Sunday items.....
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-17/guest-post-most-puzzling-and-haunting-statement-about-obamacare-fiasco
Guest Post: The Most Puzzling (And Haunting) Statement About The Obamacare Fiasco
Submitted by F.F.Wiley of Cyniconomics blog,
This may be a little after-the-fact, but I’ve been thinking about the ACA mess this weekend and keep coming back to President Obama’s November 7 interview with Chuck Todd.
Or more precisely, Ann Althouse’s post on the interview. (I admit to not watching the full interview – Althouse’s excerpts were enough to stick in my head like an annoying song.)
Speaking about why his campaign website worked so well compared to the ACA site, Obama said:
You know, one of the lessons - learned from this whole process on the website - is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. …Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I’m not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right?
He later added that:
When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn’t work or it ends up being way over cost.
BO, aren’t you kind of acknowledging that your ideological opponents are right? Yet, you claim that these fundamental inefficiencies are easily fixed?
we've been told we must buy a product, and things have been set up so we can only go through the government's market (the "exchange"), and the government has already demonstrated that its market doesn't work. But you can't walk away, you're forced to buy, and there's nowhere else to go. And yet, he wants us to feel bad about the cumbersome bureaucracy the government encountered trying to procure the wherewithal to set up the market it had already decided we would all need to use.
Check out the Althouse post for appropriate commentary and YouTube clips.
(h/t David Henderson)
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/beneath-the-headlines-on-healthcare-gov
Beneath the Headlines on HealthCare.gov
AP Photo
If you haven't read it, the piece states that the administration's goal (when it will consider the site "working" and a "success") is when 80% of users will be able to use it to buy health care plans. This is apparently what the administration means when they use the now familiar catchphrase that the "vast majority" of users will be able to successfully use the site.
Now, 20% left out is a lot of people.
But fairly far down in the article is this paragraph ...
According to a government official familiar with the new target, the 20 percent who are unlikely to be able to enroll online are expected to fall into three groups: people whose family circumstances are so complicated that the Web site cannot determine their eligibility for subsidies to help pay for health plans; people uncomfortable buying insurance on a computer; and people who encounter technical problems on the Web site.
It would clarify a lot if we knew a breakdown of these three categories within that 20%. But this is some pretty serious fine print and puts the 80/20 in a somewhat different light.
After all, getting the site to "work" for people who are unwilling or uncomfortable buying insurance on their computer seems like a pretty intractable problem and not what most people think of when they talk about the site 'working'.
The issue of people with complex life situations was the main one I heard about talking with people working on the refit process. It's what it sounds like. For your average single person making $40k a year or a family of four making $60k it basically works fine now. But when you get into more complicated situations with different kinds of dependents, more complicated income situations etc and a lot else, sometimes the site is not able to provide answers.
Obviously, the devil is in the details here. I think everyone understands there will likely be some very complicated edge cases where the calculation of a subsidy may require getting on the phone with someone. Just how complicated your situation has to be before the website can't help you will be the key question. And what I take from people familiar with the process is that this is the part of the equation, working down that percentage, that will require a lot of iterating and optimization beyond December 1st.
The political reality is that landing with a thud on October 1st means that everything about this site and the law is now getting extremely close and often misleadingly negative scrutiny. The reality reality, however, is not necessarily as dire as a lot of these reports suggest.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-insurance-commissioner-fired-a-day-after-questioning-obamacare-fix/2013/11/16/b88eaea0-4f17-11e3-9890-a1e0997fb0c0_story.html?hpid=z1
A day after he questioned President Obama’s decision to unwind a major tenet of the health-care law and said the nation’s capital might not go along, D.C. insurance commissioner William P. White was fired.
White was called into a meeting Friday afternoon with one of Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s (D) top deputies and told that the mayor “wants to go in a different direction,” White told The Washington Post on Saturday.
White said the mayoral deputy never said that he was being asked to leave because of his Thursday statement on health care. But he said the timing was hard to ignore. Roughly 24 hours later, White said, he was “basically being told, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ ”
White was one of the first insurance commissioners in the nation last week to push back against Obama’s attempt to smooth over part of the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act: millions of unexpected cancellations of insurance plans.
In persuading Congress to vote for the health-care overhaul, Obama had promised that Americans who liked their insurance plans would be able to keep them. When that turned out to not be the case, Obama apologized last week. And to stem growing bipartisan dissent, he announced Thursday that plans slated to be canceled next year to comply with the legislation could be extended for one year.
