To the Obama administration....
Only 257 individuals in Hawaii have enrolled in health-insurance plans through the Hawaii Health Connector as of Friday, a spokesman confirmed to Pacific Business News. That figure comes two days after the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services released an updated enrollment report that found only 106,185 Americans have selected health insurance plans through the online health insurance exchanges out of 846,184 completed applications. Hawaii was one of three states that did not submit enrollment numbers in time for that report. But the state did share in that report that there have been more than 1,750 completed applications, more than 2,370 individuals applying for coverage and 1,156 eligible to enroll.... The Hawaii Health Connector held a meeting with its board of directors Friday afternoon that was aired live on the Hawaii Health Connector’s YouTube channel. Some concerns and suggestions mentioned at the beginning of the meeting included a complex, long application process averaging 40 minutes, as well as needed improvements to the website to improve navigation and make it more user-friendly.The Honolulu Star further reports (emphasis added):
Investigation into the troubled launch of healthcare.gov has continued the last few days, so we’ve rounded up another sampling of recent updates you may have missed for your Friday night reading. Just months before the launch of healthcare.gov, quality assurance issues frustrated a top IT official...
“Since grade school, I have been struck with concern about solidarity with the poor and less fortunate,” he said. “I was 10 when apartheid took over Anglican and Catholic schools so the education system would keep blacks subservient. Our bishop refused to hand over the Catholic schools and ran them on collections from parishes until 1994.[caption id="attachment_70905" align="alignnone" width="350"]
(Father Patrick Hartin)[/caption]
In the Letter to the Editor, Fr. Hartin supported the student's inherent right to defend themselves and harshly criticized the Gonzaga administration's treatment of the students (emphasis added):
After reading the Bulletin Friday morning, I’m convinced that I’m living in Alice’s Wonderland! Instead, it’s no “Wonderland” – more like Dante’s “Hell”! ....
Not sure I agree with the linkage of Obama's broken promise that you can keep your insurance plan and his promise that Iran will not get nukes. One he knew was false at the time he made the promise, the other was, um, ...
U.N. Interpreter caught on hot mic complaining about relentless Israel-bashing...
The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), is coming up for a vote on Friday.... Under the administrative fix, insurance companies are permitted to continue offering existing plans to current enrollees — regardless of when they signed up for coverage, or if that coverage was recently altered. But unlike the Upton bill, insurance companies can’t offer the bare-bones plans to new enrollees.
The proportions who get news, combined with the total reach of a site, show how many U.S. adults are learning about events and issues through each social networking site. Facebook is by far the largest social networking site among U.S. adults, and with half of its users getting news there, is also the largest among U.S. adults when it comes to getting news. As discussed in an earlier report, roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use the site, and half of those users get news there—amounting to 30% of the general population. YouTube has the next greatest reach in terms of general usage, at 51% of U.S. adults. Thus, even though only a fifth of its users get news there, that amounts to 10% of the adult population, which puts it on par with Twitter. Twitter reaches just 16% of U.S. adults, but half (8% of U.S. adults) use it for news. reddit is a news destination for nearly two-thirds of its users (62%). But since just 3% of the U.S. population uses reddit, that translates to 2% of the population that gets news there.
I'll have more in the morning about the non-fix fix. I've been out of pocket all afternoon and evening. So for now, just sit back and enjoy some move Obamacare navigator fraud via James O'Keefe's Project Veritas: Project Veritas caught Obamacare Navigators counseling applicants to lie on...
In a blog post Thursday, Google said that requests from governments for user information have doubled over three years, as the search giant posted its latest transparency report which also includes added figures on other types of requests specifically from the US government. In a year...
Following a series of military gains, Syrian Kurds in the northeast of the country announced on Tuesday the formation of a transitional autonomous government. The latest declaration comes amid a general strengthening of Kurdish rights in neighboring Turkey, and increasing moves towards independence by Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. Long oppressed under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, Kurds view the civil war as an opportunity to gain the kind of autonomy enjoyed by their ethnic kin in neighboring Iraq. The announcement was made after talks in the mostly-Kurdish town of Qamishli, and comes after Kurdish leaders announced plans to create the temporary government in July.Intra-Kurdish rivalries pose a major danger to the autonomy holding. Turkey, which repeatedly has taken military action against Kurdish separatists (resulting in world silence, unlike when Israel defends itself against outside attack), is not pleased:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty together againBarack Obama just announced a "fix" for the private individual health insurance market broken by Obamacare. After an estimated 5 million and growing policies were cancelled due to Obamacare, Obama said "never mind" and told insurance companies to just keep selling the cancelled policies. "Insurers can extend plans" into 2014. (Transcipt here.) This does nothing to fix the problem, which is a war on plans people like but the Obama administration dislikes. Democrats -- alone and over vigorous objections from Republicans -- broke the individual health care insurance market. It can't just be put back together again under Obamacare. https://twitter.com/JohnJHarwood/status/401015479198052352 Not only that, but Obamas is doing this unilaterally as an administrative matter, without changing the law. So much for Democrats objections to prior proposals from Republicans that Obamacare was "settled law."
House Speaker John A. Boehner on Wednesday flatly ruled out even entering into negotiations with the Senate on that chamber’s immigration bill, signaling that the issue is dead for this year — and setting up major hurdles for any action before the midterm elections. Emerging from a meeting with fellow Republicans, Mr. Boehner said he won’t be bound by President Obama’s timeline on action this year, and firmly rejected the Senate’s approach, which would legalize most illegal immigrants and rewrite the legal immigration system.
Haaretz reports that the administration misled Israel regarding the terms of the proposed interim agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons program. One senior Israeli official explained that on Wednesday Israel had seen an outline that the Israelis “didn't love but could live with.” Thursday morning French and British officials, and not the White House, told the Israelis that the terms had changed and were much more favorable than what they’d been shown previously. “Suddenly it changed to something much worse that included a much more significant lifting of sanctions,” said the Israeli official. “The feeling was that the Americans are much more eager to reach an agreement than the Iranians.”Natan B. Sachs lays out some of the particulars.
On substance, the Israelis, like the French, appear very concerned about the provisions of the interim deal that: (a) permitted Tehran to continue some uranium enrichment; (b) allowed Iran to continue building the heavy water reactor in Arak (with only an Iranian commitment not to activate it), which would preserve the Iranian short-cut to nuclear capabilities via a plutonium — rather than uranium — track; and, most notably, (c) provided Tehran with incentives that the Israelis see as the beginning of the dismantling of the sanctions regime. Israel’s concern is that the proposed sanctions relief will not, in practice, be reversible, while the Iranian commitments could be easily reversed (and in the case of Arak will not even be halted).The French objections to the deal led the P5+1 countries to demand more of Iran, so the Iranian team left without a deal to return for consultations.
The GOP has to be seen doing something. That's just reality. Millions of people who played by the rules are losing their insurance and quite possibly their doctors as well. It's simply not an option for a political party to say, "Wow, that sucks for you. Should have voted for us, huh?". Campaigns are about generating future support, not punishing voters for past lack of support... Could this all go south and wind up with the GOP sharing blame for Obama's failure? Theoretically, yes. But doing nothing isn't risk free either.I've pondered this question ever since I heard that Republicans had suggested a Keep Your Health Plan Act to undo the cancellations and make Obama stick to his promises. Why interrupt your enemy when he might already be occupied in effectively destroying himself? Then again, people are suffering, and a failure to help them will not endear Republicans to anyone except the most die-hard tough-love advocates.
