November 21 , 2013......

Trebling down ?

Obama's Flip-Flopping In Shambles As California Rejects Proposed One-Year Plan Extension

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/21/2013 18:27 -0500

When Barack Obama, floundering in the endless humiliation from the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, gave the country's insurance companies the "put option" to reject the one-year "cancellation" extension fix stemming from the whole "if you like your plan, you can keep it, period" fiasco, he committed a cardinal sin - he lost control of the situation, because from that point onward the decision was no longer in his court. Furthermore, due to the syndicate nature of insurance companies and state insurance commissioners implementing Obamacare, suddenly the decision was subject to game theoretical facets including cooperation and defection, or rather just defection since at this point the biggest spoils would go to whoever had the initial leverage or rather, defiance of the president. Sure enough, California just flopped on Obama's most recent flip when the state, moments ago, rejected Obama's proposed fix to allow legacy plans to survive for one additional year.

CALIFORNIA REJECTS OBAMA'S INSURANCE CANCELLATION FIX
CALIFORNIA REJECTS 1-YEAR EXTENSION OF CANCELED INSURANCE PLANS

Experts Warn Healthcare.gov So Big And So Riddled With Security Flaws It Should Be Shut Down, Rebuilt From Scratch

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/21/2013 12:21 -0500

While the abysmal rollout of Obamacare hardly needs any additional debacles, a recent hearing by technology experts in Congress added yet another, quite major, wrinkle to an already insurmountable problem: healthcare.gov is so fraught with security flaws, and so bloated with code, that it may easily expose the personal data of millions (we are being generous here) of users - it collects user names, birth dates, social security numbers, email addresses and much more - to even the least experienced of hackers.

It gets worse: when asked "Do any of you think today that the site is secure?" the answer from the experts, which included two academics and two private sector technical researchers, was a unanimous "no."

And worse when the experts were asked "would you recommend today that this site be shut down until it is?" three of the experts said "yes," while a fourth said he did not have enough information to make the call.

But the worst news of the day the experts said the site needed to be completely rebuilt to run more efficiently, making it easier to protect. They said HealthCare.gov runs on 500 million lines of code, or 25 times the size of Facebook, one of the world's busiest sites.

Well... "Obama built that"

Progress: ObamaCare website taking slightly longer to crash for users than it did before

POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 21, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

It’s still crashing, sure, but it lets you complete more steps in the application process before 404ing on you. Which … I’m not sure constitutes progress, actually. If a site’s more or less unusable, you’re better off hitting the wall early on than spending 30 minutes trying to sign up before the trap door is pulled, no?

Here’s what we’re down to by way of “good news” these days.

Despite weeks of work by a small army of software experts to salvage HealthCare.gov, navigators in states that depend on the federal insurance exchange say they still cannot get most of their clients through the online enrollment process.

Those navigators said they had seen improvements in the system since its disastrous rollout on Oct. 1, particularly in the initial steps of the application process. But the closer people come to signing up for a plan, the more the system seems to freeze or fail, many navigators said…

Some navigators said it was hard not to feel discouraged, especially when their clients, locked out by the website, went home upset. “We have people who understandably say, ‘Well what the heck am I doing here if you can’t enroll me?’” said Ted Trevorrow, a navigator in Philadelphia who has not been able to enroll a single person yet. “I always want to say, ‘That’s a really good question.’”…

Clients wary of the health care law can be especially intolerant of the website’s problems, Mr. Trevorrow said. “They’re incensed over the fact that the law would, as they see it, intrude on them to this degree and then not even perform,” he said.

That last part is the moral of the story of the entire rollout period. If you’re going to disrupt one-sixth of the economy, you’ve got to be able to show people some sort of palpable improvement somewhere as evidence that it’s worth it. It could be anything — an easy application process, lower premiums, a bigger provider network, gaudy new benefits, anything. Just give the public some reason to think that the endless aggravation is paying off. O’s given them nothing: The application process is a catastrophe, exchange premiums tend to be more expensive than premiums for pre-ObamaCare plans were, and provider networks are shrinking as insurers strain to keep costs down. Benefits are better than they used to be for some people but not for everyone; it depends on whether your old plan truly was “cut-rate” or not and whether you think “comprehensive” benefits (e.g., substance abuse treatment) justify the burden of higher premiums and/or deductibles. Even the subsidies, arguably the law’s most salable point to the public, aren’t an unvarnished good. If you’re already struggling to get by and suddenly required by law to purchase insurance, having half of your new monthly bill footed by Uncle Sam doesn’t change the fact that you’re still on the hook for the other half. The least Obama and his team could have done to make this medicine go down smoothly is make the enrollment process sugary sweet. Instead it’s bitter. He’s left congressional Dems with essentially no talking points with which to defend the law. No wonder they’re bailing on him.