While the president’s plan sounded like a simple fix, it rattled the insurance industry, which had set prices for next year based on many of its products changing to comply with the health-care law. Allowing some plans to continue beyond Jan. 1 could also run afoul of provisions in laws passed by dozens of states and the District to implement the Affordable Care Act.
In a statement issued Thursday, White hinted strongly that he opposed the idea.
“The action today undercuts the purpose of the exchanges, including the District’s DC Health Link, by creating exceptions that make it more difficult for them to operate,” the statement said.
He also pointed to a statement issued by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners that said the Obama order “threatens to undermine the new market, and may lead to higher premiums and market disruptions in 2014 and beyond.”
“We concur with that assessment,” White said Thursday.
White’s statement was removed from the department’s Web site sometime before Friday morning. Asked about the removal Friday, spokesman Michael Flagg said the department’s statement had changed.
“Our statement now is that we’re taking a close look at the implications of the president’s announcement on the District’s exchange and we will soon recommend a course of action after taking into consideration the positions of all the stakeholders,” Flagg wrote in an e-mail.
On Saturday, Flagg declined to comment on whether White had been fired, saying the department doesn’t comment on personnel issues.
A senior city official said White’s initial statement was sent to the mayoral communications director, Pedro Ribeiro, only minutes before it was issued publicly. It was not sent to Deputy Mayor Victor Hoskins, White’s immediate supervisor, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about a personnel matter.
A formal statement critical of the president should have been closely vetted and approved by the mayor’s office, and White refused to acknowledge the misstep, the official said. White said Hoskins fired him Friday.
White said he thought he would have been derelict in his duties to not quickly make a statement on the president’s announcement.
“Everyone was looking for responses from the regulators. One of my chief concerns is always consistency and clarity in the marketplace — you can’t have something that big sitting out there without responding to it,” he said.
White had served as Gray’s commissioner for the D.C. Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking since February 2011. Prior to last week, his most high-profile and controversial role had been as chief of the department that took control of Chartered Health Plan, the city’s largest manager of health care for low-income residents, amid questions about “irregularities” in its finances.
Chartered was owned by businessman Jeffrey E. Thompson, who has been implicated in funding a $650,000 “shadow campaign” to elect Gray. White oversaw the successful sale of the insurer’s assets, and his department’s handling of the transition has been generally viewed positively.
White said he had known since he took the job that he served at the pleasure of the mayor. He said he was proud of his record and would have stayed.
On the president’s proposed health-care fix, he said: “I wasn’t saying I was against it, I also was saying I didn’t know enough to fully support it — I want to be clear, and I think it is, I was not speaking for Mayor Gray.”
Panic City - Stump speech .....
http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/16/obama-rallies-supporters-monday-evening-to-save-obamacare/
President Barack Obama will ask his most ardent followers on Monday evening to help bail out his rapidly sinking Obamacare project.
The 8:15 p.m. online speech will be delivered to Obama’s Organizing for Action supporters, and Obama is expected to ask them to save the Obamacare program, which has eliminated health insurance plans of at least four million Americans.
Obamacare’s launch has been so politically painful that many Democratic legislators have threatened to abandon ship even before it becomes operational on Jan. 1.
Obama will also try to go on the political offensive by urging his followers to push for the Senate-passed, business-backed immigration reform bill.
Democrats say the bill is popular and will help Americans. But GOP leaders in the House have temporarily stalled it because of opposition from voters who are already worried about unemployment, outsourcing and automation.
If it becomes law, the bill would provide a work permit to one extra Democratic-leaning immigrant or guest-worker for every American who turns 18 during the next 10 years.
On Friday, Obama held an emergency Obamacare meeting with his allies in the health-benefit companies, including the CEOs of Aetna, Humana, CareFirst and Cigna Healthcare.
That meeting came one day after Obama tried to blame the companies, not his regulations, for the millions of policy cancellations. In a White House press conference, he announced he would not prosecute executives who violate the 2010 Obamacare law by selling popular, low-profit pre-Obamacare insurance policies during 2014.
Obamacare requires the low-cost plans be cancelled, and be replaced by higher-cost plans, which generate steady profits for companies that cooperate with the government.
So far, no company has announced that they want to sell the low-profit plans, and none have announced a reversal of the Obamacare-mandated cancellations.
