Another day , another beat down....
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/obamacare-bogus-numbers-how-can-nearly-everyone-in-west-virginia-who-is-uninsured-have-created-an-account.html
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2013/11/curious-statement-in-obamacare-website.html
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/04/cnn-obamacare-war-room-worried-about-reaction-when-some-enrollees-figure-out-they-cant-keep-their-doctor/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/04/cbs-white-house-warned-three-years-ago-that-obamacare-was-running-off-the-rails/
Industry insider: Insurers skeptical that ObamaCare website will be ready by December 1st
POSTED AT 4:41 PM ON NOVEMBER 5, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
A new dispatch from health-industry consultant Bob Laszewski, who’s one of the many millions to have discovered recently that he can’t keep a plan he liked a lot. HHS is a black box on the progress of the website so we’re forced to rely on anecdotes, but there’s no reason to think Laszewski’s sources are unrepresentative. His criticisms of the site have been borne out so far. And if he’s right that December 1st seems unlikely as a target date to debut the new and improved Healthcare.gov, Obama’s got a major problem.
Marilyn Tavenner, the head of CMS, told a Senate panel full of nervous Democrats today that “by the end of November the experience on the site will be smooth for the vast majority of users.” We’ll see.
Enrollments continue to trickle in. Health plans, with the kind of market share that would have to sign-up 100,000 to 200,000 people for the administration to hit its goal of 7 million people, are generally reporting they have enrolled only about 100 – 200 people over the first 35 days via Healthcare.gov…Health plans are separately enrolling more people on their own sites and through their call centers in great part because of all of the cancellation letters they have recently sent out. Existing customers worried about facing a lapse in coverage are calling in. Many health plans are offering the “early renewal option” to these cancelled customers, which lets people keep their plan but only until December of 2014. I continue to hear that an overwhelming number of existing customers are opting to keep their current plan versus taking an Obamacare compliant plan from the carrier––an interesting outcome given that so many of these plans are said to be “substandard.”…The Obama administration finally seems to have a strong group of experienced managers in charge of fixing Healthcare.gov. I don’t mean to pile anymore bad news on them then they already have. But I also have to report that the confidence that this can all get fixed by December 1 is not high among the people on the other end of those 834 transactions.
“834 transactions” refers to the information that’s sent from Healthcare.gov to an insurance company after someone signs up for a plan on the website. The biggest problem with the site right now, even more than the endless glitches in trying to create an account, is that the information being forwarded to insurers in the 834 process is often garbled or incomplete. Until that back-end part is fixed, the White House can’t fix the front end to make it easier for people to sign up; otherwise garbled enrollments will start flooding in to insurers and they’ll have to sort out the resulting mess.
The significance of December 1st is that it’s just two weeks before the December 15th deadline for people to enroll if they want their coverage to begin on January 1 next year. If the site’s still buggy at that point, the big post-Thanksgiving surge in enrollments by healthy people that the White House is counting on will be all but impossible, which means insurers will start next year with lots of sick people newly enrolled and few healthy ones to help cover their cost. It also means that the millions who have had their coverage dropped are at risk of starting the year without insurance because they can’t get the damned website to work long enough for them to sign up. The “early renewal option” Laszewski mentions will solve that problem for some people, but not every insurer will offer it. Crunch time for The One, then: What does he do on December 1st if we’re still stuck in 404 hell? Allow insurers to bring back plans that have been canceled under the new ObamaCare regs? Extend the enrollment deadline next year from March 31st to some later date, which raises the risk of adverse selection problems for insurers? Delay the entire law until HHS gets its act together? Nothing but bad options here as far as the eye can see. And lest you doubt that Laszewski’s sources are right to be skeptical about December 1st, ask yourself why Obama would be wasting valuable “sign up!” cheerleading time this month on unrelated crap if he didn’t agree. He knows it won’t be ready soon. No sense spending more time and political capital on it until it is.
While we’re waiting for the “tech surge” to work miracles, enjoy this new report from the AP about the White House begging for help from the same industry they’ve spent the last few weeks scapegoating to excuse Obama’s big “if you like your plan” lie. Yesterday’s spin: We had to pass ObamaCare to protect the public from “bad apple” insurance companies and their “cut-rate” plans. Today’s spin: Help us, insurance companies, you’re our only hope.