The only bright spot for Democrats is that the state exchanges are working better than Healthcare.gov. But then, that’s complicated too: Read John Sexton and Ace for the demographic breakdown of enrollees in Kentucky and California. To make risk pools in the age of ObamaCare sustainable, the insurance industry needs roughly 40 percent of enrollees to be young and healthy. They’re the suckers who almost never need medical care but who are being coerced into buying insurance anyway by federal law so that insurers have a new revenue stream with which to cover the old and sick. If they don’t hit the 40 percent target by next April, premiums are going up in 2015 and/or HHS will be on the hook for some sort of bailout. As things stand right now, young adults make up only 19 percent of Kentucky’s new enrollees and 23 percent of California’s — and even that may be overstating things. Like Ace says, the data only tells us that some enrollees are young; it doesn’t say whether they’re healthy. It may well be that some disproportionate chunk of young enrollees in both states is clamoring to sign up precisely because they’re rare cases of young adults who do have serious medical issues. Those don’t count for purposes of the 40 percent target, obviously. None of this is a grave danger to O-Care yet since everyone expects the first wave of enrollees to contain a higher percentage of older, sicker people than the final risk pool will contain. Obviously, if you need care, you’re in more of a hurry to sign up than someone who doesn’t. But if the website problems drag on and the frustration over signing up deepens — which is what seems to be happening in the NYT piece excerpted above — then maybe the feds will lose some segment of “young healthies” irretrievably. That’s when they’ve got real political problems.

By the way, the Speaker of the House tried to sign up for a plan on the federal website today.It didn’t go so well.

http://twitchy.com/2013/11/20/ouch-obama-obamacare-just-needs-a-little-rebranding-guys-guess-again-champ/

Obama: Rebranding Obamacare Will Be a Challenge http://abcn.ws/1bPjBZV 

12:54 AM - 20 Nov 2013

Obama: Rebranding Obamacare Will Be a Challenge

President Obama admitted that, even once the health care website is working properly, he faces an uphill battle to “remarket and rebrand” his signature law in the face of political opposition....

ABC News @ABC

Oh, just needs a little rebranding. Serious You Guys.

Stop it! We can’t catch our breath! Also, it’s the fault of the icky GOP, natch. Surprise!

Obama: Rebranding Obamacare Will Be a Challenge

President Obama admitted that, even once the health care website is working properly, he faces an uphill battle to “remarket and rebrand” his signature law in the face of political opposition....

ABC News @ABC

Good Morning America ✔ @GMA

Obama: Rebranding #Obamacare will be a challenge - http://abcn.ws/1asMPxx

TED @2_Dye4
Follow

@GMA Obama won't be able to put lipstick on a pig & make it look good. Rebranding won't make a poorly designed idea a good one. #Obamacare

9:20 AM - 20 Nov 2013

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-20/here-come-even-higher-insurance-premiums

Here Come The Even Higher Insurance Premiums

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/20/2013 18:33 -0500

White House

Remember when Obama apologized about lying for years that "you can keep your old plan" even though he knew you can't? It seems many more apologies are forthcoming, now that it is about to become clear that the Affordable Care Act had an epic, if very unfortunate, typo in the first word.

From CBS' White House correspondent Mark Knoller:

After meeting today with Pres Obama, National Assn of Insurance Commissioners warns of possibility of higher premiums for consumers.

6:26 PM - 20 Nov 2013

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/20/next-obamacare-dilemma-for-obama-break-the-law-to-let-people-buy-subsidized-plans-directly-from-insurers-or-not/

Next ObamaCare dilemma for Obama: Break the law to let people buy subsidized plans directly from insurers or not?

POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

I’ve flagged this issue before — Time magazine was on it before the end of October, in fact — but Megan McArdle’s right that it’s worth revisiting now, with Sebelius hinting that people shouldn’t expect too much from the website on November 30. The emerging Plan B in case Healthcare.gov is still FUBAR next month is to tell users to skip the site and sign up for the plan they want on the insurance company’s own website instead. (Said one industry official recently to the NYT, “If they don’t have Healthcare.gov up and running by the end of the month, direct enrollment is critical.”) There are technical snags with that approach, namely the fact that insurers have no way to calculate an applicant’s taxpayer subsidy (then again , neither do the feds), but at least it gives people a way to get covered before December 15 so that they have a plan in place on New Year’s Day. Cold comfort for the millions who’ve had their plans dropped, but some coverage is usually better than none.