The political pain caused by the cancellations is made worse by the inability of many people to buy the more expensive replacement policies via Obamacare website.
There’s growing doubt that the website will be fixed b Nov. 30, as Obama and his deputies have predicted.
White House officials didn’t provide a transcript of Obama’s Friday meeting with the executives, but did release a so-called “readout” of the meeting.
The readout did not include any mention of the president’s Thursday request, which was widely seen in Washington as a p.r. move to prevent Democratic legislators from voting against the Obamacare project.
So far, the PR move has been partly successful.
On Friday, only 39 Democratic legislators backed a successful GOP-drafted bill that would allow insurance companies to sell the low-profit policies until the end of 2014.
The GOP bill will be blocked by the Democratic-majority Senate.
In the Friday, meeting, “the President led a discussion with industry leaders about the best pathways for consumers to enroll in coverage,” said a vague White House readout.
“Administration officials are working closely with insurance companies on both consumer education as well as fixing the technical issues with HealthCare.gov so that consumers can obtain the coverage they need,” it stated.
http://www.correntewire.com/obamacare_clusterfuck_obamas_presser_the_terror_and_pity
ObamaCare Clusterfuck: Obama's presser, the terror and pity
Submitted by lambert on Sat, 11/16/2013 - 5:35pm
Departments:
Obama's presser was so bad, so bad bad BAD. I hate to quote The National Review, and even more do I hate to quote Mark Steyn, especially because he's Canadian and knows what a humane health care system looks like, and so should be out pushing for single payer instead of indulging in schadenfreude, but since our putative left is just wandering about, looking at the sky, humming vaguely, and refusing to acknowledge that the Preznit, in his latest presser, displayed not only all the capacity to accept responsibility, but all the intellectual ability, of a fucking six-year-old*, I guess I'll just have do what I hate doing.
Caveat: I assume that, just as so many of the bloggers who built the case against Bush 2003 - 2006 turned out to have no trouble at all with Obama doing whatever Bush did, because Obama, Steyn would, were a Republican President, be writing a very different column on RomneyCare, because Romney.
That said, to Steyn's weapons-grade snark:
Still, as historian Michael Beschloss pronounced the day after his election, he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” Naturally, Obama shares this assessment. As he assured us five years ago, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Well, apart from his signature health-care policy. That’s a mystery to him. “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working,” he told us. The buck stops with something called “the executive branch,” which is apparently nothing to do with him. As evidence that he was entirely out of the loop, he offered this:Had I been I informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, “This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,” a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.Ooooo-kay. So, if I follow correctly, the smartest president ever is not smart enough to ensure that his website works; he’s not smart enough to inquire of others as to whether his website works; he’s not smart enough to check that his website works before he goes out and tells people what a great website experience they’re in for. But he is smart enough to know that he’s not stupid enough to go around bragging about how well it works if he’d already been informed that it doesn’t work. So he’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing. The country’s in the very best of hands.
Pretty good, for a professional.
And I'd forgotten this quote (just double-checking):
“[OBAMA:] I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.”
Well, what does that tell you? (No points for "Obama's an arrogant asshole"; we know that already.) It might tell you that Obama picked the wrong policy directors. More frighteningly, it might tell you that Obama picked the very best policy directors that were to be had, with results as you see. More and more, I incline to the latter; it's a useful rule of thumb, these days, that anybody in a position of authority is likely to be, at best, severely corrupted ethically and morally; what I'm now focused on is the idea that "these people" are intellectually compromised as well, severely impaired; and that's Steyn's message, if you dial back the snark knob from 11:
He’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing.
That's exactly it. Exactly. Steyn is paraphrasing accurately. Honestly, how can anybody read this quote (again, for your delectation)....
Had I been I informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, “This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,” a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work
... and not understand very directly that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong? Obama's the Preznit. He's supposed be "informed"! But I don't mean something's gone horribly wrong only with Obama, with his state of mind, I mean with his retainers, his courtiers, his followers, his faction, his tribe, his party, and with everyone who interacts "normally" with all these, including their opponents. This is a moment and a quote like Nixon's "I am not a crook," and yet nobody except a snarky soi disant Brit raises a hair. It's more than odd. More than mind-boggling. It's frightening.