The White House is asking insurance companies to explain to Americans the cancellation letters they’re receiving in the mail.President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, met Tuesday with CEOs from some of the largest health insurers. The White House says McDonough updated the CEOs on fixes to healthcare.gov and problems with enrollment data sent electronically to insurers. McDonough also solicited input on whether the system is getting better.The White House says McDonough urged insurance companies to “ramp up communication and education efforts” to those who have lost their insurance.
Good luck educating someone on the glories of ObamaCare when you’ve just told him he’s being booted from an affordable plan he liked to one that’s more “comprehensive” than he needs and more expensive than he can manage. In fact, having seen photos of various cancellation notices people have received, I note that they almost uniformly mention that the plan’s cancellation is due to the Affordable Care Act. They’d have no strong incentive to do that if they thought people would be happy about being “upgraded” to a new plan on the exchanges; if anything, they’d want to downplay the new law’s role in all this and treat it as some sort of initiative undertaken by the company itself to help its customers seek better, more affordable coverage. But they know how the cancellation notice will be received so they’re careful to blame the ACA for it, not themselves. No one wants to hold the hot potato.
Via the Corner, here’s Jim Moran wondering if Obama’s big lie maybe wasn’t just “a little hyperbole” he engaged in a few hundred times because he was super-excited about America’s new health-care regime or something. This must be the first time a Democrat’s ever used Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech as a yardstick for mild, unfortunate, yet well-meaning exaggerations. Exit question: Are we really going to get the ObamaCare enrollment numbers next week? Or are we going to get a big hash that does nothing to tell us how many people have enrolled in the exchanges versus how many have enrolled in Medicaid?
CBS: Obama admin ducked final HealthCare.Gov security requirements; problems rolling in
POSTED AT 10:01 AM ON NOVEMBER 5, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN
The confidence in their big-government agenda that the Obama administration daily instills in me is truly overwhelming. Via CBS News:
As HealthCare.gov was being developed, crucial tests to ensure the security and privacy of customer information fell behind schedule.CBS News analysis found that the deadline for final security plans slipped three times from May 6 to July 16. Security assessments to be finished June 7 slid to August 16 and then August 23. The final, required top-to-bottom security tests never got done.The House Oversight Committee released an Obama administration memo that shows four days before the launch, the government took an unusual step. It granted itself a waiver to launch the website with “a level of uncertainty … deemed as a high (security) risk.”Agency head Marilyn Tavenner accepted the risk and “mitigation” measures like frequent testing and a dedicated security team. But three other officials signed a statement saying that “does not reduce the risk” of launching October 1.
And in a follow-up this morning, CBS reports on still more technology experts’ concerns over the lack of adequate testing of the website before its launch, and the real-time examples already cropping up even with HealthCare.Gov moving at only partially operational speed. Via the WFB:
As a test, CBS gave one technology expert the real healthcare.gov username of a CBS employee, and within seconds, he identified the specific security question she used to reset her password.Sean Henry, the former assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said the security issues need to be taken seriously.“If somebody’s got the ability to look at a source code and able to reverse-engineer that and identify what somebody’s personal questions are, that should be of concern,” Henry said.
And the hits just keep on coming.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/obamacare-bogus-numbers-how-can-nearly-everyone-in-west-virginia-who-is-uninsured-have-created-an-account.html
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2013
Obamacare Bogus Numbers: Why Results Touted in West Virginia as Sign of Success Are Either Wrong or a Proof of Failure
Michael Olenick unearthed an anomaly that is so extreme that it raises doubts about the numbers that the Department of Health and Human Services is reporting for Obamacare signups and enrollments to date. He writes:
Following up about the rightfully maligned healthcare.gov website, and the software which underlies it, I can verify the program appears significantly sicker than anybody admits. As a Florida resident using the Federal exchange, I was never able to view plans despite working feverishly at it for over a month. I finally reached a worker at healthcare.gov who told me the site simply doesn’t work. She heard that state exchanges were better but verified that she has never personally seen anyone from Florida able to move past the last screen to view or purchase plans.Yet the Department of Health and Human Services boasts about their signup success. Lambert pointed me to this October 26 statement by Kathleen Sebelius, What’s Working in the Marketplace: The Data Services Hub, which proclaims:The Social Security Administration has reported 4.2 million transactions involving individuals or households who have elected to establish an account… The highest numbers of transactions continues to involve individuals and households in the following states: Pennsylvania (323,000), New York (310,000), California (290,000), West Virginia (240,000), and Washington (135,000).
Yves here. This extract from Sebelius is a remarkable confection of disinformation.
