http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/12/cnn-source-if-white-house-doesnt-have-solution-to-canceled-plans-by-friday-dems-may-vote-for-gops-keep-your-plan-act/

( Dem rebellion against W. H dilly dallying ? What does the fox ( obama ) say ? )

CNN source: If White House doesn’t have solution to canceled plans by Friday, Dems may vote for GOP’s “Keep Your Plan Act”

POSTED AT 8:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 12, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Amazing stuff via Mediaite. The “Keep Your Plan Act” is Fred Upton’s bill, which Jay Carney spent a few minutes attacking at today’s press briefing because it would make canceled plans available to all consumers, not just the ones who’d been enrolled in those plans before. That would be a disaster for the insurance industry. Healthy people would flee the new, more expensive plans for the resurrected cheaper ones, leaving no one in the new risk pool except sick people with very expensive treatments. That means either heavy losses for insurers, steep premium hikes next year to make up the difference, or some sort of federal bailout (congrats, red-state Democrats!) — or maybe a little of all three. You’ll have the same problem, though, albeit to a lesser extent, even if Upton’s bill is amended so that it applies only to people who’d been enrolled in a particular plan before it was cancelled. You can’t run a two-tiered healthy/sick insurance system. If the risk pools aren’t merged, replete with higher rates for the former, you can’t pay for the latter.

I understand why the GOP would back Upton’s bill. It’s a slam dunk politically, grinding Obama’s face in the consequences of his lie. This is the Democrats’ mess; Reid and the Senate can/will kill the bill if they like. I can’t understand why House Democrats, aware of the adverse selection problem that’s lurking here — and the political humiliation for the White House — would sign on, unless they’ve already reached a point of such pure terror over the “if you like your plan” backlash that they’re willing to kneecap ObamaCare six weeks out of the gate. Did they … not understand that millions of people were going to face cancellations and higher premiums under the law’s redistributive scheme? Of course they did. Steny Hoyer, number two in the Democratic caucus admitted it on October 29th. Fast forward two weeks and here’s where Hoyer is now:

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do on the Upton bill,” the Maryland Democrat said at a Tuesday briefing with reporters when discussing legislation sponsored by Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich.

Hoyer noted that he was “inclined not to be for the Upton bill at this time,” but he emphasized that he was “not closed to the option,” and would “reserve judgment” until he had seen the legislative text, which is reportedly undergoing some tweaks.

“I agree that people who purchased their policies prior to [the law's enactment date] ought to be able to keep their policies,” he said.

If he agrees that they should be able to keep their policies, why did he vote for ObamaCare?The whole point of the law is that healthy middle-class people shouldn’t be allowed to keep policies that have relatively low premiums. We need to gouge those suckers with higher premiums for new “comprehensive” plans so that we can pay for the preexisting conditions of the sick. It’s like voting for immigration reform and then feigning surprise in five years when the newly “secure” border hasn’t halted illegal immigration. It’s not supposed to do that. That’s something you tell the hoi polloi in order to give Congress enough cover to vote for it.

The vote on Upton’s bill is set for Friday, which, per CNN’s source on the Hill, means the White House has 48 hours or so to come up with its own proposal for letting people keep their plans — adverse selection problem or not — before Democrats head for the lifeboats. Greg Sargent claims that the Democratic leadership is now warning the rank and file that rich liberal donors won’t look kindly at them if they abandon The One on his big “accomplishment.” I’ll leave you with this, just to show that the fear isn’t limited to Dems in red states. After a million cancellations, even DiFi’s nervous:

Feinstein: "I have decided to cosponsor Senator Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) legislation: Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act."

5:18 PM - 12 Nov 2013

Cue the song.......

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/12/the-plot-thickens-obamacare-website-project-manager-claims-he-wasnt-told-that-security-flaws-posed-limitless-risk/

The plot thickens: ObamaCare website project manager claims he wasn’t told that security flaws posed “limitless” risk

POSTED AT 11:11 AM ON NOVEMBER 12, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

It’s Henry Chao, who warned people back in March that he was “nervous” about the state of Healthcare.gov’s development and hoped that using the site wouldn’t be “a third-world experience.” Eight months later, that’s exactly what it is: The front end barely functions, the back end is a ripe target for thieves, and the people in charge are either dangerously ignorant about its operations or covering up what they knew. Money quote from CBS’s story about this:

Chao said he was unaware of a Sept. 3 government memo written by another senior official at CMS. It found two high-risk issues, which are redacted for security reasons. The memo said “the threat and risk potential (to the system) is limitless.” The memo shows CMS gave deadlines of mid-2014 and early 2015 to address them…

It was Chao who recommended it was safe to launch the website Oct. 1. When shown the security risk memo, Chao said, “I just want to say that I haven’t seen this before.”

A Republican staff lawyer asked, “Do you find it surprising that you haven’t seen this before?”

Chao replied, “Yeah … I mean, wouldn’t you be surprised if you were me?” He later added: “It is disturbing. I mean, I don’t deny that this is … a fairly nonstandard way” to proceed.