I finally found the objective correlative for what I'm feeling about Obama, and our impaired elites generally, after this presser, in a passage from one of Phillip K. Dick's lesser novels, Our Friends from Frolix 8. The premise here is that planet Earth has been ruled by a class of genetically enhanced super-beings, the "New Men," one of whom is Mr. Marshall, in the passage below. Mr. Marshall has an "inflated, balloon-like" head because he has a giant brain, a giant brain that has hitherto -- given that the New Men have established a meritocracy based on tests that only people with giant brains can solve -- qualified him as a member of the ruling class. However, immediately before the passage below, an immensely powerful, planet-sized alien being has electrically shorted out the giant brains of all New Men, destroying their mental faculties. Word of something like this gets around, and so Ed Woodman and Dick's protagonist, Nick, seek out Mr. Marshall, a low-ranking New Man, low because he lives in their building. (The highlights are from the search string I used: "Began to cry.)
(Frolix 8 actually has a happy ending, since the Old Men decided to take care of the New Men humanely.) Anyhow, this is the quote I was looking for, the objective correlative:
"What are playing with, Mr. Marshall?" Ed Woodman asked, bending down. "An electric mixer. He's making the blades turn."
That's Obama. The mixer is the ObamaCare website, and the long train of policy and administrative disaster that produced it. And Obama is making the blades turn. We are dealing with impaired people, here. Severely impaired people.**
NOTE Hat tip for the National Review article to Richard Smith.
NOTE ** No, it's not just Democrats. If you look at any squillion-dollar project over the last decade or so, Democrat or Republican, it's gone horribly out of control. Iraq. The bailouts. Name it. The ruling class has lost the basic ability to govern. They can't even fake it. It may be more evident with Obama, first because of the "hope and change" build up, but I think primarily because the situations with which he must cope are becoming worse and worse. Thank heavens Mr. Marshall never plugged in a fan and made those blades turn, eh?
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Saturday items ......
Good news: Obama administration doing a bit of soul searching in the wake of all these screwups
POSTED AT 1:01 PM ON NOVEMBER 16, 2013 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN
President Obama’s out-of-nowhere-save-political-desperation announcement this week that he — emphasis on the he — intends to ‘allow‘ insurers to temporarily extend policies that have recently been canceled because they do not meet the coverage standards established by his signature legislative achievement. It’s an almost absurdly unworkable “fix” designed purely to enable the White House to be able to shift some of the blame for cancelled plans onto the insurance companies themselves, prompting a lot of people to wonder… is the president and his administration just making all of this up at will as they along?
Because that’s certainly what it looks like. Apparently, the White House is finally cottoning on to their steadily worsening image as a harebrained, unscrupulous, wildly political, say-anything talking-points machine, so no worries — they’re going to look into it. The WSJreports:
The White House has begun a quiet self-assessment in the wake of the troubled health-law launch, recognizing that administration officials missed warning signs and put too much trust in their management practices in implementing a program that is the centerpiece of PresidentBarack Obama‘s domestic legacy.White House officials want to learn how the rollout flopped, despite what they believed had been sufficient planning, preparation and attention to the issue. Although not a full-bore “forensic” inquiry into what went wrong, the administration aims to organize itself so that “going forward, we don’t have these problems,” a senior White House official said in an interview. …More details about managerial shortcomings emerged Friday, when a House committee released emails showing that staff who were working on the HealthCare.gov website worried the project was off track months before the Oct. 1 launch.
A self-assessment, thank goodness! My confidence is practically restored already!
…Alright, yes, that was sarcasm, but I’m sure there are plenty of “folks” — to borrow one of the president’s favored terms — for whom that could be true, and the White House’s ridiculously botched healthcare rollout isn’t doing progressivism any favors.
http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/blog/2013/11/obama-health-insurance-switch.html?ana=e_du_pub&s=article_du&ed=2013-11-15&page=all
Obama's about-face too little, too late for some insurers
Brian O'Grady, vice president at BlueShield Northeastern New York.
Three health insurers faced a prescient question the night of Nov. 13: What if President Obama suddenly preserves health plans that do not comply with the Affordable Care Act?
At that Wednesday panel, the question was posed to Denise Gonick, the CEO ofMVP Health Care; John Bennett, CEO ofCDPHP; and Brian O'Grady, vice president at BlueShield Northeastern New York.
"The unanimous response was, 'That's impossible. Those plans are gone,' " O'Grady says.