Let’s start with a basic issue: What exactly is a transaction? Normally, you’d assume that means signing up for insurance. My trusty desktop dictionary defines a transaction as “an instance of buying or selling something; a business deal.” But here in a typical Obama Orwellianism, that’s redefined to something, but we’re not sure exactly what, that prospective insurance customers do after the’ve managed to set up an account. So it’s clear they aren’t even within hailing distance of the conventional use of “transaction” which would be a completed enrollment (or in Obamacare speak, a clean, unique 834 transaction). We know those numbers are tiny for the Federal exchanges, hence the desperate effort to point at anything that looks like progress, particularly if you can attach big impressive-sounding numbers to it.
But the simple layperson way to think about this is that a transaction in this case means some sort of interaction with a database. This is Oracle’s definition:
A transaction is a logical, atomic unit of work that contains one or more SQL statements. A transaction groups SQL statements so that they are either all committed, which means they are applied to the database, or all rolled back, which means they are undone from the database. Oracle Database assigns every transaction a unique identifier called a transaction ID.
Lambert adds:
So for example you could have a number of SQL statements to set up an account, each with it’s query, like one for the name, another for family members, another for income, and so on. It would seem reasonable that ALL the fields to create an account would be a transaction, because that’s what you would want to be able to roll back. I think there would be a minimum of two transactions: 1 for the account, 2 for the plan. But there’s probably tons more, to save state between sessions, or to roll back incomplete file transmissions, say.In other words, this figure is just as meaningful as the “hits” figure they gave us at first.
Let’s notice a second layer of misdirection: the mention of the Social Security Administration as the source. Um, the Social Security Administration subcontracted this all to Experian. And unlike outsourced call centers where the folks who answer the phone follow scripts that give the customer the impression that they are dealing with a company employee (“This is Sarah with Podunk Catalogue. How can I help you?”), there’s been no effort to hide the fact that Experian is running this gig. This practice didn’t start with Obamacare; it started right out of the box when the Social Security Administration contracted out its web access to Experian last January.
And remember, merely setting up an account was a process that took weeks of daily attempts for Olenick, a computer professional, to complete.
Olenick continues:
Wow, that’s a lot of accounts I thought, though then I did a double take at the numbers. California has 38 million people and about 20% are uninsured, according to the census and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, whose numbers are used for this type of analysis. So CA has 7.6 million uninsured people. Texas is the second most populous state with 26 million people and leads the nation with 24% uninsured, for six million uninsured people. My own Florida has 19.4 million people and 20% are uninsured, making for 3.9 million uninsured Floridian’s.In contrast West Virginia has 1.86 million people of which Kaiser says 14% are uninsured, so there are 260,000 uninsured West Virginians. But according to HHS those quarter million West Virginians created almost as many accounts as the 7.6 million uninsured Californians and more accounts than the six million uninsured Texans or the 3.9 million uninsured Floridians…I believe it is fair to infer that HHS/CMS – who did not respond to a written inquiry – is busted. They’re either outright lying about the number of accounts created or they somehow made it easier for people from West Virginia to use the federal exchange for testing. Either way their figures are grossly misleading.
I don’t mean to make an example of Olenick, but look what happened. He’s a careful reader, since he caught the significance of the numbers. Even so, we have an IT professional who works a lot with databases and hence more likely to be sensitive to what “transactions” might really mean per the HHS who was nevertheless taken in by Sebelius’ misdirection. He read her statement and took it to be referring to account creation, and not some mystery activities that take place after that point.
Nevertheless, his conclusion is correct. The figures are implausible, even more so than he suggests, as we will demonstrate.
This image underscores the point Olenick made, that despite its conventional association with moonshine and Appalachian poverty* (and West Virginia is indeed poor and rural), the state is middle of the road as far as the proportion of uninsured is concerned:
In December, as quoted by Associated Press (hat tip Lambert), “Tomblin administration officials estimate that between 37,000 and 60,000 people would seek coverage through this new marketplace.” So that 240,000 “transactions” for West Virginia is 4 times the highest number of individuals that state officials expected to sign up.
Pull out a calculator. The HHS number might be read to be making the bold claim that 92.3% of the entire uninsured population in West Virginia has signed up (240,000 divided by the uninsured population of 260,000). But uninsured individuals does not equal the number of accounts that would be created to insure them. Uninsured children and spouses would all sign up as part of a household; in fact, one of the most annoying and difficult parts of the Federal exchange account creation process is apparently telling the system who in your family is going to be signing up with you and identifying their relationship to the person creating the account correctly.
