” said Robert Laszewski, a consultant who works with health insurance companies. “If everyone is hearing that there are all these problems with the website and you have to do all these workarounds, who’s going to do the workarounds? Sick people.”
The Obama administration says roughly 106,000 people selected health insurance plans in October — and only a quarter if those used the federal website, which serves 36 states. There are a lot more potential customers, since nearly 1.1 million were found to be eligible for Obamacare plans. But they have to get through the website first.
The buggy website would have to be working well by the beginning of December, as the Obama administration has promised, to avoid discouraging healthy people from signing up, Laszewski said — and the chances of a successful fix by then are growing more remote every day.
Others, however, say it’s too early to tell if a death spiral is a real danger. The open enrollment period lasts through March, they point out, and healthy people would probably be the last customers to sign up anyway.
“It’s too early to know for sure,” said Mark McClellan, who ran the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President George W. Bush and presided over the launch of the Medicare prescription drug program. “What’s going to matter is not the enrollment numbers over the next few weeks, but what the enrollment looks like come February or March.”
The cost of the cancellations fix
There’s another problem, and it has nothing to do with the website. Insurers and actuaries say the Obama administration’s solution to the canceled policies mess could backfire — because by telling insurers they can extend people’s individual coverage, they might cause the insurance prices to rise anyway.
That’s because the mix of healthy and sick people in the new Obamacare plans would be disrupted. In the worst-case scenario, it would be the healthy people that renew their old, pre-Obamacare insurance, and only the sick people would switch to the new plans — because they’d want the new coverage that accepts anyone with pre-existing conditions.
Obama administration officials say they can take care of that problem by using a built-in mechanism in Obamacare that’s supposed to help insurers with high-cost patients. The “risk corridors” provision gives extra payments to health plans that draw a lot of sick people, and administration officials think they can adjust that mechanism to help insurers that lose too many customers they were expecting.
But even if that works, that could increase the cost of Obamacare — because the federal government would be on the hook for most of those extra expenses. In a letter to lawmakers, the American Academy of Actuaries warned that “costs to the federal government could increase as higher-than-expected average medical claims are more likely to trigger risk corridor payments.”
That’s the issue Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is targeting with his proposal to repeal the risk corridors provision to prevent a “bailout” of insurance companies. A Rubio aide says there’s no exact estimate of how much federal spending would increase, but they’re going to ask the Congressional Budget Office to look into it.
Price hikes during election season
If the Obamacare health plans don’t get a good mix of healthy and sick people, the rate hikes wouldn’t happen right away. The prices are already locked in for 2014. The bigger political headache for Democrats is that insurance companies would raise their prices for 2015, and those new rates would be announced in the spring — bringing another round of bad news during election season.
Most likely, the insurance companies would submit their bids in April, and that would be based on only the most preliminary information about final enrollment figures for Obamacare’s first year.
“That should be in the category of things the administration should be thinking about,” said McClellan.
Coverage gap
The big danger of the canceled policies isn’t totally off the table. For any individual health plans that don’t get extended, customers will have to find new health insurance, either through the Obamacare websites or through workarounds, like the call center or even contacting health insurers directly. If they can’t do it by Dec. 15, they might not have a replacement health insurance plan by Jan. 1.
If health insurers — and state insurance commissioners — go along with the White House plan and extend people’s policies, that won’t be a problem. But not all of them will. Insurance commissioners in Washington state, Mississippi, Georgia and Rhode Island have already said no, and others have said they’re skeptical about it.
“It definitely allows insurers to continue policies and avoid any cancellations until 2015, but it’s still up to state regulators and the insurers themselves whether to take the option. So, it’ll probably vary from state to state and plan to plan,” said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
More cancellations close to the election
There’s another, separate issue with the cancellations. Some have actually been pushed into next year, because some insurers have offered early renewals — in which individuals or small businesses who renew their policies before the end of the year can keep them into 2014.
For example, Elaine Buccieri of Arlington, Texas, was able to get that kind of deal from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas. The carrier just moved everyone’s anniversary date to December, giving them more time in their old plans.
