http://blog.heritage.org/2013/11/02/exclusive-healthcare-gov-users-warn-of-security-risk-breach-of-privacy/
Exclusive: HealthCare.gov Users Warn of Security Risk, Breach of Privacy
http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/02/administration-officials-worried-obamas
( Audacity of hype..... )
Administration Officials Worried Obama's Promise that People Could Keep Their Plans Wasn't Right, and Let Him Make It Anyway
Whitehouse.govWe already know that administration policymakers were aware that President Obama's promise that people who like their plans can keep them under Obamacare was not true, because estimates built into early regulations indicated that many plans would lose their grandfathered, protected status.
A report in today's Wall Street Journal indicates that senior White House advisers were also concerned that the promise could not be fulfilled, but decided to let the president make it anyway:
When the question arose, Mr. Obama's advisers decided that the assertion was fair, interviews with more than a dozen people involved in crafting and explaining the president's health-care plan show.But at times, there was second-guessing. At one point, aides discussed whether Mr. Obama might use more in-depth discussions, such as media interviews, to explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches, a former aide said. Officials worried, though, that delving into details such as the small number of people who might lose insurance could be confusing and would clutter the president's message."You try to talk about health care in broad, intelligible points that cut through, and you inevitably lose some accuracy when you do that," the former official said.The former official added that in the midst of a hard-fought political debate "if you like your plan, you can probably keep it" isn't a salable point.
So they apparently decided the president should repeatedly make a promise that wasn't true, and whose impacts would be felt by millions of Americans, simply because they hoped that would make it easier to sell the legislation they wanted to pass.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-02/top-obama-donor-gets-paid-fix-obamacare-website-after-blowing-it
( Bet you know how this will play out.... )
Top Obama Donor Gets Paid To Fix Obamacare Website After Blowing It Up
The ironically-named Quality Software Services Inc (QSSI) allegedly responsible for the SNAFU that is the Obamacare website's data hub has, incredibly, been named the new general contractor in charge off repairing the glitch-plagued HealthCare.gov. As The NY Post reports, as if the $150 million so far paid to this UnitedHealth subsidiary for its farcically bad implementation was not enough, the executive vice president of the firm (Anthony Welters) and his wife were among Obama's largest personal campaign contributors during the 2008 election cycle (and the firm has spent millions "lobbying" for Obamacare). The cronyism runs deep as the Post also points out that visitor logs show at least a dozen visits between the two by the end of 2012, the most recent information available.
The man at the center of the "cronyism"... Anthony Welters
A tech firm linked to a campaign-donor crony of President Obama not only got the job to help build the federal health-insurance Web site — but also is getting paid to fix it.Anthony Welters, a top campaign bundler for Obama and frequent White House guest, is the executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group, which owns the software company now at the center of the ObamaCare Web-site fiasco.UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Quality Software Services Inc. (QSSI), which built the data hub for the ObamaCare system, has been named the new general contractor in charge of repairing the glitch-plagued HealthCare.gov.Welters and his wife, Beatrice, haveshoveled piles of cash into Obama’s campaign coffers and apparently reaped the rewards....The couple have been frequent guests at the White House.Visitors logs show at least a dozen visits between the two by the end of 2012, the most recent information available.The entire Welters family has gotten into the donation game.The Welters, along with their sons, Andrew and Bryant, have contributed more than $258,000 to mostly Democratic candidates and committees since 2007.What’s more, UnitedHealth Group is one of the largest health-insurance companies in the country and spent millions lobbying for ObamaCare....The insurance giant’s purchase of QSSI in 2012 raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill, but the tech firm nevertheless kept the job of building the data hub for the ObamaCare Web site where consumers buy the new mandatory health-insurance plans.QSSI has been paid an estimated $150 million so far, but officials couldn’t say how much more the company might collect on the repair contract.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/01/carney-yes-somebody-could-provide-a-rough-estimate-of-obamacare-enrollees-but-not-for-the-public/
Carney: Yes, somebody could provide a “rough estimate” of ObamaCare enrollees, but not for the public
POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 1, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN
Via the questioning of Chuck Todd during Friday’s White House press briefing:
We’re compiling data. You can’t — you need to verify it and make it accurate. Obviously the challenges in doing that have been exacerbated by the difficulties with the website. … I suppose that somebody could provide a rough estimate, but the point is you want to get accurate information when you release it publicly. If the purpose of this line of questioning, which I know is of fierce interest to those who never wanted affordable health insurance available to the American people to begin with, is to demonstrate that those numbers are low, we concede that they will be.