Just one problem. The law says that, in order to be eligible for subsidies, you have to enroll through an ObamaCare exchange. Buying your plan directly from an insurance company disqualifies you, no matter how low your income is. Time wrote about that specifically in the context of people who’ve had their plans canceled and then been automatically enrolled by their insurer in a new plan. Because that enrollment didn’t happen via an exchange, the insured gets no help from Uncle Sam with their new premiums. Experts on the law told Time that it’s unambiguous:

The ACA subsidies are technically tax credits, but consumers can’t apply for them later when they file their income tax returns. The subsidies are only available when consumers purchase coverage through the exchanges, according to CMS. “As far as retroactive premium tax credits for a plan outside the exchange, you can’t do that under the statute,” says Timothy S. Jost, a professor at Washington and Lee University and an expert on provisions of the new law.

As of yesterday, Sebelius herself was warning people that it’s perfectly fine to sign up with insurers directly — unless you need a subsidy:

Sebelius urged those who know they will not qualify for a subsidy on their insurance premium to research available plans and contact their chosen insurance company directly, an option she said is working well.

Subsidies generally are available for individuals earning less than $46,000 a year and families of four earning less than $92,000.

Big problems here for the White House. If they go full bore in promoting direct enrollment with insurers as an alternative to Healthcare.gov, there are bound to be tons of lower-income people who somehow miss the fine print about not going that route if you need a subsidy. That means lots of rate shock and disgruntlement over their new unsubsidized premiums. An obvious alternative is to have insurers themselves ask people what their income is and to discourage them if they’re below the $46,000/$92,000 threshold, but then that means the poor, who are supposed to be the law’s big winners, end up being shut out of coverage for awhile even as middle-class and upper-middle-class people sign up. This is why, I assume, the White House hasn’t promoted direct enrollment enthusiastically with a full-fledged PR campaign despite some congressional Democrats begging them to be more aggressive. They’re probably better off having people not sign up for coverage than to nudge everyone towards direct enrollment and then have thousands of poor applicants shocked by the unaffordable rates being quoted to them.

Or, of course, there’s a third option: Obama could simply decide to ignore the statute and pay out subsidies anyway to people who directly enroll. Normally you don’t have to game out “what if the president just does something illegal instead?” scenarios, but after the employer mandate was dubiously delayed and Obama foisted his highly questionable “fix” for plan cancellations on the insurance industry last week, the illegal option can’t be ruled out. Maybe he’ll conclude that, in the interest of getting as many people on the rolls as possible before December 15th, his best option is to tell the country to go ahead and enroll directly with insurance companies and then demagogue the hell out of the GOP later if they refuse to pass something granting subsidies to those direct enrollees retroactively. Decisions, decisions.

Oh, by the way — because of the way the section about subsidies in the ObamaCare statute was written, it may be that people are also ineligible for subsidies if they bought their plan … via Healthcare.gov. It’s the state exchanges, the statute seems to say, that can bestow taxpayer subsidies on people whose income is below the cut-off. There’s nothing in there about a federal exchange. That issue is currently tied up in court; if Healthcare.gov enrollees also end up disqualified for subsidies, all hell’s going to break loose.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/20/sebelius-on-second-thought-we-probably-shouldnt-have-launched-that-obamacare-website-on-october-1/

Sebelius: On second thought, we probably shouldn’t have launched that ObamaCare website on October 1

POSTED AT 2:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Is this news? On the one hand, of course they shouldn’t have launched it on October 1. That the site wasn’t ready to handle traffic isn’t a matter of political debate, it’s a fact. The only people who disagree are the lowest of low-information voters and the hackiest of partisan Democratic hacks. Behold:

They would’ve been hit with a wave of bad press if the launch was delayed, especially in the middle of a shutdown, but it couldn’t possibly have been worse than the press they’ve gotten for parading their galactic incompetence for the past seven weeks.

On the other hand, this raises questions. If she thinks it shouldn’t have gone live on October 1, when does she think it should have? Whose call was it to launch the site that day? If they had delayed instead, would it have been easier for the tech team to find and repair the site’s problems? Would delaying have inspired the GOP, sensing O-Care’s weakness, to hold out longer during the shutdown? Would it have increased the odds that Obama might agree to delay the mandate or the entire law until the website was finally ready to go?

I bet there are a few red-state Democrats who’d be interested in the answers.

When asked why officials pushed ahead with the Oct. 1 launch date despite warnings the site hadn’t been properly tested, Sebelius said they were hoping to give consumers as much time as possible to enroll before coverage begins in January.

“We were hoping to maximize that,” she said. “Clearly that was a bad call.”

She also said that November 30, the widely accepted last-clear-chance for Healthcare.gov to improve to the point where it can handle a massive number of daily enrollments before the December 15th deadline, is “not a magic go, no go date.” Which, I guess, is her way of signaling to panicky Democrats not to get their hopes up about a big turnaround next month. This part is fun too:

David Kennedy, head of the Ohio-based TrustedSec, a company that offers to hack into private systems to determine vulnerabilities, told the House Science Committee that a cursory look at the website revealed multiple “exposures” that put it at “critical risk.”

