http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/25/ofa-be-sure-to-use-your-thanksgiving-family-gathering-to-convince-relatives-to-buy-a-plan-on-the-obamacare-exchange/
( ObamaCare - where desperation is apparently a destination... )
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/25/democrats-set-to-turn-on-obama-if-healthcare-gov-isnt-ready-next-week/
( ObamaCare - where desperation is apparently a destination... )
OFA: Be sure to use Thanksgiving dinner to convince relatives to buy a plan on the ObamaCare exchange
POSTED AT 6:11 PM ON NOVEMBER 25, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Via Jonah Goldberg. Believe it or not, these soulless robots have prepared an actual talking-points memo for the occasion replete with tips on how to plan your “talk.” My favorite: “Integrate the talk into family time.” Good advice — and for my money, the more dramatic the integration, the better. When your cousin pulls out baby pictures of her newborn and tries to pass them around, grab her arm gently but firmly and say, “Hey — isn’t there something more important we should be discussing?”
Don’t be fazed by the stunned silence that follows. That’s your opening to grab your iPad and start the Powerpoint on enrollment that you’ve prepared.
I like the idea that you, by dint of having donated to Obama and happily swallowed endless lies about keeping your plan and your provider network, are necessarily the “voice of reason” at the dinner table this year. In the unlikely event that you find yourself seated across from one of these benighted schmucks, you can play it three ways: One: Deflect. Change the subject. Bring up “The Walking Dead” or how boring the NFL is this year or whether maybe Orwell had a point about statism’s insidious power to dehumanize people by reducing them to cogs in a government propaganda machine. Two: Engage. Ace has prepared a helpful talking-points memo of his own in case you find yourself at a loss upon being pitched on O-Care by the same arrogant little sh*t who called you ignorant for doubting that the program would work at Thanksgiving dinners past. (If Ezra Klein has any conservative relatives, he or she is about to have the best Thanksgiving ever.) Three: If there are people at the table considering buying a plan on the exchange, wait patiently until they’re done cursing Obama for having forced their insurer to cancel their old coverage and then prepare them for how to shop on the exchange. For starters, don’t believe the prices quoted on Healthcare.gov:
The troubled federal website allows visitors to anonymously surf the site for exchange plans sold in their areas and provides them with estimated prices for each health plan. (Just click on the “See Plans Now” button on the homepage and follow instructions.) But here’s the problem: The monthly premium estimates provided on the website do not consider a person’s specific age, household size or tobacco use — all critical factors when estimating premiums…For our family of four, HealthCare.gov offers six Silver plans: four Independence Blue Cross plans and two Aetna plans. (We considered only the Silver plans to keep it simple.) The HealthCare.gov estimates ranged from $708.84 per month to $982 per month.Now, HealthCare.gov doesn’t ask for ages or even an age range when providing plan information and premium estimates for family coverage. All it wants to know is the visitor’s home state and county.ValuePenguin.com asks for a little more information. Besides county and state, window shoppers have to provide household size, as well as ages and tobacco use for all family members. That website’s estimates were higher — much higher. A whopping 69 percent higher for each exchange plan. The premium range: $1,201.44 to $1,666 per month. (And, remember, that’s for a family of nonsmokers.)
They might be eligible for a subsidy, but then again they might not. And their subsidy might be illegal depending upon where they buy the plan: If they get it from Healthcare.gov or directly from an insurer, the rug could be pulled out from under them next year. Buying one of the cheaper “bronze” plans on the exchanges will help cut their cost, but they need to be careful and read the fine print. The bronze plans are the ones with the highest deductibles and the smallest provider networks. They might be better off with silver or even gold, if they can afford it. At around this point, someone at the table’s going to pipe up and say, “But why are they so expensive?” That’s when the real fun begins.
Actually, I think that last bit explains why OFA is doing this, as creepy as it seems. They know ObamaCare’s going to come up at a lot of dinner tables this year and they know that most of what’s said won’t be happy. The talking-points memo isn’t meant to be followed to the letter — I hope — it’s just a way of nudging liberals to encourage people to reserve judgment when the subject does come up. In fact, given that young adults are (a) O-Care’s target consumers and (b) the demographic that’s probably most likely to click on a link from OFA, the whole “talking-points memo” is really just a way to encourage the people reading it to sign up themselves. There’s a lot of “young healthies” out there to be gouged before this boat will float.
There … sure is a lot of this stuff floating around on lefty sites right now, though. Exit quotation:
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/25/democrats-set-to-turn-on-obama-if-healthcare-gov-isnt-ready-next-week/
Democrats set to turn on Obama if Healthcare.gov isn’t ready next week
POSTED AT 3:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 25, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Pure, sweet, schadenfreudean goodness from Politico. See now why I think there’s a chance that those new Iran sanctions pass with veto-proof majorities?