Well, duh. Of course “somebody” can cobble together a “rough estimate,” but the administration will be revealing what those numbers might actually look like when they’re good and ready, thank you very much (although I might point out that today marks exactly a month since ObamaCare has been — er — technically open for business). ObamaCare can hardly afford any more poor PR at the moment, and as Carney so aptly concedes, those enrollment numbers probably aren’t anything to brag about just yet. Like in, say, Arkansas, for instance:
LITTLE ROCK — Insurance company executives told a state legislative panel Wednesday they have enrolled fewer than 170 Arkansans in health insurance plans through the Arkansas Health Insurance Marketplace.Cal Kellogg, executive vice president and chief strategy officer of Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield, Michael Stock, president and CEO of QualChoice of Arkansas, and John Ryan, CEO of Arkansas Health & Wellness Solutions, were asked about enrollment numbers while testifying before the legislative oversight committee on the marketplace.Four insurance carriers sell plans through the marketplace, which launched Oct. 1. The fourth is the national Blue Cross Blue Shield.Kellogg said he has seen fewer than 100 enroll, Stock said he has seen about 50 and Ryan said he has seen fewer than 20.
DC appellate court rules against HHS contraception mandate, for religious liberty
POSTED AT 10:01 AM ON NOVEMBER 2, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY
The HHS contraception mandate took a body blow in the DC federal appeals court yesterday. The court ruled that forcing business owners to fund and facilitate contraception and sterilization services against the tenets of their faith encroaches on their free exercise of religious belief, and that the government’s argument that protecting womens’ health trumped that right was absurd:
The mandate “trammels the right of free exercise,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote for a divided three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.The ruling was largely in line with most others around the country so far. Of nearly 40 challenges, only a handful of courts have upheld the government’s requirement that employer health plans provide free birth control, emergency contraception and sterilization.Francis A. Gilardi Jr. and Philip M. Gilardi, brothers from Sidney, Ohio, should not have to provide contraception coverage to employees of the companies they own if it goes against their Catholic faith, the court ruled. However, those companies themselves, Freshway Foods and Freshway Logistics, do not have the right to challenge the mandate on religious grounds, the court said.
That’s true, but backwards. What Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote in her decision was that corporations themselves, whether for-profit or non-profit, do not have First Amendment standing for religious exercise. However, those who own or run them do, and even though the Gilardis’ businesses are corporations, the net effect of the HHS mandate is to penalize the Gilardis individually for living their faith.
Ed Whelan explains it better:
The primary opinion, by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, rules, first, that the closely-held companies that the Gilardis run do not have any rights under RFRA. Judge Brown determines that “secular corporations” do not have free-exercise rights. And although the line between secular and religious corporations might not be easy to draw (and does not turn on the for-profit/nonprofit distinction), the plaintiff companies conceded that they are religious corporations. (Slip op. at 7-15.)But, Brown rules, the Gilardis themselves have been injured by the HHS mandate in a way that is separate and distinct from the injury to their companies. (Slip op. at 15-17.) The HHS mandate burdens their exercise of religion by pressuring them to approve and endorse the inclusion of objectionable coverage in their companies’ health plans. “They can either abide by the sacred tenets of their faith, pay a penalty of over $14 million, and cripple the companies they have spent a lifetime building, or they become complicit in a grave moral wrong.” (Slip op. at 20; see generally pp. 17-23.) The government’s supposedly compelling interest is nebulous (slip op. at 23-28), and even if it were compelling, the HHS mandate is not the least restrictive means of furthering that interest (slip op. at 28-32.)
Steven Ertelt notes that the majority had considerable skepticism over the Obama administration’s argument that this mandate was necessary to keep women healthy:
The Obama administration said that the requirement is necessary to protect women’s health and abortion rights. The judges were unconvinced that forcing companies to violate their religious rights was appropriate.Brown wrote that “it is clear the government has failed to demonstrate how such a right — whether described as noninterference, privacy, or autonomy — can extend to the compelled subsidization of a woman’s procreative practices.”“The provision of these services — even without the contraceptive mandate — by and large fulfills the statutory command for insurers to provide gender-specific preventive care,” she wrote. “At the very least, the statutory scheme will not go to pieces.”
It’s actually paternalism taken to an absurd level. People earn wages to pay for their own elective choices. Why should employers have to provide free contraception when they’re paying people to work? The policy assumes that women who don’t get contraception for free won’t buy it for themselves, even when they’re earning a paycheck. Employers who want to provide that benefit should feel free to do so, but those who don’t shouldn’t be forced to do so, especially when it interferes with their religious beliefs.
The Supreme Court will eventually weigh in on this, and the White House had better get prepared for bad news in this regard. As the New York Times notes, this mandate is mostly getting laughed out of court so far, and I’d bet that it won’t do well at the next level either.
Projecting Obamacare's Early Enrollment Numbers
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Obamacare expects to need about 7 million enrollees on the newly created insurance exchanges to make the program work. To meet this goal, the administration had hoped it would have between 400,000 and 500,000 enrollees in the first month, at a minimum, since enrollment was expected to accelerate later.
Given the problems with the federal exchanges, the total will almost certainly be much lower. But state exchanges have been much more successful at collecting data and transmitting them to insurers. If we look at those numbers, we might get an indication of how well the federal entities would have done had they functioned properly. And this might provide a better benchmark for the expected efficacy of the law in the long run.
