Which liberal pundit’s credibility will be the last to die for the Obamacare mistake?
That “fixed” Obamacare website still is so broken feds will have to make estimated payments to insurers to cover premiums
Really, now we’re going to make estimated payments to insurance companies because healthcare.gov doesn’t even have a payment system?
Megyn Kelly discussed this tonight. (Video added at bottom of post.)
Here’s the Reuters report, Short-term fix eyed for another problem with U.S. healthcare website:
Dec 3 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s administration has found a short-term fix to pay insurance companies for plans selected on HealthCare.gov, the not-yet-complete government website used to shop for insurance required under Obama’s healthcare program.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has not yet finished building the part of the website that would transfer billions of dollars in subsidies for plan premiums and cost-sharing payments to insurance companies.
It is part of a long technical to-do list that has so far focused on fixing the errors and lag times in the part of the website used by consumers….
The administration is planning a “workaround” for payments, said Daniel Durham, vice president for policy and regulatory affairs at America’s Health Insurance Plans.
Health plans will estimate how much they are owed, and submit that estimate to the government. Once the system is built, the government and insurers can reconcile the payments made with the plan data to “true up” payments, he said.
“The intent is to make sure plans get paid on time, which is a good thing,” Durham told Reuters.
The fix puts an additional “burden” on insurance companies, already taxed by having to double-check faulty enrollment data from the HealthCare.gov system.
Now, companies need to quickly put together financial management systems to make the payment estimates, so they can be paid beginning in January, he said.
“They have to recognize that plans are already quite stressed and introducing this at the last minute just adds substantial burden for plans to deal with,” Durham said….
“They cannot survive if they don’t get paid. And even the larger carriers, it can only go on for so long,” Lucia said. “The last thing we need is for a carrier, especially a large carrier, to walk away from this.”
John Ekdahl asks:
How can anyone possibly defend this unlawful mess any longer? http://t.co/GPLzjfc1s3
— American Journalists Publish Chinese Propaganda (@JohnEkdahl) December 4, 2013
Oh, they will, they will.
MT @JohnEkdahl "How can anyone possibly defend this unlawful mess any longer?" >> http://t.co/MPN7V8dInQ via @FDRLST
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) December 4, 2013
(Featured image: Liberal bloggers at White House 2010)
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
The insurance companies need to walk away from this.
Are you kidding me ? The Federal Faucet is under their control even more than ever before.
A sword errr … faucet that works two ways.
What would they walk away to? They are barred from selling non-obamacare compliant policies. Without government subsidies they are going to go broke. Period.
I believe they will be driven out of business anyway. But, the Democrats don’t want that just yet.
Companies are run by people. Buy them off (or influence them some other way) and the company goes belly up.
The answer to questions such as this are always, always Paul Krugman.
No sweat. It was foreseen…er, anticipated,…er. planned.
Free money. Built in. Appropriated. Legal. Lawful.
risk corridors….
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-19/a-guide-to-obamacares-backstop-for-anxious-insurance-companies
Another item brought to light way back when…
What difference, at this point, does it make?
forward
Yes, forward…to single payer.
How many “short-term fixes” will it take to reach their health care nirvana?
“How can anyone possibly defend this unlawful mess any longer?”
Because shut up, racist. We won.
/s
Homophobe.
I listened to this tonight and thought I couldn’t get any more sick to my stomach, then she brought up Benghazi.
When she said we need to know what Obama knew and when he knew it, I thought: the hell we do. He is the president of the United States and we can assume he knew from the get go what was going on in Benghazi, he initiated the illegal gun running, ordered the stand down and relieved field commanders of their posts when they tried to rescue our embattled people, and cooked up the you-tube lie that got an innocent American hauled off to jail in the middle of the night. And then he and Hillary Clinton stood, with the dead bodies of their friends and colleagues between them and lied to the faces of their families. Right over the dead bodies of the friends and colleagues they abandoned to unspeakable brutality and death. What makes her think she can, or should run for president after a betrayal of that order?