Less than 18 hours later—and in the middle of open enrollment for many customers—O'Grady stopped work to watch President Obama try to revive those plans live on TV.
Obama had promised Americans that they could keep their current plan if they wanted to.
Millions of Americans had discovered otherwise. So now, Obama says insurers can keep offering plans that do not provide the minimum benefits mandated by the law, known to most as Obamacare.
For BlueShield, it's too late. The Buffalo-based insurer has already told 31,000 households (about 6 percent of its business) that their policies were being canceled.
The vast majority of those are employees of various small businesses.
By now, health insurers such as BlueShield have endured an incredible amount of work to comply with the Affordable Care Act.
Their work was further complicated by state law, which requires "prior approval" of proposed increases in premiums.
Now, O'Grady says insurers are waiting for state regulators to decide whether they can keep alive, for one more year, any "small group" business plans that do not comply with the Affordable Care Act.
Even if he gets that authority, O'Grady didn't sound eager to use it.
"It would be a mad scramble to file rates. And it would be a huge administrative burden to go into great detail explaining why we're letting substandard policies continue," O'Grady says. "We're six weeks away from Jan. 1. All that is almost impossible to do now."
For his members who lost their old plans, O'Grady says he is confident that many will save money by shopping for coverage on the state's health insurance exchange.
In a statement, BlueShield added that "in general," the number of policies being nixed across New York is "significantly less than in other states."
O'Grady says he does not know what to expect next.
"It has already consumed a vast amount of our resources," he says. "And who knows, there will probably be another press conference in 25 minutes."
Losing hearts and minds - Bowie State students hit by ObamaCare rate hikes as student healthcare canceled by School ....
Paging Hagan to the Panic Room !
Kay Hagan reaches for the panic button
POSTED AT 8:31 AM ON NOVEMBER 16, 2013 BY JAZZ SHAW
We mentioned earlier this week how red state Democrat Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina had watched as a previously slim but solid lead in the polls had evaporated of late. It seems that this was no momentary glitch in the numbers and the situation continues to deteriorate. The slide continued with what could only be described as a disastrous conference call with reporters, eager to pepper her with questions about her role in the development and launch of Obamacare, which even the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank saw as a ship taking on water.
Well, her problem begins with Obamacare, ends with Obamacare and has a whole lot of Obamacare in between.Hagan hosted a conference call for reporters Tuesday morning to discuss the problems with the health-care law’s rollout, and the Q&A session was so painful that the senator should qualify for trauma coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Hagan tried reciting some of the standard issue White House talking points to claw her way out of that one, but things only got worse when one of her spokeswomen followed up to try to clean up the mess. (From Big Government and the local paper the News & Record.)
“First, this is nothing more than a political stunt that does nothing to help more people get access to care and highlights the difference between Kay, who is working to fix this law, and her opponents who don’t have any plan to reform our broken health care system,” Hagan spokeswoman Sadie Weiner told the News and Record, a Greensboro, NC newspaper. “In her capacity as a member of the HELP Committee, Senator Hagan was involved with that committee’s markup of the health care reform bill in the summer of 2009.”In the next sentence of the quote, Weiner states that her boss Hagan was aware of the fact that people would lose their healthcare plans under Obamacare some time ago.“Once insurance companies began disingenuously offering plans that they knew they would be canceling it became clear that more people would be getting cancellation letters,” Weiner said.
Did you catch that one – two punch in those answers? Not only was her boss, Senator Hagan, an instrumental player in crafting the bill, but she was also aware that insurance companies were going to be cancelling policies as soon as it went into effect. It’s bad enough that the popularity of Obamacare in North Carolina is rapidly approaching that of a raging case of the crabs, but that sort of admission plants her firmly in the series of shifting denials and stories about precisely who knew what when.
If Kay Hagan, one of the busy bees working on the bill, was aware that many people who liked their policy would not, in fact, be able to keep it, how did the President not know? Did she not find it worth mentioning to him? And since the “you can’t keep that” effect is presumably hitting people in her own state, how does she square up not letting the voters in on this little secret before she voted for it? Either way, somebody has some explaining to do, and there is a pack of GOP challengers who are all very interested in that Senate seat who are more than happy to discuss the matter with her in the coming battle. I think we can put North Carolina in play as one of the six seats the GOP needs to pick up next year.