Asked about those concerns, Sebelius said: “I feel like it’s safe. Absolutely,” adding, “when there have been issues identified or flagged, it’s immediately fixed.”

A tech expert who built a business on his know-how says Healthcare.gov is a security disaster waiting to happen, and the person in charge of the most notorious website debacle of the Internet age says nuh uh. Imagine being a Democratic incumbent in Congress and reading those two paragraphs. Knowing that the political ice is already thin and getting thinner, how excited are you by the prospect of hundreds of thousands of users swarming onto the site next month after it’s “fixed” and some sort of mass hacking scheme compromising their personal information? Obama mumbled something yesterday about needing to “rebrand” the website. Good luck with that if/when the weeks-long 404 disaster is suddenly overtaken by a giant security breach.

Speaking of which, turns out there’s a reason Carney was cagey with reporters yesterday about what Obama knew and when. He later admitted that O was indeed briefed on the alarming McKinsey study back in March that identified major problems with the website’s development:

[H]e said the president’s familiarity with the report and recommendations did not contradict previous statements from the White House that described Obama as surprised by the scope of flaws in HealthCare.gov.

Obama was told that the problems identified by McKinsey were being addressed, Carney said. And Obama had never claimed to be unaware of “red flags” about the site, only of their seriousness.

But since the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, the question has persisted whether the president has been “less than competent or less than candid,” said John Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. “This tips the scales in favor of less than candid.”

Exactly my point in yesterday’s post. No one much cares whether O knew how bad things were because, whatever the answer, it’s a grave indictment of his leadership. Either he knew and rolled it out anyway — a “bad call” even by Sebelius’s admission — or he was so insulated from the truth about his biggest policy gamble that he was genuinely caught off guard when it blew up on the launchpad. Liar or enormous chump? You make the call.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/20/maryland-oregon-exchanges-still-stuck-in-technological-limbo/

Maryland, Oregon exchanges still stuck in technological limbo

POSTED AT 1:21 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

For lack of better news to tout, the White House has lately been including the relatively more robust ObamaCare enrollment going on in some of the various state-controlled exchanges in their daily talking points rather than focusing on their own federal catastrophe (although, as ever, higher enrollment numbers are only a good thing if they are comprised of the right mix of both high- and low-cost individuals, which we won’t be able to judge for certain until the enrollment period is over), but most unfortunately, several of their most enthusiastic blue-state allies are still trying to work out website problems rivaling their own.

WaPo reports that Maryland has yet to effectively tackle their prohibitive tech problems, and points out that their website’s glitchiness is already being used as fodder for the progressive politicking that will likely decide who replaces Gov. O’Malley as the state’s top Democrat in 2014′s gubernatorial:

In October, the exchange’s first full month of operation, 1,278 people signed up for the private plans, and 465 signed up in the first week of November. Those low numbers raise questions about whether Maryland will achieve its enrollment target of 150,000 by the end of March. The state has about 800,000 uninsured residents.

Backup options, such as paper applications, are proving time-consuming and cumbersome. Front-line helpers must manually enter information from paper applications into electronic ones, using an internal state Web page available from only some government buildings. That puts access out of reach for many helpers working at community organizations. …

“What is surprising to me is that the state has been so supportive of the ACA, has messaged positively about it and invested in it early, that it’s a bit of a puzzle to me why the numbers are so low,” said Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere Health, a consulting firm.

And on the west coast, the state of Oregon still — still — hasn’t managed to sing up a single person through their online exchange, despite the ambitious website construction project they began well in advance:

But instead of serving as a national model, Oregon’s experience has emerged as a cautionary tale, inviting comparisons to technical glitches that have plagued other state-run portals and the federal government’s website for those states lacking exchanges of their own.

Oregon’s online exchange has remained inaccessible to the public, requiring the state to sign up applicants the old-fashioned way, using paper forms. This has made comparison shopping more difficult for consumers and severely slowed the enrollment process.

“Oregonians have questions,” said state Senate President Peter Courtney, a Democrat, in a written statement on Tuesday. “What went wrong with the rollout? How are they going to fix it? When are they going to get it right? Is the website contractor doing everything it can? Our people need to know.”

Funnily enough, those are all questions that perfectly apply to the federal exchange, too, which fully or partially covers the ObamaCare operations of 36 states. The White House might be trying to redirect attention to individual states’ comparative successes with enrollment as positive signs, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of states are still struggling with unworkable online portals, with no immediate end in sight.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/20/obama-republicans-are-partly-to-blame-for-obamacare-fiasco-you-know/

( The Tinkerbell defense ...... )

Obama: Republicans are partly to blame for ObamaCare fiasco, you know

POSTED AT 12:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY

Call this the Tinkerbell Argument — the notion that ObamaCare’s failures can be partly blamed on a failure to applaud it enthusiastically enough. The Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 with no Republican votes, but with its own funding mechanisms thanks to a myriad of taxes applied immediately. The Obama administration had more than three years to focus on delivery without any GOP interference in the executive branch, which it spent promulgating regulation like the contraception mandate rather than developing a web portal that worked. Republicans couldn’t manage to defund any of the ACA efforts even after winning control of the House.