So take that 260,000 and divide it by the average household size in West Virginia, which per the Census Bureau, is 2.43. That might slightly understate the number of parties that might seek accounts (unmarried couples would apply as individuals) but it’s closer to the mark. You have roughly 110,000 uninsured households as the total universe.
Now remember, Obamacare (plus expanded Medicaid) was never was intended to cover them all. Nationally, over 30 million people were expected to remain uninsured, some because they weren’t eligible, others because they opted out (either by choice or necessity, as in the plans were too costly even with the subsidies). The CBO estimated that 14 million of the 48 million now uninsured will become covered as a result of Obamacare. That ratio is 29%. So, making some crude assumptions, you’d expect 30% of West Virginia’s households to sign up, which is 33,000. This is generally consistent with the state government’s estimates of 35,000 to 60,000, because those higher figures are for the number they expect to “seek insurance” which will include people who find they aren’t eligible or opt out once they look at the policies. Some subset of that set up accounts and has engaged in 240,000 “transactions.” Given how hard Olenick found it to be to establish an account, one has to believe that the number who have accounts is way lower than the 60,000, which is the highest estimate of the relevant universe we have so far, and that mean the average number of transactions per account in West Virginia is therefore considerably higher than four.
The wildly disproportionate level of transactions relative to the eligible population is even more ridiculous once you do more digging. You’d expect West Virginia to have its enrollment level as a percent of its uninsured population to be considerably lower than that of other states. Why? 35.9% of the population has no Internet connection anywhere, and over 20% does not have a computer at home, according to the Census. And yes, the Census was smart enough to capture people who don’t have either a computer or Internet access at home but use the Internet elsewhere; that’s an additional 5.0% of the total. And you can be sure those with no Internet access would be overrepresented among uninsured households, since both would skew poor.
And it’s not as if outreach could explain this difference. The Administration’s outreach efforts are targeting the “young invincibles” and Hispanics, who aren’t heavily represented in West Virginia.
Why are we harping on these numbers? Because the Administration is trying to turn a metric of failure into a badge of success. More transactions per person is not a good outcome. In this context, it likely means (among other things) difficulties finding information the prospective buyers found relevant (like “is my doctor part of the network?” or “are abortions included?”), trouble with subsidy information, and hangups in completing the enrollment.
The West Virginia outlier in theory could result from the fact that its exchange is a bastard child, a “partnership marketplace“:
A state that partners with HHS may assist HHS with certain functions, such as making qualified health plan recommendations and conducting aspects of consumer outreach and assistance.
But there’s no obvious reason why in practice it should be any worse than the Federal exchanges. Per Forbes (hat tip Lambert):
In a state-federal partnership, states will divide obligations with the federal government. For this partnership model, as well as the state-state partnership option, there is no requirement for a 50-50 split of labor. The states are actually more of a façade, whereby the consumers (individuals and employers) merely interact with the state. The federal government, on the other hand, will essentially perform all functions of exchange management except customer service and plan management. Moreover, states have the choice to take responsibility for only one or both of those functions.
And Sebelius is taking ownership for the West Virginia results and including it in her “hub” success stories, so the Administration acts like it owns the results no matter what the branding is.
None of the plausible explanations are flattering.
1. The HHS numbers are as utterly error-filled as everything about Obamacare, but no one cares about accuracy if the PR message is good2. The Administration is just plain lying and assumes no one will catch it (“There’s a lot of black lung in West Virginia, so of course people in that state will sign up in droves!”)3. The Administration has come up with some highly technical definition of transaction (as in particular types of database queries) so that their figures are technically correct even if by any commonsense standard the related declarations are lies
Given that the Administration has highly competent technologists working with the NSA, one would have hoped it would enlist them to cut the healthcare.gov Gordian knot. It now does look like the HHS types have called on the folks at the NSA, but only the ones who are experts in misleading wordsmithing under fire.
____
* I am permitted to say that sort of thing about West Virginia since I was born there.
* I am permitted to say that sort of thing about West Virginia since I was born there.