But that kind of renewal only carries people into 2014, raising the possibility that those people, and small businesses, could just get another wave of cancellation letters next year. And those letters would have to go out early enough to give them time to sign up for new policies — meaning they could go out in the fall, right before the mid-term elections.
“This is really getting backloaded into December 2014,” said Laszewski, who got an early renewal option with his own cancellation notice from CareFirst.
It’s not clear how widespread the practice is. A Commonwealth Fund blog post said it has been allowed in states like Arkansas, Colorado, Montana, Idaho and Kentucky, usually with some strings attached. And Sabrina Corlette of Georgetown University, one of the researchers who wrote the blog post, says more than 80 percent of small businesses in Wisconsin have taken the early renewal option — and of the individual insurance cancellation notices she was able to review, three out of four offered early renewals.
The Obama administration fix could take care of some of the problem, because it allows existing health plans to be renewed any time before Oct. 1, 2014. But again, not all states will allow it, and not all insurers will do it — so it’s not clear that the fix would take pre-election cancellations completely off the table.
Sticker shock
Obamacare supporters are convinced that once people with canceled policies can actually use the federal website, they’ll be able to find replacement health plans that are better and cheaper than what they have now, not just the expensive replacements their own insurers are offering up.
But Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, says that’s not going to be true of everyone. He says some people will go to the website and be dismayed by the prices — because they now have to include coverage of everyone with pre-existing conditions, new benefits that weren’t covered by all individual plans before, and a ban on charging older customers more than three times as much as younger people.
That doesn’t mean everyone will actually pay the sticker price. Many people will qualify for subsidies, which could mask any increases. But not everyone will get subsidies — a lot of people who will need coverage will find that their incomes are too high.
Ginsburg says the Obama administration will have to do something about “sticker shock,” but they won’t be able to backtrack on covering pre-existing conditions — that’s too central to the law’s goals. The limits on age-related pricing, however, are less crucial and could probably be rolled back to reduce the prices, he said.
There could also be another level of sticker shock not just over the premiums, but over the other out-of-pocket expenses people will have to pay.
A good example is the deductible — the amount of medical expenses someone has to pay before coverage even begins. All private health insurance has deductibles — that’s not unique to Obamacare. But a survey of 22 health insurers in six states by Avalere Health, a consulting firm, found that the average deductible is $2,550 in “silver” Obamacare plans (the second-cheapest kind). That’s compared to the $1,135 average that nearly eight out of 10 people in employer-sponsored health plans had to pay.
The deductibles are even higher in “bronze” plans, the cheapest kind. The average bronze deductible was $5,150 — and some were as high as $6,350.
“We all knew this was going to happen, but there could be another round of shock” when people actually try to use their Obamacare coverage and realize it doesn’t pay for everything, said one health insurance industry official.
People who can’t prove they’re covered
When Medicare Part D began in 2006, many seniors had rude surprises when they went to their pharmacies, expecting to fill their drug prescriptions, and the pharmacists had no record that they were covered.
Given all the problems with the Obamacare website — especially since insurers are so uncertain that they’re getting accurate information on who’s signing up — there’s a chance that the same kind of thing could happen in January, as people who believe they’ve signed up for health insurance can’t prove it when they go to the doctor.
“There are going to be some issues around that, and it’s important to be looking at the information coming out of the website,” said McClellan.
It’s not likely to be as serious, given that doctors are used to dealing with patients who don’t have proof of insurance and “you can usually work something out” as long as the patients can prove it later, according to Jon Kingsdale, the former head of the Massachusetts health insurance exchange that pre-dated Obamacare.
But the reporting of customer information to the insurers has already been a well-established problem, and it’s one of the highest-priority fixes the administration is trying to make to the federal website. So far, health insurers have been double-checking all of the information they’re getting, but that won’t be possible if the volume of customers shoots up in December — as it needs to, for people to get coverage in January.
“That’s OK with low volume. If you kind of open the floodgates and tens of thousands of people are going through, manual verification is not an option,” said the insurance official.