But it’s Republicans rooting against the law that created the failures in his administration, Obama insisted yesterday:

Obama said that fixes to the HealthCare.gov Web portal are underway and that the exchange will function for a majority of people by the end of November. But the president said staunch opposition from congressional Republicans is inhibiting the law’s implementation.

“One of the problems we’ve had is one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure,” Obama said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting in Washington. “We obviously are going to have to remarket and rebrand, and that will be challenging in this political environment.”

Both of these are nonsense arguments. Opposition to the law on Capitol Hill has zerosubstantive impact on the ACA; it’s merely rhetorical, and it’s being proven prescient by the White House’ performance. It hasn’t impacted funding or development in any significant sense at all. Democrats have had full control over the implementation of ObamaCare, and have full responsibility for its outcomes.

Furthermore, the idea that the only problems facing HHS and the White House are marketing and branding is nothing short of breathtakingly obtuse. Millions of people have lost coverage that they preferred, and will have to pay higher premiums and deductibles for coverage they didn’t choose. The website, as the Post notes in the same article, turns out to be only 60% or so complete when the administration insisted all year long that it was ready to roll out on time.

Obama seems unwilling or unable to come to grips with the scope of the disaster his administration has created. Instead of blaming Capitol Hill Republicans for not clapping enthusiastically enough to save Tink, a competent executive would start replacing the people responsible for the massive failures. In my column for The Week, I wonder why Obama still hasn’t sent heads rolling over the problem — and why we’re supposed to have confidence that the people who couldn’t succeed in three-plus years are the people to fix the problems over the next three weeks:

The most charitable conclusion from all of the revelations in the ACA collapse is that the management of this project has been incompetent, which for most executives would prompt a significant number of personnel changes. After all, leaving the same people in the same roles doesn’t produce a lot of confidence in the ability to fix those problems now.

Even former administration officials have begun to wonder aloud why no heads have rolled in the past seven weeks. “I think the only way to restore ultimate confidence going forward,” Robert Gibbs told NBC News, “is to make sure that whoever was in charge of this isn’t in charge of the long-term healthcare plan.” David Plouffe predicted on ABC News that personnel changes would come “once the website gets fixed.”

Unlike the previous fiascos, this one has seriously damaged Barack Obama himself, and not just in job approval ratings. Over the four-plus years of the Obama presidency, his enduring high marks on personal qualities have tided the White House over some rough times. According to the latestWashington Post/ABC News poll, those days are over. Voter impressions of Obama himself turned unfavorable by a majority for the first time in the series, 46/52; 60 percent viewed him favorably in January, and 50 percent just three weeks ago. Half of respondents now say they don’t see Obama as “honest and trustworthy,” which goes to 46/52 when narrowed down to registered voters. Only 38 percent of registered voters see Obama as a “good manager,” and his ratings as a “strong leader” dropped from 60/38 in January to 44/55 now.

These assessments are long overdue. A strong leader would have paid more attention to the central project of his agenda long before its implementation. An adequate executive would have already removed those responsible for inexplicable failure and replaced them with more competent officials. Even a mediocre manager would know better than to promise more success with the same team that produced a spectacular and costly failure. The longer those people remain in place, the more apparent it becomes that Barack Obama finds himself in far over his head as an executive — and the less confidence anyone can have in his big-government promises and agenda.

Unless, of course, you believe in fairy tales.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-20/obamacare-shock-one-california-employers-terrifying-true-story

The "Obamacare Shock" - One California Employer's Terrifying True Story

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/20/2013 12:54 -0500

Medicare

None

Obamacare

From a Zero Hedge reader:

My company, based in California, employs 600. We used to insure about 250 of our employees. The rest opted out. The company paid 50% of their premiums for about $750,000/yr.

Under obamacare, none can opt out without penalty, and the rates are double or triple, depending upon the plan. Our 750k for 250 employees is going to $2 million per year for 600 employees.

By mandate, we have to pay 91.5% of the premium or more up from the 50% we used to pay.

Our employees share of the premium goes from $7/week for the cheapest plan to $30/week. 95% of my employees were on that plan. Remember, we used to pay 50% now we pay 91.5% and the premiums still go up that much!!

The cheapest plan now has a deductible of $6350! Before it was $150. Employees making $9 to $10/hr, have to pay $30/wk and have a $6350 deductible!!! What!!!!

They can't afford that to be sure. Obamacare will kill their propensity to seek medical care. More money for less care? How does that help them?