Study of 49 states: Obamacare hikes individual market premiums an average of 41 percent
POSTED AT 10:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 4, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM
Notably, this doesn’t count co-pay and deductible hikes. Avik Roy offers the third in a series of maps meant to show, state by state, the impact of Obamacare on the individual insurance marketplace:
One of the fundamental flaws of the Affordable Care Act is that, despite its name, it makes health insurance more expensive. Today, the Manhattan Institute released the most comprehensive analysis yet conducted of premiums under Obamacare for people who shop for coverage on their own. Here’s what we learned. In the average state, Obamacare will increase underlying premiums by 41 percent. As we have long expected, the steepest hikes will be imposed on the healthy, the young, and the male. And Obamacare’s taxpayer-funded subsidies will primarily benefit those nearing retirement—people who, unlike the young, have had their whole lives to save for their health-care needs.
Bros hardest hit?
Men will face the steepest increases: 77, 37, and 47 percent for 27-year-olds, 40-year-olds, and 64-year-olds, respectively. Women will also face increases, but to a lesser degree: 18%, 28%, and 37% for 27-, 40-, and 64-year-olds.
There are several states that will see premium decreases, most of which are benefiting because their individual markets were already highly regulated and expensive. Winners and losers:
Eight states will enjoy average premium reductions under Obamacare: New York (-40%), Colorado (-22%), Ohio (-21%), Massachusetts (-20%), New Jersey (-19%), New Hampshire (-18%), Rhode Island (-10%), and Indiana (-3%). Most, but not all, of these states had heavily-regulated individual insurance markets prior to Obamacare, and will therefore benefit from Obamacare’s subsidies, and especially its requirement that everyone purchase health insurance or pay a fine.The eight states that will face the biggest increases in underlying premiums are largely southern and western states: Nevada (+179%), New Mexico (+142%), Arkansas (+138%), North Carolina (+136%), Vermont (+117%), Georgia (+92%), South Dakota (+77%), and Nebraska (+74%).
Other winners: The elderly at the expense of the young. Losers: People who like their doctors and current deductibles.
It’s a 49-state study only because Hawaii’s exchange is so non-functional they could get no information off of it. Noted red state full of sabotagey Tea Partiers, that one. Click to see where your state ends up in this pile.
But don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll find out soon that President Obama never really said you’d see lower premiums at an average of $2,500 per family.
Exit quotation: “This whole experience has converted a lifelong Democrat into a foot soldier for the Republican Party.”
President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least 29 times.
Obama told 330 million Americans variations of the promise that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period” on numerous occasions, from 2009 to October 2012.
But that’s not what he really said, Obama announced Monday in a speech to about 60 Organizing for Action supporters. Community organizers in fancy dress listened to the president at Decanter, the restaurant inside the St. Regis hotel.
“What we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” he told a D.C. rally of Obamacare’s political beneficiaries and contractors.
That claim is not supported by his videotaped statements, which don’t include any mention of his new “if it hasn’t changed” exception.
But the hidden exception is justified by a higher-priority promise in Obamacare, Obama declared.
“If we had allowed these old plans [to continue]… then we would have broken an even more important promise — making sure that Americans gain access to health care that doesn’t leave them one illness away from financial
ruin,” he announced.
ruin,” he announced.
“So the bottom line is, is that we are making the insurance market better for everybody,” he declared, prompting loud applause by supporters eager to ignore his three years of fraudulent statements.
Obama’s higher promise is now causing the cancelation of insurance policies chosen by at least 3.5 million Americans.
The cancellations are spreading from the individual market to the small-group market. For example, Kentucky’s Department of Insurance has reported that 150,000 people in small-group plans — typically created for employees of small companies — are losing their insurance.
Obama told his supporters to counter the political effect of the many cancellations by highlighting good-news stories, and by reassuring people who have lost their insurance that they can buy new Obamacare-compliant policies.
“I realize that can be scary for people if they just get some [cancellation] notice like that… we’ve got to make sure that we’re getting them the right information,” he said.
But he also tried to downplay the Obamacare-caused cancellations, which are creating a wave of bad publicity that is hammering his poll ratings and his political clout.
“People are acting like this is some new phenomenon… every year there was churn in this individual market” before the law was passed, he complained.
But Americans’ complaints are subordinate to his political goals, he suggested.
“We decided we need to build something better, no matter how hard it is,” he declared.
Under that better progressive-managed system, some people’s health-care costs are going to jump, but it will be good for them, Obama said.
“Some Americans with higher incomes will pay more on the front end for better insurance with better benefits and better protections that could eventually help them a lot, even if right now they’d rather be paying less,” he announced.
Obama’s deceptive statements were deliberate and were intended to bolster Obama’s ability to get Obamacare passed in 2010 and him reelected in 2012, according to aides cited in a Wall Street Journal article Saturday.
Journal article Saturday.