People who get wrong subsidies
This one is more of a question mark, because it’s too early to know how accurate the website calculations will be. But the reality is that any errors would backfire on the newly insured people — and so could any nasty surprises, like changes in their incomes.
If people get bigger tax credits than they’re supposed to get, Obamacare requires them to pay back the overpayments — with some limits — when they file their taxes the next year. But the calculations are so complicated that it would be hard, if not impossible, for most consumers to know if they’re getting too much.
And people may not realize that if their incomes go up in the middle of the year, they may not qualify for as much of a subsidy as they did before.
“Think of the family that gets a big subsidy, and then Mom goes to work halfway through the year,” said Laszewski.
Health care experts don’t put this one at the top of the list yet, but they’re watching it.
“It’s hard to judge how big a risk it is, but it would be a very consequential problem if it turned out to be true,” said Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story contained an inaccurate description of the “silver” Obamacare plans.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=245_1384840750
Obama: "More than 100 million Americans" have enrolled
Obama flubs during health care conference call with community organizers, claims 'more than 100 MILLION Americans' have enrolled
By DAVID MARTOSKO, U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR
Original Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509715/Obama-flubs-health-care-conference-community-organizers-More-100-million-Americans-successfully-enrolled.html
By DAVID MARTOSKO, U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR
Original Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509715/Obama-flubs-health-care-conference-community-organizers-More-100-million-Americans-successfully-enrolled.html
Secondary Source: http://weaselzippers.us/2013/11/19/delirious-obama-tells-ofa-recruits-on-conference-call-100-million-have-signed-up-for-obamacare/
President Barack Obama told a conference-call audience of progressive volunteers on Monday evening that 'more than 100 million Americans' – in a nation of less than 314 million – have successfully signed up for health insurance via the Affordable Care Act.
And at a time when his signature legislative initiative's website has made the White House the butt of jokes, the website hosting the conference call was plagued with its own connection errors and other malfunctions.
A weary-sounding Obama made his gaffe during the call, hosted by Organizing For Action, the nonprofit successor to his campaign organization Obama For America. The group claimed 200,000 people managed to listen, aided by an RSVP process that included a fundraising solicitation.
'I just wanted to take a few minutes to speak to everybody because you guys are the ones who are in the trenches, day-in, day-out,' Obama said, complaining of 'misinformation' that has circulated about his health insurance overhaul law.
But 'problems with the website ... have created and fed a lot of this misinformation,' he admitted.
Boasting of his administration's skill in encouraging taxpayers to buy health insurance policies through public marketplaces, he claimed that 'in the first month alone, we've seen more than 100 million Americans already successfully enroll in the new insurance plans.'
That number is att odds with reality, but Obama didn't skip a beat or make any effort to correct himself, and his next comments did little to clear up the mistake.
'You've got a million Americans who've completed an application for themselves or their families,' he continued. 'And that represents about a million-and-a-half people.'
'And of those million-and-a-half people, you've already got a whole bunch of folks who have successfully signed up to get coverage, and you've got almost 400,000 folks who could gain access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.'
'So effectively, in a month,' he said, 'we've already got half a million Americans who will likely have the security of health care – for the first time, in some cases, in their lives – as soon as January 1.'
It's likely Obama meant to initially take credit for 100,000 success stories, rather than 100 million. But his mangling of the statistics put him off-track by a factor of 1,000.
Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=245_1384840750#g2fySKq8Ytrs8EQR.99
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/18/uh-oh-white-house-might-have-even-less-time-than-thought-to-repair-healthcare-gov/
Uh oh: White House might have even less time than thought to repair Healthcare.gov
POSTED AT 2:51 PM ON NOVEMBER 18, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
A short but important post from Jeryl Bier at the Standard. To refresh your memory, the reason everyone from Obama to Sebelius to the rank-and-file on the “tech surge” team keeps babbling about fixing the website by the end of this month is because the deadline for signing up for insurance coverage is just two weeks later, on December 15th, if you want it to take effect at the beginning of the year. In a perfect world where the White House had some dim sense of what it was doing, the “young healthies” on whom O-Care’s fiscal stability depends would already be signing up en masse via Healthcare.gov. People who’ve had their plans canceled would, at least, now have the option of signing up on the website so that they don’t suffer a lapse of coverage in January, even if that means higher premiums. Obama would have spent the past month doing a nonstop publicity tour encouraging people to enroll before mid-December to make sure that they have insurance on 1/1. In the world we actually live in, where the president supposedly didn’t find out that the federal insurance exchange was a smoking crater until after it went live on October 1st, virtually no one’s been able to enroll in an exchange plan yet. If — if — the website can be repaired by November 30th, that’ll give the White House two weeks at least to warn people that they need to enroll immediately if they want their new coverage in effect on New Year’s Day. It ain’t much, but it’s something.
But what if that’s all wrong? What if signing up for coverage by December 15th doesn’t by itself ensure that your new plan takes effect on January 1st? In fact, says Bier, in order to be covered at the start of 2014, not only do you need to sign up by 12/15 but you need to pay your first premium too. And, like everything else, that’s not easy to do on Healthcare.gov.
TWS: If I don’t pick a plan until 12/15, won’t it be too late for my info to go to the insurance company, them to bill me, and me to make a payment by 12/21? Seems pretty tight.[Healthcare.gov] Rep: You must make your first premium payment by 12/15/13 for your coverage to begin January 1, 2014. If you make your payment by the 21st, your coverage will begin in February 1, 2014.TWS: You said above “It may give you that option” to pay on healthcare.gov. Does that mean it’s not available yet?Rep: We are still experiencing some technical difficulties with the website, which is why it would be best to possibly go through the insurance company to make your first premium payment.
How many members of the “five percent” (the actual number is likely higher) will have enough cash available in a pinch — right before Christmas, mind you — to pony up that surprise first premium on time? How many “young healthies,” having enrolled on the site, will somehow have it slip their mind that they need to contact their insurer separately to arrange payment by the deadline? How many users of Healthcare.gov, thinking that they’ll be covered on January 1, won’t even realize that they’ve only completed half the process to make that happen? This is yet another landmine for O-Care buried on the 2014 calendar: Some segment of the population, wrongly thinking that their coverage is in effect, will go to the doctor in January only to find that they missed the payment deadline. Note to all bros in Colorado: No keg stands until February.
By the way, the White House’s new hope for Healthcare.gov is that it’ll be able to handle 80 percent of users by December 1st. That’d be ridiculous for any private commercial website, but it’s a moral victory as a salvage operation for a site built by a team whose ostensible leader eagerly reminds the media that he didn’t know much about it until it was too late. Exit quotation: “People don’t like to tell him bad news.”
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/18/incoherence-democrats-offer-contradictory-excuses-over-keep-your-plan-lie/
Incoherence: Democrats offer contradictory excuses over ‘keep your plan’ lie
POSTED AT 6:11 PM ON NOVEMBER 18, 2013 BY GUY BENSON