Here is the craziest part. Employees who qualify for mediCAL (the California version of Medicare), which is most of my employees, will automatically be enrolled in the Federal SNAP program. They cannot opt out. They cannot decline. They will be automatically enrolled in the Federal food stamp program based upon their level of Obamacare qualification. Remember, these people work full time, living in a small town in California. They are not seeking assistance. It all seems like a joke. How can this be the new system?

Pelosi, pass the bill to find out what's in it? Surprise! You've annihilated the working class.

Q.E.D.

And......

Obama was briefed earlier in year on health website problems

BY ROBERTA RAMPTON AND CAREN BOHAN

WASHINGTON Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:13pm EST

15 COMMENTS

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A busy screen is shown on the laptop of a Certified Application Counselor as he attempted to enroll an interested person for Affordable Care Act insurance, known as Obamacare, at the Borinquen Medical Center in Miami, Florida October 2, 2013.

CREDIT: REUTERS/JOE SKIPPER

(Reuters)

- President Barack Obama, who has portrayed himself as surprised by technical problems with the government's new health care website, was briefed earlier this year on a consultant's report that warned of possible widespread site failures, the White House said on Tuesday.

There have been weeks of questions about whether Obama understood the depth of the site's problems and let it open anyway, or simply "did not have enough awareness" of them, as the president stated at a November 14 news conference.

While the government says it is improving the portal's performance every day, security experts told a Republican sponsored congressional hearing Tuesday that in their opinions, it is still not sufficiently secure to be used confidently by consumers.

Even as the administration fended off criticism of the so-called "front end" of the system, officials revealed Tuesday that they had not completed development of the "back end," the financial management component needed to finalize federal subsidies for consumers who buy health plans.

A spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the lead agency for the website, said it would not be completed until mid-January, weeks after the first enrollees are scheduled to begin receiving benefits under the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010 as Obama's signature domestic policy.

The law, commonly called Obamacare, mandated that Americans have health insuranceand created new online marketplaces to buy and sell policies.

Meanwhile, Obama's approval rating dipped to a low of 37 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Bits and pieces have leaked out over the past few weeks about flaws in the site's development process. Monday night, however, Republican lawmakers who oppose Obamacare released a report and recommendations prepared by McKinsey & Co at the government's request in March 2013.

It cited, among other things, a rushed process that left insufficient time for testing and a focus by officials on getting people enrolled versus making the system work right.

The consequence, it said, could be system failures that could make enrollment slow or at times impossible for consumers, which is exactly what happened.

Questioned about the McKinsey study, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president had been briefed on it in the spring.

But he said the president's familiarity with the report and recommendations did not contradict previous statements from the White House that described Obama as surprised by the scope of flaws in HealthCare.gov.

Obama was told that the problems identified by McKinsey were being addressed, Carney said. And Obama had never claimed to be unaware of "red flags" about the site, only of their seriousness.

But since the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, the question has persisted whether the president has been "less than competent or less than candid," said John Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. "This tips the scales in favor of less than candid."

Release of the report by the Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was part of a broad effort by Republicans to discredit the health care program and to portray the administration as incompetent in implementing the health care law.

DEMOCRATS JOINING CRITICISM

Democrats are increasingly joining the chorus of criticism. Representative Elijah Cummings, a senior Democrat and ally of Obama, called on Tuesday for a White House shakeup over the handling of the rollout.

The botched rollout has hurt the popularity of the initiative, but the decline has been fairly modest, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Monday.

Forty-one percent of Americans expressed support for Obamacare in a survey conducted from Thursday to Monday. That was down 3 percentage points from a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken from September 27 to October 1.

Opposition to the healthcare law stood at 59 percent in the latest poll, versus 56 percent in the earlier survey.

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?

It's just mind-boggling. If the payment system isn't even built, how in the world did HHS or the WH think this thing could go live on Oct 1?

12:49 PM - 19 Nov 2013

Two things as you watch. First, note that Chao’s talking about the entire online exchange apparatus here, not the front end of Healthcare.gov where people sign up. The front end is in place and being repaired, he says. It’s the back end that … hasn’t completely been built yet. Second, it sounds initially like he says 60-70 percent of that back end is missing, but then he appears to correct that in the last minute or so. I’ll be conservative and assume it’s the later number that’s accurate. Regardless: How does the enrollment process work if the payment system hasn’t been finished yet? Remember, even if you’re one of the chosen few who managed to complete the sign-up process, your coverage doesn’t take effect on January 1unless you make your first premium payment by December 15. You could make that payment directly to the insurer, bypassing the federal website entirely, but some segment of people won’t do that, whether because of absent-mindedness or their understandable assumption that payment should be made through the same site they used to enroll — i.e. Healthcare.gov.