And further, Obama also knew from the get go that he was lying about his filthy health care law, fast and furious, and the IRS was taking orders directly from him. It is all his responsibility and his piss-ant wining doesn’t change any of that.
I am so sick of this crap.
Nailed it. I’ve decided to update my litmus test for friends — nobody gets close unless they are sickened by this crap. If you can take it or leave it, then I’ll be cordial but nothing much beyond that.
Seriously, this moral depravity is what I spent my entire life contributing to? If I’d have known this earlier in life, I might have accepted that offer I got to join the mafia. (j/k)
Michelle Obama in charge of patient dumping at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and Senator Obama was the one bribing the hospital to hire her? Like we should trust our health insurance to someone like that?
Buy insurance stocks. We have passed a law which makes it unlawful to NOT buy their product !! What a racket !!
Don’t be a sucker. The Dems will drive the insurance companies out of busiess. Just, not yet. They don’t want people to realize that is their ultimate goal.
A dead business is one whose executives can’t make kickbacks and campaign contributions.
The “conservative” pundits’ credibility isn’t worth a damn better, save Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.
So… who besides me is thinking that there’s some Jane Doe out there whose new insurance plan is being “covered” by the “estimated payments”, who will go on to be diagnosed with something terrible (and terribly expensive).
Do we expect Ye Olde Insurance Provider to smile and say, “Ah, well, it probably won’t cost more than two-three million all told, and that’s what we’re here for!” ?
Or do we expect them to say, “Dear Ms. Doe: it has come to our attention that (unfortunately) your insurance premium was *NOT* paid in full; thus we must decline to cover further treatment for your condition. We do regret the necessity. If you like, we can refer you to a fine palliative-care facility in your area. Sincerely, BigBux Insurance Company” ?
Personally, I am not leaning toward scenario #1…
By what friggin’ authority is Obama allowed to advance taxpayer dollars for unsubsidized portions of premium to insurance companies?
[Never mind the squish room in the amount of subsidies — or whether those signing up on the federal exchanges are permitted to get subsidies (which in turn breeds another taxation legislation issue but let’s not go there for now…)]
I think they wrote it up in the “regs”. And if the carriers get an overpayment they get to keep it. That is how they hooked the carriers into it and why it should result in a RICO case against the carriers. It is a criminal conspiracy to defraud.
Well, this is what the tea parties were trying to prevent. The Weeper of the House is Jugears best friend because that’s where the money comes from.
No CR; no funding for BS. Raise your hand if you knew the stimulus (3/4 of a trillion dollars) gets re-authorized every year. Raise both hands if you knew that was being partially paid for with the sequester savings.
Jump out the window if you know we’re screwed. (j/k)
They’re just making it up as they go, using taxpayer funds as a big slush fund they can spend on whatever they please whenever they want, with zero legislation backing it up.
To a ‘liberal’ like Yglesias, anything more than 1 bank, run by the government, is too many.
Same with health insurance.
They did the same with the UAW bailout. They killed Pontiac and Saturn for no other reason than they couldn’t understand why GM had so many brands. They wanted to kill Buick too, until GM pointed out that Buick had access to China. They even wanted to combine GM and Chevy under one brand.
It just continues to drip out. The stupidest people in the world are in the Spite House. While the insurance carriers could rip the Treasury off, I would suggest they refrain from doing so. Why? Because it would be within the statute of limitations for various felonies which the next administration could pursue against them. Show trials for Obamacare would be very popular.
Regarding the # of banks, there are fewer banks now than since the great depression. We need MORE banks and not gov’t subsidized monopolies too big to fail and knowingly bailout dependent.
Regarding Obama doing what he wants to do via Executive whims, Congress should send him a “Cease and Desist” letter. Congress has the right to amend the law. Obama has the right to enforce the law – as written and amended by Congress.