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
President Barack Obama meets with health insurance executives at the White House on Friday.
Several insurance industry officials and state insurance commissioners expressed frustration Friday, saying they were “baffled” by President Barack Obama’s assertion that the cancellation of millions of insurance policies occurred because a key provision of the Affordable Care Act didn’t work as expected. The administration was warned three years ago that regulations would have exactly that effect, they said.
They said the widespread cancellations in the individual health insurance market — roughly 5 million and counting -- are in line with what was projected under regulations drawn up by the administration in 2010, requirements that both insurers and businesses objected to at the time. Cancellations also are occurring in the small group market, which covers businesses with between two and 50 employees, they noted.
“We have been saying for years that the requirements in the law were going to mean that people couldn't keep their current plans and they were going to have to purchase coverage that was more expensive,” said one high-level heath industry insider who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We said these changes would disrupt coverage and increase premiums for consumers. And now everything we said is coming true and people are acting surprised.”
At issue is a so-called “grandfather” clause in the law stating that consumers would have the option of keeping policies in effect as of March 23, 2010, even if they didn’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed after that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered.
The president, in accepting responsibility for Obamacare’s rocky rollout at a news conference Thursday, specifically addressed his repeated pledge that “if you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period.”
Asked why he continued to say that when estimates from his own administration suggested millions of Americans would not be able to keep their insurance, Obama replied, “There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate. It was not because of my intention not to deliver on that commitment and that promise. We put a grandfather clause into the law but it was insufficient."
To fix the problem, Obama said that he would give health insurance plans the option to keep selling plans that don't comply with Obamacare for one more year, effectively shifting the decision to insurers and state insurance commissioners.
In comments filed in August and December 2010, America’s Health Insurance Plans -- a trade group representing 1,300 insurance plans — urged the administration to “reconsider” grandfathering rules because they were too stringent to allow many to keep their policies.
In the first round of comments, AHIP stated that under the administration’s proposed regulations, “The percentage of individual market policies losing grandfathered status … will likely exceed the 40-67 percent range” and warned that could cause “disruptions” for those who wish to keep their policies.
When those proposed rules weren’t changed, AHIP again wrote in December, “We believe that more can and should be done to protect the interests of consumers who wish to maintain their existing coverage.”
The individual market is made up of approximately 15 million Americans who purchase health insurance on their own. If 40 percent of those consumers lose their policies, that would work out to 6 million cancellations.
“The significance of the AHIP letters is that they show the administration was warned that their proposed grandfather rules were far too stringent for people's plans to survive come 2014,” health care analyst Robert Laszewski, who consults for insurance companies, hospitals and physicians groups, told NBC News. “The industry told the administration that the historic rate at which consumers increase their out-of-pocket costs was far more than the very limited rules the administration ultimately wrote. The only foreseeable outcome would be that most plans would not survive. The administration, knowing that, went ahead with these stringent rules anyway.”
One state insurance commissioner, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said he sympathized with the president’s predicament and the political blowback he is getting. But the official said “the cancellations are consistent with what we expected under the regulations.” He said he didn’t know yet whether his state would or could implement the president’s suggestion that canceled policies be reinstated for a year. “We’re waiting to hear from our insurers and then will decide if it’s feasible or would mean even more chaos.”
During the same period, consumer groups complained that the administration’s rules were too lenient and would allow too many Americans to keep substandard policies that didn’t meet the new standards of the Affordable Care Act.
A senior administration official pointed out Friday that beyond suggesting that consumers be allowed to continue policies that were canceled, the president’s latest proposal informs consumers of their options:
“Specifically, insurers offering these renewals must inform all consumers who either already have or will receive cancellation letters about the protections their renewed plan will not include and how they can learn about the new options available to them through the marketplaces, which will offer better protections and possible financial assistance,” said the official, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
Insurance commissioners from California, Florida, Kentucky and North Carolina said Friday they would move quickly to implement the president’s request. Florida Insurance Commission Kevin McCarty said most insurers in his state already had voluntarily extended coverage for those impacted. Other state insurance officials suggested it may be too late in the game to change the rules.
(Reuters) - UnitedHealth Group dropped thousands of doctors from its networks in recent weeks, leaving many elderly patients unsure whether they need to switch plans to continue seeing their doctors, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The insurer said in October that underfunding of Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly could not be fully offset by the company's other healthcare business. The company also reported spending more healthcare premiums on medical claims in the third quarter, due mainly to government cuts to payments for Medicare Advantage services.