So I’ve taken the state numbers from enrollmaven.com, which breaks out the number of private enrollments by state. (I looked only at states with actual enrollment numbers, not just applications.) I’ve excluded Hawaii, which apparently doesn’t have a functioning website yet. You can see that data in the first two columns in the chart here:
The data were reported at different points in the month. Nevada, for instance, provides numbers through Oct. 10, while Colorado’s reporting is fairly up-to-date (it’s current as of the 28th). Regardless, I prorated the numbers through the 31st. This probably understates the growth of enrollment, given that some states have worked out the bugs in their websites and people have become more aware of the programs.
Next, I looked at each state’s share of the national population. I then divided total enrollment in the state by the state’s share of the national population. This allows us to extrapolate how many people might have enrolled if a given state’s exchange had been a national one (or, if you prefer, if a given state had the population of the country as a whole).
The numbers vary by a fair amount. If exchanges had functioned and attracted customers nationally at the same rate as Minnesota, they would have attracted some 53,000 customers. On the other hand, if they had functioned like Kentucky’s, they would have attracted around 450,000, which would be close to the administration’s low-end estimate. On average, it works out to about 280,000 customers nationally.
Now, we need some caveats here, and they cut both ways. First, different states have different risk pools, different insurance rates, and different numbers of uninsured. You can’t literally extrapolate from a state to the nation as a whole. The above is meant as an estimate. That said, we have a decent cross-section of states, if perhaps a bit skewed to the Northeast. Second, there is a high degree of variance in the performance of state exchanges; some are functioning okay, some are terrible, and some are doing well. Third, these numbers might be depressed due to the negative publicity surrounding the national exchanges.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, we need to remember that 400,000 to 500,000 enrollees represented a bare minimum for what the administration expected at the start. The fact that only two states prorate into that range (and Vermont’s website is having problems now), the picture isn’t particularly encouraging.
The bottom line is this: If the national exchanges were functioning as well as the best-functioning state exchange -- and encountering the same demand -- we’d probably be on the low end of the administration’s acceptable enrollment range. If the middle state were representative of the country as a whole, we’d be below it, but not by an overwhelming amount. That’s not much, but it’s probably the best news supporters of the law have received in a while.
UPDATE: To clarify, the numbers above are private enrollment only. They exclude those who sign up for Medicaid.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/01/almost-nothing-about-obamacares-federal
Almost Nothing About Obamacare's Federal Exchange System Works
Whitehouse.govAlmost nothing about Obamacare's federal exchange system is working. It’s almost impressive how comprehensive the federal system’s technical failures are. Just about every part of the system that has been reported on seems to have problems, many of which are quite serious.- The account creation system necessary to even start the process of using the exchanges basically didn’t work at all when the site launched. Administrators appear to have improved this functionality since launch, but Jeff Zients, who is overseeing the troubleshooting project, says it’s still not working for about 10 percent of users.
- The vast majority of people who can create accounts still can’t complete the enrollment process. According to Zients, only about 30 percent of users are able to get through the system.
- Anyone who successfully logs in gets to the point of shopping for specific plans on the exchanges may see prices displayed incorrectly, as the system has had problems calculating eligibility for public subsidies for insurance. (Subsidy calculation has also proven difficult for several state-run exchanges.)
- Anyone who decides to browse for plans without logging in first is alsoliable to see incorrect prices. The “shop and browse” feature installed to mitigate problems caused by the broken account system often displays the wrong prices, because it lumps together premiums for anyone who is 49 and under, and anyone who is 50 or older. Everyone under 50 is provided prices for a 27-year-old, even though prices for people in their 40s might be quite a bit higher.
- Several exchanges are having trouble accurately displaying provider and network information for the plans on offer. This is not a big problem for the federal exchanges yet because they are still so dysfunctional, but if the state-run exchanges are any indication, it could eventually create headaches for people who want to know which doctors and hospitals are attached to which plans.
- Even with just a trickle of individuals making it all the way through the process, insurers are not getting correct enrollment information from the exchanges. As a result, many are reviewing applications manually. If larger numbers of applications ever make it through the system, that won’t be sustainable. And there may be longer term problems as well: If enrollment data is transmitted incorrectly, people could eventually find out they didn’t enroll in the plan they selected, or didn’t actually enroll at all.
- The small business exchanges aren’t fully up and running either. Enrollment in those exchanges, already delayed once, was delayed again, the administration announced this week.
- The federal exchanges were supposed to seamlessly interface with multiple state Medicaid programs, but that functionality, originally delayed until November 1, was also further delayed last week. And at this point, federal officials won’t say when they expect that functionality will be complete.
- Security testing for the federal exchange system was never completed. An internal memo warned that too little testing "exposed a level of uncertainty that can be deemed as a high risk.” (The temporary security authorization under which the site is operating also appears to violatethe administration's own web security guidelines.)
- The Spanish language version of the website has been delayed indefinitely.
- The “data hub” that routes information between multiple databases hasgone down on multiple occasions due to hosting facility outages.
It’s a near-total failure. All the major segments of the system—the user end, the insurer end, the data-routing in the middle, the plan information on display, the connections with state-run legacy systems—are either problem-plagued or broken entirely.
http://twitchy.com/2013/11/02/jim-angle-shares-disturbing-experience-with-obamacare-800-number/
Fox News correspondent Jim Angle described what happened when he reached out to the Obamacare call center.