The Obama cartel should be sued by every state in the union because he/they are usurping state’s rights via the IRS, EPA, OSHA, EEOC et al by arbitrarily changing the subsidy law for Obyssmalcare and by creating regulations that skirt, distort and then coercively enforce the ‘re-configured’ laws.
In a sea of soft (estimated) money, a whole lot of dollars can find their way to unexpected places.
Too many people seem to assume people in this administration have minds that work like theirs. They don’t. They are lost in abstractions. Having never worked in the private sector where results matter and having always held jobs with gold plated benefits, many of them are as clueless about health care and insurance plans as the cargo cultists on South Pacific Islands where clueless about the marvels of modern civilizations.
Both Roger L. Simon and Peggy Noonan had articles yesterday about Obama and his staff. Simon calls him the first Hippie President while Noonan calls them people who saw the movie but never read the book. Both articles touch a common thread about how Obama and his administration regularly confuse words with actions and see the act of being at a meeting the same as achieving some concrete results. Noonan writes at some length about the chaos inside a White House in which meetings never start on time, there is never an agenda, lists of attendees change apparently at whim, people enter and leave again during the meeting and speak just to be heard. It seems this White House is badly in need of an adult like a Rumsfeld or a Cheney to tell people to stop wasting time if they haven’t got a point.
Most of all, in Obama’s administration there is a tendency to talk about how a problem will look and how appearances should be handled as opposed to identify the key sticking points and deciding how to change them.
Most pundits also have only seen the movie and mistake writing a column or appearing on a TV show with obtaining a result. I don’t expect many of them to wise up any time soon.
This begins to get at it, especially Noonan’s comment (apparently she’s now decided that the dinner party invites aren’t worth her soul).
I’ll suggest another way of saying it: Obama, the White House staff, the OFA crowd, and so on are all talkers, not doers. Their distaste for the other America is based on that: the fly-over, red state America are filled with people who make and build and do for a living as opposed to talk for a living.
Remember the old Nextel commercial of how government would work if it were run by firefighters? Humorous, of course, but it illustrates a point — a government run by people who build, do, move and assemble for a living would NEVER have built Obamacare. Their first question would have been, “how’s this going to work?”
Obamacare, and the coming immigration policy, and our current economic policies, etc., could only be created by people who talk for a living, who work with words and not stuff, and who have never really been called upon to be accountable for what they did. I work in an academic environment today: if an academic gets something wrong oh well, it was a theory, or someone else screwed it up, or we need more funding for more studies, etc. You rarely see an academic held accountable (which is why we have a higher education bubble but that’s another story).
Obama’s White House and executive service are filled with these people. How many of them have sweated a payroll? How many of them were accountable for something they built, serviced, assembled? How many of them ever had customers or clients who gave them deadlines and said to them, “this had better work!”?
Not enough.
So like you I don’t expect them to wise up in time.
Yglesias has never been anything but a glib liberal hack propagandist. He and Ezra Klein were to Obama’s rise as John the Baptist was to the coming of Christ.
Yet, back in the day the fresh young hip-to-the-net conservatives at NRO told us Yglesias was one of the “new, pragmatic voices on the left with whom we can have an open and honest discussion of issues.”
I may have paraphrased, but that was the gist of it. Oh, I left out the fawning and butt-kissing of Yglesias by all those in NRO’s Short Pants Brigade, because young children may read this blog and should not be exposed to such things without parental supervision.
If you ever read Yglesias, it is proof you have too much time on your hands.
Lib-Left pundits are almost identical to many traumatic brain injury folks: Endlessly on the same talking points, raise voices to bellows rather than present rational thinking, bad-to-no impulse control… Ohhhhh…
Okay, now I understand their whatcha’call context,’Yo.
Look, I don’t understand why the Federal Reserve can’t just print enough money to give to all the uninsured people so they can buy the insurance they need, without having to change the healthcare system. /sarc