It’s not just enrollees and insurers who are having trouble with payment either:

Add insurance brokers to the list of people stymied by HealthCare.gov…

Brokers say their clients are having trouble entering the right ID numbers in the balky website — and that’s what’s needed for the health plan to pay them…

In the chaotic days after the rollout of HealthCare.gov, many brokers were told by call center operators that they could not, or would not, enter a broker’s identification, or the “national producer number.” In other cases, the numbers seemed to be recorded — but then they got caught up in the problems with the corrupted “834” files that the exchanges send to the health plans with enrollment information.

Here’s the other part of this. One of the key points that O-Care critic Bob Laszewski has stressed all along is that the front end of Healthcare.gov shouldn’t be fixed until the back end is. The back end is where an applicant’s information, including payment information presumably, is transmitted to the insurer he signed up with. Because of the “834″ problem mentioned in the excerpt above, much of the info received thus far by insurance companies from the federal website is garbled or incomplete. That problem is manageable, says Laszewski, as long as the number of enrollments is low; if there’s only a trickle of bad data flowing in, insurers may have the time and manpower needed to correct it piecemeal. If, however, the front end of the website is fixed and enrollments pick up precipitously, the trickle turns into a flood and suddenly insurance companies are overwhelmed with garbled data. Listening to Chao here, it sounds like CMS is setting itself up for precisely that problem — they’re desperate to finish the front end first in order to get “young healthies” on the rolls ASAP, but they haven’t even begun to build part of the back end of the site. How bad, exactly, are things on that back end right now? What happens if the White House convinces hundreds of thousands of people to sign up before December 15 and then their new coverage isn’t there for them on January 1 because of a catastrophic breakdown on the non-public part of the site? Even if the coverage is there, what about the payment of subsidies that lower-income people are relying on to make their coverage affordable?

Exit question via Philip Klein: “If — as per Chao — payment system still needs to be built, has anybody fully enrolled in 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:

The “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” press conference in January will be amazing

12:27 PM - 14 Nov 2013

We all knew this was bunk, too. In order to put all the “Essential Health Benefits” into new Obamacare compliant plans, prices had to go up. In order to keep prices in the ballpark of affordability, insurance companies look for other places to change plans. “Essential Health Benefits” are mandated by Obamacare, but coverage networks aren’t. So, you get more “benefits” from a smaller network of doctors, which may not include the doctor you liked. You’re welcome.

Old and busted: If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period.

New hotness: Hey, things change a lot in the private insurance market, y’all.

In this round of excuse making, Carney once again goes to the “evil insurance company” well, even throwing Romney into the mix. Obama didn’t do a government takeover of health care, you see? He implemented a Romney-like plan, which didn’t allow him to dictate to insurance companies (nevermind that that’s exactly what he was doing yesterday), so he can’t be blamed for this. Then why, pray tell, did he make the promise when he knew he couldn’t control it? To pass the law, of course.

You think people are mad about losing their plans? Even losing one’s doctor is not always the hugest deal to a healthy adult. You don’t see them that often anyway. But this thing really starts to spiral out of control when people’s children start losing their doctors. Pediatricians are dang near family members to many parents. Parents who vote.

Update: Keep Karl’s checklist handy! It’s devastating health care changes you were promised wouldn’t happen Bingo!

In New Hampshire, the exchange attracted only one insurance provider, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which has excluded 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals from the health plans it offers through the exchange. Similar issues lurked in Edie Sundby’s story. Obamacare will even reduce choice in the Medicare population. President Obama (and other Democrats, most likely) promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If Democrats thought the public got angry over the “If you like your plan” lie, they should imagine the public anger when people lose their doctors and hospitals. Doctors are not as easily demonized as health insurers; perhaps Obama will accuse them of unnecessarily removing your tonsils and amputating your feet for profit again.

ObamaCare: Covering what comes next

POSTED AT 8:01 AM ON NOVEMBER 18, 2013 BY KARL

“Obamacare: Covering What Comes Next” is the title of a January 2014 seminar for journalists sponsored by the Poynter Institute and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. The seminar’s draft agenda includes a session on the “next shoes to drop” for Obamacare which seems illuminating. Let’s examine them in roughly chronological order:

Where will the fraud show up first? Funny you should ask: it’s already here, both from websites fraudulently imitating government exchanges and from the so-called navigators for Obamacare. To the degree fraud becomes any sort of significant story, it will not be a political plus for the White House or Democrats generally.

When new very high deductibles become reality: This will already be happening by the time of the seminar, along with high co-pays. It is already possible to look at charts of the plans offered in the exchanges and conclude this is not a plus for Obamacare.