“Simplification and ease of explanation were a premium, and that was true throughout the process,” Jon Favreau, who was Obama’s senior speech writer, told the journal’s writers.
Despite Obama’s new claims to his supporters, his “if it hasn’t changed” exception is not recorded in even one of his many videotaped “you can keep it” promises to Americans.
“We will keep this promise to the American people… if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period,” Obama said June 23, 2009.
“If you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future,” Obama told voters on April Fool’s Day, 2010, after the law was signed.
He repeated the unqualified promise in the run-up to the 2012 election. “If you’ve got health insurance…. you keep your own insurance, you keep your own doctor,” he declared in one of the three presidential debates.
However, Obama didn’t spend all of his Nov. 4 speech denying the videotapes.
He did confess that he and his aides may have made some mistakes, such as failing to manage the development of the Obamacare website.
“We got [Obamacare] done. Now, let’s face it, a lot of us didn’t realize that passing the law was the easy part.”
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2013/11/curious-statement-in-obamacare-website.html
Monday, November 04, 2013 1:17 PM
Curious Statement in Obamacare Website Source Code: "You Have No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy"
Right in the source code for the Obamacare website is the statement "You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication of data transiting or stored on this information system".
It curious why this message would be placed in the source code where no one would have any expectation of ever seeing it.
In the video below (which came out last week's Congressional testimony) Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, grilled Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI Federal Inc., the company that built the Obamacare health care exchange website, on the hidden language and on HIPAA compliance.
Campbell testified that the system is HIPAA Compliant.
"The HIPAA Privacy Rule addresses the saving, accessing and sharing of medical and personal information of any individual, while the HIPAA Security Rule more specifically outlines national security standards to protect health data created, received, maintained or transmitted electronically, also known as electronic protected health information."
In repeated questioning, Barton got Campbell to admit she knew that the "no reasonable expectation of privacy" line was in the code.
Barton then asked "How the hell could it be HIPAA compliant?" Campbell refused to answer the question.
The original source of the video appears to be CNS News. CNS has a longer video clip, not directly embeddable, but playable at Hidden Code on Obamacare Website Says 'No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy'.
In the longer video, after Democrat Rep. Frank Pallone got the floor, Barton asked Pallone to yield. Pallone responded "I will not yield to this monkey court!"
Pallone went on to say "the statement is no legitimate concern of this committee."
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
It curious why this message would be placed in the source code where no one would have any expectation of ever seeing it.
In the video below (which came out last week's Congressional testimony) Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, grilled Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI Federal Inc., the company that built the Obamacare health care exchange website, on the hidden language and on HIPAA compliance.
Campbell testified that the system is HIPAA Compliant.
"The HIPAA Privacy Rule addresses the saving, accessing and sharing of medical and personal information of any individual, while the HIPAA Security Rule more specifically outlines national security standards to protect health data created, received, maintained or transmitted electronically, also known as electronic protected health information."
In repeated questioning, Barton got Campbell to admit she knew that the "no reasonable expectation of privacy" line was in the code.
Barton then asked "How the hell could it be HIPAA compliant?" Campbell refused to answer the question.
The original source of the video appears to be CNS News. CNS has a longer video clip, not directly embeddable, but playable at Hidden Code on Obamacare Website Says 'No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy'.
In the longer video, after Democrat Rep. Frank Pallone got the floor, Barton asked Pallone to yield. Pallone responded "I will not yield to this monkey court!"
Pallone went on to say "the statement is no legitimate concern of this committee."
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/04/cnn-obamacare-war-room-worried-about-reaction-when-some-enrollees-figure-out-they-cant-keep-their-doctor/
CNN: ObamaCare “war room” worried about reaction when some enrollees figure out they can’t keep their doctor
POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 4, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
This is the big unexploded landmine in the ObamaCare mine field. There have been little booms about it here and there — the NYT story last week about rural counties suffering under O-Care is one, as was that U.S. News story about high-end hospitals being excluded from many plans on the exchanges — but it hasn’t fully detonated yet. That’s because most consumers are still comparison-shopping for plans, which means cost is foremost in their minds right now. Not until next year, after they’ve received their new coverage and begun making doctor appointments, will they start focusing on the shrinking size of their provider networks. It’s one thing to be told that you need to pay a higher premium and deductible because you’re getting more “comprehensive” insurance. It’s another to be told that the “comprehensiveness” you’re paying for includes a less comprehensive network than you used to have under your old, ahem, “cut-rate” plan. That was the whole point of the op-ed by Edie Sundby that everyone’s linking today, in fact. Sundby’s complaint wasn’t that the price of her insurance has skyrocketed, it was that she was essentially being forced to choose between her doctor and her hospital because she couldn’t find a plan in California whose network included both. If you like your doctor, you can’t necessarily keep him/her.