The Journal report said that doctors in at least 10 states were notified of being laid off the plans, some citing "significant changes and pressures in the healthcare environment." According to the notices, the terminations can be appealed within 30 days.
Tyler Mason, a UnitedHealth spokesperson, was not immediately available for comment when reached by Reuters.
The insurer told the WSJ that its provider networks were always changing and that it expected its Medicare Advantage network to be 85 percent to 90 percent of its current size by the end of 2014.
UnitedHealth is participating in about a dozen new state insurance markets that launched on October 1 to offer subsidized health coverage under President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul.
The insurer said previously it planned to withdraw from some markets in 2014 because of the government funding cuts.
Another top health insurer, Aetna Inc , also warned in October that it expected slowing growth in 2014 in its Medicare Advantage plans.
and....
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/16/2013 15:12 -0500
Nation's Largest Healthcare Provider Cuts Thousands Of Doctors; Blames Government
UnitedHealth, the nation's largest provider of privately managed Medicare Advantage plans, has dropped thousands of doctors from its networks in recent weeks citing "substantial funding pressure from the federal government." The WSJ reports that physician groups are protesting as many elderly patients are now unsure about whether they need to switch plans to keep seeing their doctors. Doctors in at least 10 states have received termination letters, some citing "significant changes and pressures in the health-care environment." UnitedHealth said its provider networks are always changing and that it expects its Medicare Advantage network "to be 85% to 90% of its current size by the end of 2014," due to the new health law (Obamacare).More job creation?
...The company said it is managing its network, in part, to provide more value for members, particularly given Medicare's new five-star rating system that ties bonus payments for insurers to certain measures of cost and quality."That's what's driving our actions," said Austin Pittman, president of UnitedHealth's networks. He also said, "It's no secret that we are under substantial funding pressure from the federal government."...Medicare Advantage, an alternative to traditional Medicare, combines hospital and doctor coverage and often includes prescription drugs and perks like gym memberships. Enrollment has more than doubled since 2004 to 13 million in 2012, which represents about 27% of Americans on Medicare.The federal government pays private insurers a per-capita fee to manage the benefits. The rate is currently about 12% more than the average Medicare patient spends annually. The Obama administration plans to cut those extra payments to insurers by about $150 billion over the next 10 years to help pay for the health law. Some experts expect enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans to decline sharply if that occurs....UnitedHealth is the biggest player, with nearly three million members in Advantage plans, many of them sold under the AARP brand. The company says it had over 350,000 doctors in its Advantage provider networks...."Instead of a scalpel, United is using a chain saw," said Michael Saffir, a rehabilitation specialist and president of the Connecticut State Medical Society, which estimates the insurer has cut 2,200 doctors across the state....A spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said CMS is reviewing UnitedHealth's and other provider's networks "to ensure that beneficiaries have full, transparent and timely information and access to needed care.""We recognize that change is hard," said Mr. Pittman. "This is about meeting the needs of patients in specific geographic areas, improving the quality and sustainability of our networks and deepening our relationships with providers over the long term." The company said it had no comment about the investigations....
So yet another unintended (and yet foreseeable) consequence of government intervention in free-markets...
"Fewer practitioners mean longer waits, longer drives, less convenience,"
Let’s recap: If you like your insurance policy, you can keep it. No, wait. If you liked your policy, it was probably worthless anyway. Scratch that. If your junk policy was canceled and you still want it, you can keep it. Er, get it back.
Whatever.
So now President Obama has apologized for real. On Thursday, he told Americans, “I hear you loud and clear” (Do I hear an echo?) and announced that insurance companies can ignore the law for a year. The several million Americans whose policies were canceled, or were scheduled to be canceled, can keep them — or get them back — assuming state regulators and insurance companies comply.
It isn’t clear whether insurers can, or will, based on the assurances of someone whose credibility isn’t exactly soaring. Meanwhile, the newest promise dovetails with another earlier delay granted to businesses with at least 50 employees (just 3.6 percent of employers), which were given another year to comply with the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
With the computer-crash rollout preventing people from signing up, businesses temporarily exempted from compliance and policyholders either reinstated or facing yet another broken promise (for which the insurance companies will be blamed), is there anyone left to love Obamacare?