Turns out, after three years and a half years of development plus two months of frantic triage to Healthcare.gov, Democrats are finally ready to hold the White House accountable for its giant O-Care fark-up. A little.
“The president and his team have repeatedly assured us that the system will be working by Dec. 1. That’s when I start looking at what we have to do in our oversight function to hold the administration accountable for making it work.” Rep. Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat who is running for an open Senate seat said Thursday, adding that he’s contemplating whether to ask the president to fire members of his staff. “I’m thinking about those options. But my biggest concern is fixing the system and making it work.”…[A] big-city lawmaker predicted oversight hearings are “going to be ugly” come next month. “The more we find out about this implementation of the ACA, the worse it looks. The Congress did our job. We passed the ACA. It’s up to the administration to implement the law.”…“At this point, I don’t think there is anyone that would express any confidence in the administration’s ability to right the ship,” said [a House Democratic] source, adding that members seem to be “bracing for another tidal wave when Dec. 1 comes and goes and we are still dealing with a dysfunctional website, or ‘broken computer’ as the old-timers have been calling it.”…One Democratic House member, asked by text message whether he was worried that there didn’t seem to be a Plan B at the White House, wrote back, “Yes!!!”
What does it mean for Democrats to turn on O, apart from some angry grandstanding at the next round of congressional hearings on ObamaCare? Well, there may or may not be floor votes to extend the enrollment period or delay the mandate, depending upon how loyal Reid is feeling to Obama these days. Another piece at Politico notes a schism between congressional Democratic leaders who feel they need to protect O on the one hand and Democratic strategists and backbenchers who need to protect the party (read: themselves) next November on the other. Al Franken’s job approval stands at 51/42 and he’s running next year in a famously blue state, and even he’s erring on the side of delay. No one is safe, at least for now.
If Reid sides with rank and file and those floor votes on delay happen, that’ll raise a new dilemma for the White House. Does O sign the bill(s), knowing that giving people more time to enroll next year could make the adverse selection problem for insurers worse, or does he veto it/them on grounds that it’s too early to know if an enrollment extension is necessary and that we should avoid one if possible? As with Iran sanctions, I don’t know if a veto-proof majority is out of the question. In fact, precisely because a veto override would be a dramatic way to distance congressional Dems from Obama, some Democratic fencesitters may end up tilting in favor of the bills. Even if it’s bad policy for O-Care fans, it’s good optics for the panicky Democrats who passed it.
Speaking of the website and Democratic schadenfreude, carve out three minutes for this NYT piece from Saturday about the special blend of arrogance and incompetence that led HHS to think it could manage a project as sophisticated as the Healthcare.gov build. Here’s what House Democrats will be ostentatiously pounding the table over at the next hearings:
CGI and other contractors complained of endlessly shifting requirements and a government decision-making process so cumbersome that it took weeks to resolve elementary questions, such as determining whether users should be required to provide Social Security numbers. Some CGI software engineers ultimately walked out, saying it was impossible to produce good work under such conditions…Another sore point was the Medicare agency’s decision to use database software, from a company called MarkLogic, that managed the data differently from systems by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. CGI officials argued that it would slow work because it was too unfamiliar. Government officials disagreed, and its configuration remains a serious problem…[HHS technology officer Henry] Chao had to consult with senior department officials and the White House, and was unable to make many decisions on his own. “Nothing was decided without a conversation there,” said one agency official involved in the project, referring to the constant White House demands for oversight. On behalf of Mr. Chao, the Medicare agency declined to comment…A pattern of ever-shifting requirements persisted throughout the project, including the administration’s decision late last year to try to redesign the site’s appearance and content to make it more informative to consumers, according to many specialists involved. The administration also decided to reconfigure it as a national site, instead of one where each state had its own front page, after many states decided not to open their own exchanges.
Things were so far behind in late summer, per the Times, that HHS had no choice but to drop nearly 30 features that had wanted for the site — including a system to transmit subsidies for individual consumers’ policies to insurers. A predecessor at HHS warned Chao this summer that you can’t build a system like this overnight, to which Chao allegedly replied, “I know. But I cannot talk them out of it.” Anyone out there still think President Bambi was a blissfully ignorant little fawn about all this?
Repairs are being made, though. Even inveterate website critic Bob Laszewski reports that there have been improvements to the crucially important back end of the site, which routes information on applicants between insurers and the federal data hub. Roughly five percent of the information that’s being received by the industry, though, is still garbled or incomplete. If that rate isn’t reduced, the White House’s target of seven million enrollments by next April would mean … 350,000 botched applications that would need to be corrected. Somehow.
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