Reading Erika’s post this morning got me thinking. Democrats still haven’t gotten their story straight about the untimely demise of “if you like your plan, you can keep it” — President Obama’s most memorable presidential promise. For his part, Obama delivered the pledge ad nauseam for years, before misleadingly minimizing the scope of its victims as it unraveled. Then, after a feeble shot at revisionism cratered, he was forced to muster a half-assed apology. When that didn’t staunch the bleeding either, he rolled out a desperation “fix” that hits a rare trifecta: It is logistically infeasible — and quite possibly illegal — according to various experts, it has been roundly criticized by lefty wonks who see it as a counter-productive affront to the viability of the law, and it has been dismissed by elected Democrats as insufficient weak sauce. No one’s happy. Quite a feat. As the White House flails and fumbles, Congressional Democrats have been left to their own devices to engage in freelance damage control. The yarn they’re spinning is a tangled web, indeed. To hear people like House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand tell it, of course they knew that ‘keep your plan’ wasn’t exactly accurate. The president employed “imprecise” language, Hoyer allowed last month. Hey, “we all knew” Obama’s categorical pledge wasn’t quite right, Gillibrand added over the weekend, lamenting that Democrats hadn’t adequately explained all the details:
Two quick points: (1) A fuller explanation would have rendered Obama’s vow inoperative, and likely would have sunk the bill. That’s the whole reason they lied in the first place. (2) Gillibrand needs to have a chat with Kirsten Powers, the Hammacks, Edie Sundby, Bob Laszewski, David Frum, Matthew Fleischer, and countless others who’ve been dumped from their decidedly non “terrible” plans into inferior and/or more expensive coverage. The Left’s persistent “junk coverage” talking point is garbage, and is especially rich coming from folks who believe with religious fervor that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is the height of human compassion. (Also, has she heard about Obamacare’s effects on deductibles?) In any case, a number of Democrats want Americans to know that yes, they did know ‘keep your plan’ was inaccurate — and therefore their primary shortcoming was fouling up the expectations management game. Which brings us to a separate class of Democrats, to whom we’ll refer as the “we had no idea!” crowd. This nervous bunch is hoping to persuade voters that they were bamboozled by Obama’s promise just like everyone else, and that they’re working tirelessly to rectify the unforeseen breach of trust. This group is led by vulnerable Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon:
“It was a significant failure to understand that the grandfathering had this flaw in it,” said Merkley, “and now that it’s recognized, we’ve got to fix it.” The senator added that “we just didn’t fully understand” that during the three years before the new law went completely into effect, many people would migrate to other coverage or be forced off these grandfathered plans.
And Mary “100 percent” Landrieu of Louisiana:
“It was our understanding when we voted for that bill that people when they have insurance could keep with what they had. So I’m going to be working on that fix.”
Which is it, Democrats? Did everyone know ‘keep your plan’ wouldn’t pan out for millions of Americans, or were members left in the dark by a conniving administration? Team Gillibrand has decided that the best course of action is to try to spin their lie into a mere miscommunication — which, ironically enough, is yet another lie. Team Landrieu, by contrast, has concluded that posing as derelict ignoramuses is preferable to looking like shameless liars. The trouble for the former group is that their new “truth” is painfully incompatible with their previous assertions, and people aren’t that stupid. The problem for the latter cohort is that by pretending to be surprised by the inevitable consequences of a law they supported, they are only compounding their previous lie. How can we be so sure that at least Senate Democrats knew better? Because they were explicitly warned by their colleagues about this issue in 2010, then voted en masse to defeat a GOP proposal that would have mitigated the problem:
Fortunately, Republicans have a turn-key riposte to either cynical Democratic posture: Obamacare supporting liars and morons deserve to be replaced by voters.
UPDATE – It looks like Landrieu and Gillibrand are gal-pal sister Senators. Why didn’t Gillibrand have the decency to warn her red state friend about the faultiness of Obama’s pledge before it was too late? Why??
And SNL hits one out of the park ! When you become pawned by comedians , you are basically toast.....
Morning Fred,
ReplyDeleteYes I don't want to see Iran attacked, bad for them and possibly would lead to WW3.
Libya is a mess, I would think the majority miss the old days. I hadn't thought about Ocare messing up college policies, that sucks. Politicians lie and cheat and steal, get that :)
Bitcoin is fun as hell to watch, PM's have been a bit depressing lately even for those who are buying and not selling. Maybe some of that Bitcoin magic will rub off on the PM's. Have a great day.
Morning Kev - gold and silver being held down ( for now . ) BitCoin is a crazy roller coaster - something has to give , this can't continue for too long . Libya , Iraq , Afghanistan , Pakistan , Syria ..... all messes !
ReplyDeleteObamaCare is slapstick comedy where the actors are at their comedic best when they attempt to be serious ( Obama's performance last night a great example ! ) See the Live Leak Report where Obama claimed 100 million Americans had enrolled as an example .