Note well: The estimated fix for the unspecified security problems was the middle of next year at the earliest. HHS says they rolled out the site on October 1 even though it wasn’t functioning because they thought they could fix it on the fly relatively quickly after launch. This memo proves that that’s a lie.

Now, the question: Did Chao lie to the committee about not having seen the Sept. 3 memo before or was there a deliberate effort within CMS to withhold the extent of the site’s problems from supervisors like him so that they’d greenlight it for launch as scheduled? If the latter, who’s responsible? As it turns out, the memo was written by — ta da — Tony Trenkle, lead tech officer for Healthcare.gov who left last week under mysteriously vague circumstances. As CBS reported, Trenkle himself never signed off on security for the site in September; it was his boss, Marilyn Tavenner, who signed the authorization, supposedly because she thought that a project this big should carry the John Hancock of the head of CMS. Is that the truth, or did Trenkle refuse to sign because he knew the site’s security was a travesty and couldn’t in good conscience authorize launching it? The fact that he wrote such a dire memo about “limitless” risk suggests that he knew the extent of the problem — and yet, if you believe Chao, that information somehow never made its way to the project manager. Why? Why are there so many unorthodox procedures related to approval of the site’s security here? Did Tavenner, at least, see Trenkle’s memo before she authorized the launch or was it withheld from her too? If she did see it, why didn’t she tell Obama and Sebelius that security was too weak to justify rolling it out now?

I assume CMS will try to pin all of this on Trenkle by claiming he didn’t do enough to warn his superiors about how bad things were. And yet the fact remains: He wrote the memo. He wanted someone to see it. The language he used was sufficiently alarming that Chao himself said it was “disturbing” that he hadn’t seen it before when it was handed to him at the hearing. It can’t be Trenkle who suppressed the bad news about security. Whodunnit?

Bill Clinton: Obama should honor his promise about keeping your plan if you like it

POSTED AT 12:31 PM ON NOVEMBER 12, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Three possibilities here. One: If you’re married to the likely Democratic nominee in 2016, it’s never too early to start running away from ObamaCare. Two: With House Republicans set to pass Fred Upton’s “Keep Your Plan Act,” Clinton wants to make sure people know that Democrats want them to keep their plans too. Three: Clinton really does believe that Obama should keep his promise. I can buy either of the first two theories but not the third, for the simple reason that … there’s no obvious way for him to keep his promise at this point. That was the takeaway from yesterday’s post. But don’t take my word for it:

The White House is “just reacting to one broken promise by imposing a much larger and harmful one: our promise to insurers that if they priced fairly, we would deliver a broad pool of insured,” [Jon] Gruber wrote in an email. “If you allow the healthy enrollees to stay out in their old policy, the insurers lose money and the program falls apart.”…

“You just can’t send tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ‘never mind’ letters out to policyholders on, maybe, a month’s notice,” said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance industry consultant at Health Policy and Strategy Associates. “So an executive order to change the regs would be like putting Humpty Dumpty back together.”…

Let healthy people re-enroll in their old, cheaper plans and you’re left with no way for insurers to pay for the preexisting conditions of sick enrollees that they’re now on the hook for. As for Upton’s bill:

Another insurance industry official said it would be “almost impossible to operationalize” the bill for 2014 — “bordering on herculean.”

Insurers often have to get state approval each year for their plans and premiums, which can take months. For these 2013 plans to get renewed in time for 2014, the federal government would have to circumvent state control of insurance plans — a significant change in precedent — or demand states swiftly approve the plans.

They screwed the pooch here by launching O-Care late in the year, when there isn’t time for insurers to readjust plans before new coverage takes effect on January 1. Clinton surely understands all of this too, which is why it’s interesting that he’d use a question about “if you like your plan” to urge O to keep his promise rather than try to get him off the hook by launching into some shpiel about how it’s “only” five percent who are losing their plans, how it needs to be that way to make sure the sick have coverage, etc. He’s doing Obama no favors by lending his centrist credibility to the idea that, yes indeed, getting blindsided with a cancellation notice is a legitimate grievance that the president should redress.

One last possibility, though: What if, instead of people re-enrolling in their old plans, they stayed on the new ones but got extra subsidies instead? That wouldn’t solve all of the problems with the new exchange-provided plans, like smaller provider networks, but it would make them more affordable. That’s probably a nonstarter too, though, for two reasons. First, not even Obama would presume to increase subsidies set by Congress via a unilateral executive order — I think. Second, even if he could increase the amount of subsidies himself, a couple of friends reminded me last night that the ObamaCare statute states that subsidies are available only for plans purchased on the exchange. That’s actually a fatal flaw with the“Plan B” I wrote about yesterday, wondering whether people could theoretically buy their plans directly on individual insurers’ websites. They can — but they can’t get subsidies if they go that route. You’ve got to get your plan on one of the exchanges to qualify for those. In fact, if you read the statute closely, it actually says that subsidies are available only for plans sold on state exchanges. There’s a lawsuit in federal court right now challenging subsidies for plans sold through Healthcare.gov because, after all, that’s a federal exchange, not a state one. For Obama to try to unilaterally boost subsidies despite all of that would be quite a power grab. So yeah, given his track record, it’s well within the realm of possibility that he’ll try.