This is going to blow up. Not just yet — website woes and rate shock are of more immediate media concern — but it’s coming and the White House knows it.
Officials expressed concern that the next shoe to drop in the evolving story about the Affordable Care Act would be disappointment from consumers once they are able to get on the troubled HealthCare.gov website – disappointment because of sticker shock and limited choice, according to a new document obtained by CNN.“Mike described a general concern of PM (Project Management): getting to the point where the website is functioning properly and individuals begin to select plans; the media attention will follow individuals to plan selection and their ultimate choices; and, in some cases, there will be fewer options than would be desired to promote consumer choice and an ideal shopping experience. Additionally, in some cases there will be relatively high cost plans,” say the notes from the Obama administration’s Obamacare ‘War Room’ from one week ago…Other notes from the war room meeting describe specific “problem plans,” and a problem with the site that prevents certification, perhaps due to a misspelling on the website.
The NYT had a nice explainer back in late September anticipating the problem of shrinking networks. It’s a byproduct of rate shock, actually: In addition to taxpayer subsidies, one way to keep the cost of plans offered on the exchange down is to exclude more expensive providers from a plan’s network. That’s not a terrible thing for the demographic targeted by ObamaCare, i.e. “young healthies” whose premiums will be used by insurers to cover the cost of others’ preexisting conditions. If you’re healthy and don’t go to the doctor much, who cares how big your network is? Some people do care, though — e.g., people who live in rural areas where the only hospital within 30 miles might no longer accept their plan and people like Sundby, who have very good reason to prefer a particular doctor or hospital. In fact, making their provider networks nice and small might be a sly way for insurers to discourage Sundby and others with expensive preexisting conditions from enrolling in their plans. They’re required by law to allow her to enroll if she tries, but make the provider network small enough and she won’t.
The point, though, is that horror stories about people losing their doctors en masse are still to come and the White House is preparing for them. Which makes me wonder: Given all the political agony that’s in store for red-state Democrats up for reelection next year, how much longer can they afford to stand by the law? Even if the website’s fixed tomorrow, they’re staring at a parade of horribles well into 2014. Rate shock is the story now; the next story will be whether O-Care can possibly hit its enrollment targets in order to make the program sustainable. (This assumes that Healthcare.gov will begin operating smoothly soon. If it doesn’t, the next story will be all about Democratic panic and Obama’s bad options in minimizing the damage from a busted enrollment drive.) The next story after that will be people outraged at how their provider networks have shrunk. After that comes the March 31, 2014 deadline for enrollment; will the administration reach its target on that or will the deadline be extended, raising the risk of an adverse selection problem for insurers? And then, as a cherry on top, after a long summer of the GOP showcasing ObamaCare nightmare stories,insurers will release the 2015 rates next October and there’ll be a new flood of small-business employees agonizing publicly about how high the premiums are on their new exchange-bought plans. It’s nothing but sh*t sandwiches for Senate Dems until next November. How long before they lose their appetites?
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/04/cbs-white-house-warned-three-years-ago-that-obamacare-was-running-off-the-rails/
CBS: White House warned three years ago that ObamaCare was running off the rails
POSTED AT 8:41 AM ON NOVEMBER 4, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY
Remember when you’re watching this that it pertains to the same people who now argue that they know better than you about what kind of insurance coverage you need. CBS News reports that an internal memo warned the White House three years ago that the Healthcare.gov project was turning into a disaster, and that no one with any expertise had control of the project:
CBS News is learning the Obama administration knew of the risks associated with the Obamacare rollout well before last month.Three years ago, a trusted Obama health care adviser warned the White House it was losing control of Obamacare. A memo obtained by CBS News said strong leadership was missing and the law’s successful implementation was in jeopardy. The warnings were specific and dire — and ignored.David Cutler, who worked on the Obama 2008 campaign and was a valued outside health care consultant wrote this blunt memo to top White House economic adviser Larry Summers in May 2010: “I do not believe the relevant members of the administration understand the president’s vision or have the capability to carry it out.”Cutler wrote no one was in charge who had any experience in complex business start-ups. He also worried basic regulations, technology and policy coordination would fail.“You need to have people who have understanding of the political process, people who understand how to work within an administration and people who understand how to start and build a business, and unfortunately, they just didn’t get all of those people together,” Cutler said.The White House dismissed these and other warnings. It relied on appointed bureaucrats and senior White House health care advisers. Fearful of constant attacks from congressional Republicans, the White House became secretive about the law’s complexity and regulatory reach.