New “super tight” networks that may not include the providers people want: The Allahpundit has been on this one repeatedly, and rightly so — particularly given that asking people to shop among plans via a government portal without telling them which doctors accept which plans is a recipe for disaster. In New Hampshire, the exchange attracted only one insurance provider, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which has excluded 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals from the health plans it offers through the exchange. Similar issues lurked in Edie Sundby’s story. Obamacare will even reduce choice in the Medicare population.President Obama (and other Democrats, most likely) promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If Democrats thought the public got angry over the “If you like your plan” lie, they should imagine the public anger when people lose their doctors and hospitals. Doctors are not as easily demonized as health insurers; perhaps Obama will accuse them of unnecessarily removing your tonsils and amputating your feet for profit again.

Will the Young Invincibles sign up? The early results of signups in several states suggest not, which could lead to increases in insurance premiums and deductibles next year. In fairness, young healthy people have the least incentive to sign up early for O-care. On the other hand, they do not have much incentive to sign up for it in general. It is not just conservatives like Katrina Trinko pointing this out; it’s also lefties like Marc Rubin. High deductibles and co-pays affect young people less, but young men will suffer the worst of O-care’s premium shock. Asking young people to spend money on Obamacare will prove more difficult than asking for their vote.

Can providers handle the new load of patients? Good question, and one Democrats might have considered more thoroughly before enacting the law. America already has aworsening shortage of doctors, just at a point where America is generally getting older and sicker. The market — if allowed to work — may alleviate some of the problem. But in the short-term, dumping millions more people into the system at once — likely resulting in longer wait times and restrictions on new enrollments with doctors — may not prove to be the political plus Democrats think.

The battle over employer mandates still ahead: Indeed. The problems being discussed above in the context of the individual market (high premiums, deductibles and co-pays, possibly losing your doctor or hospital) may ultimately affect as many as 93 million Americans — including the employer-based market — starting perhaps weeks before the midterm elections. If the reality of Obamacare in the past six weeks has politically damaged the Democrats, one can only imagine what the damage will be when the affected population potentially reaches nearly one out of three Americans.

Unsurprisingly, the presenters this seminar for training journalists appear to be generally in favor of Obamacare. However, this only makes the storylines for 2014 listed above more notable. There will almost certainly be a few good stories for Obamacare in 2014, not least because journalists will be seeking them out. Yet one lesson of the past six weeks is that even the progressive establishment media is unable to spin away ugly truths. When looking at what even supporters think the major stories of 2014 will be, Obamacare looks to be bad news for everyone, including its supporters.

Catharsis Ours

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Obama's Flip-Flopping In Shambles As California Rejects Proposed One-Year Plan Extension

Experts Warn Healthcare.gov So Big And So Riddled With Security Flaws It Should Be Shut Down, Rebuilt From Scratch

Progress: ObamaCare website taking slightly longer to crash for users than it did before

POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 21, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Obama: Rebranding Obamacare Will Be a Challenge

Obama: Rebranding Obamacare Will Be a Challenge

Here Come The Even Higher Insurance Premiums

Next ObamaCare dilemma for Obama: Break the law to let people buy subsidized plans directly from insurers or not?

POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Sebelius: On second thought, we probably shouldn’t have launched that ObamaCare website on October 1

POSTED AT 2:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Maryland, Oregon exchanges still stuck in technological limbo

POSTED AT 1:21 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

Obama: Republicans are partly to blame for ObamaCare fiasco, you know

POSTED AT 12:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY

The "Obamacare Shock" - One California Employer's Terrifying True Story

Obama was briefed earlier in year on health website problems

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

It begins: White House edging away from “keep your doctor” promise

POSTED AT 9:21 PM ON NOVEMBER 19, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM

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Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Obama's Flip-Flopping In Shambles As California Rejects Proposed One-Year Plan Extension

Experts Warn Healthcare.gov So Big And So Riddled With Security Flaws It Should Be Shut Down, Rebuilt From Scratch

Progress: ObamaCare website taking slightly longer to crash for users than it did before

POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 21, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Obama: Rebranding Obamacare Will Be a Challenge

Obama: Rebranding Obamacare Will Be a Challenge

Here Come The Even Higher Insurance Premiums

Next ObamaCare dilemma for Obama: Break the law to let people buy subsidized plans directly from insurers or not?

POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Sebelius: On second thought, we probably shouldn’t have launched that ObamaCare website on October 1

POSTED AT 2:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

Maryland, Oregon exchanges still stuck in technological limbo

POSTED AT 1:21 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN

50 to 100 million insurance cancellations coming

Obama: Republicans are partly to blame for ObamaCare fiasco, you know

POSTED AT 12:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 20, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY

The "Obamacare Shock" - One California Employer's Terrifying True Story

Obama was briefed earlier in year on health website problems

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

It begins: White House edging away from “keep your doctor” promise

POSTED AT 9:21 PM ON NOVEMBER 19, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM

ObamaCare: Covering what comes next

POSTED AT 8:01 AM ON NOVEMBER 18, 2013 BY KARL

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