In the wake of Obama’s latest tweak, two salient questions have emerged: Can the ACA survive? Can the president even do what he just did, legally?
Though brilliant minds may differ, the president is probably within bounds, according to a compelling argument bySimon Lazarus, senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center. The relevant constitutional text, he writes for the Atlantic, requires that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” a broad-enough concept to allow for judgment in the execution.
The only prohibition is that the president not fail to execute the law owing to his opposition to a policy. Obviously, this is not the case here. As a political matter, it is also obvious that Obama is merely trying to right his own sinking ship, especially after Bill Clinton’s undoubtedly heartfelt advice (you just know), as well as to preempt a new House bill to aid canceled policyholders that passed Friday with bipartisan support, including 39 Democrats.
Cynics on the left insist that Republicans have no real interest in helping Obamacare. And, of course, they are correct. Do Republicans just want to make sure Obama fails? Yes, but not for reasons sometimes suggested. Oprah recently intoned that many Americans disrespect Obama because he is African American. Even if that were remotely true, it is not the reason half the country opposes Obamacare and many more now doubt its efficacy.
Similarly, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky notoriously said that his job was to make sure Obama was a one-term president, it wasn’t because of race, nor was it immediate to the president’s election. McConnell made his remark in October 2010, on the eve of the midterm elections, and after Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote.
In other words, Republicans oppose Obama’s policies, not the man, because they believe the president will so inexorably change the structure of our social and economic system by mandating and punishing human behavior that nothing less than individual freedom is at stake. Under present circumstances, this hardly seems delusional. Does anyone really believe that subsidized policyholders with preexisting conditions won’t eventually face other mandates and penalties related to their lifestyle choices?
Finally, Democrats incessantly seize upon their prize trophy: The U.S. Supreme Court validated Obamacare. True-ish. The high court didn’t endorse Obamacare as a good idea. It didn’t even find the individual mandate constitutional. It ruled that the mandate/penalty is constitutional only if the penalty is viewed as a “tax.” If one were to examine this gift horse’s mouth, one would have to note that, funny, but throughout the health-care debate and oral arguments, and even now, Democrats have insisted that the penalty is not a tax. Paging George Orwell.
Whether the ACA survives the new timetable remains an open question. The plan sinks or swims on the basis of young, healthy people signing up, which, for now, they cannot do except in dribs and drabs. Further, the ACA clearly needed the canceled policyholders to buy new, more expensive policies to underwrite subsidies and preexisting conditions.
Given the season, the timing of these un-glad tidings could not be worse. Soon enough, Americans will figure out whether Obamacare is the gift Democrats promised — or if Obama is the Grinch who stole, you know, the holiday season.
Friday round up ......
Hot Air.....
Upton Bill passes House - 261( 39 Dem votes ) - 157
Open thread: House to vote on Upton’s “Keep Your Plan Act” soon; Update: 261-157
POSTED AT 12:05 PM ON NOVEMBER 15, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Gut-check time for House Democrats: Was yesterday’s phony “fix” from on high enough political cover for them to vote no today on Upton’s bill or do they still feel the need to do something dramatic to distance themselves from ObamaCare? The One’s done everything he can in the past 24 hours to nudge them to oppose the GOP’s bill, from holding that shinola-eating presser yesterday in which he claimed Upton’s idea more or less as his own tothreatening a veto of Upton’s bill last night. The House Democratic leadership is even preparing its own bill, “Landrieu-lite,” to give the more panicky members of the caucus an alternative to Upton. Given all that, if they vote for Upton anyway, it’s practically a vote of no-confidence. Precisely for that reason, plus the fact that Pelosi’s been dumping on Upton’s bill as “dangerous,” I’ll be surprised if more than a few dozen Dems cross the aisle. If it’s many more than that, political media will have a field day about the Democratic schism over O-Care this afternoon.
A little mood music while we wait:
President Barack Obama’s credibility may have taken a big hit with voters, but he’s also in serious danger of permanently losing the trust of Democrats in Congress. The Obamacare debacle has been bad enough that it’s tough for Democrats to take on faith that the president can fix the problems. His one-time allies are no longer sure that it’s wise to follow him into battle, leaving Obama and his law not only vulnerable to existing critics, but open to new attacks from his own party.“I don’t know how he f—-ed this up so badly,” said one House Democrat who has been very supportive of Obama in the past.
Not good enough? Okay:
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