The White House didn’t heed this warning for the same reason they embarked on this project in the first place. The bureaucrats and the activists thought they were smarter than the markets, and smarter than the people who have actual experience in the private sector. It’s the same infection that creates the monumentally tone-deaf argument that people should behappy that the government forced them out of existing plans they chose for themselves in order to pay more for coverage that the consumers know they don’t need. It’s unbridled hubris, and it produced this inevitable Greek tragedy that also doubles as farce.
Now, keep this in mind, too. Did the White House bring in ground-up business people and web-savvy firms to take over from the bureaucrats and the contractors who wasted $400 million on a web portal that doesn’t portal anything? No — they brought in Jeffrey Zients, one of Obama’s economic advisers, and kept everyone else in place. With this background in mind, just how likely will it be that the November 30th deadline for full functionality will be met?
Feinstein: Hey, you could have kept your plan … until we enacted ObamaCare
POSTED AT 8:01 AM ON NOVEMBER 4, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY
Sen. Dianne Feinstein appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation yesterday in part to face the music. Bob Schieffer led off this portion of her appearance by noting that the Obama administration has failed to deliver on many promises of ObamaCare, not the least of which was “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Feinstein tries to explain that the promise was true … up until the bill passed.
No, seriously (via Eliana Johnson at The Corner):
SCHIEFFER: The president said in the beginning that one thing was that if you liked the health care program you had, you could keep it. We now know there was debate within the administration before he said that as to whether that was actually a promise that could be kept. Should the president not have made that statement?FEINSTEIN: Well, as I understand it, you can keep it up to the time — and I hope this is correct, but this is what I’ve been told — up to the time the bill was enacted, and after that, it’s a different story. That part of it, if true, was never made clear.
So let’s get this straight. The promise made by Barack Obama from 2007 forward all the way through the 2012 election, made dozens if not hundreds of times in those five years, meant that you could keep the plan you liked only if we never enacted the reform he proposed? I’ve heard some pretty fanciful spin on the “keep your plan” promise, but that really does take the cake. “Never made clear,” indeed.
Here’s another question for Senator Feinstein. You voted for this bill and helped push it through Congress with zero Republican votes. Why is it only now that we find out that you had no idea how this bill, drafted in the Senate by senior Democratic leadership, would impact Americans who liked the insurance they already had? Why did it take Senator Feinstein, a senior member of Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill herself, more than three and a half years to figure this out — and not even to a certainty, if one is to believe this spin cycle yesterday on CBS News?
WH: Yeah, about those 7 million people we needed to register for Obamacare…
POSTED AT 6:31 PM ON NOVEMBER 3, 2013 BY JAZZ SHAW
It was quite the weekend of, shall we say, managing expectations in Washington. Erika already pointed out that the original roll out for the whole, “if you like your plan” may have been questioned internally by subject matter experts and advisors, but hey… that didn’t matter. See, we never really meant all the plans. Just the good ones.
Another theme you previously heard from administration officials over and over again dealt with how many people absolutely, positively, without a doubt would need to be enrolled in the program in order for it to be able to stand on its own feet financially. That number, lest you somehow missed it, was seven million. We need everyone on board with this and registered in order for everyone to share the burden. But, as Andrew Johnson points out at The Corner, White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer showed up on the Sunday show circuit to say that the original number may have been more of an estimate.
Dan Pfeiffer, one of President Obama’s top advisers, played down the initial estimation that 7 million people would need to enroll in Obamacare exchanges in order for the program to succeed. He said the White House wasn’t going off of that figure offered by the Congressional Budget Office, but rather just try to “as many people done as possible.”
Let’s go to the video.
You have to admit, as targets go, as many people as possible is a pretty comfortable goal. You pretty much can’t miss that one, even if the number turns out to be six. But seriously, if there are any software people left in the country currently not working on fixing this debacle, somebody may want to build us a database just to keep track of the number of different stories we’ve been told about this program from the original bill of sale to present.
On a possibly related topic, do you suppose these shifting tales of woe could have something to do with The One’s daily job approval rating finally hitting 40?
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