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Health Care Tag

Posted by David Gerstman on June 12, 2014 17 Comments
As Bryan Jacoutot documented here three months ago, Maryland's health exchange was a complete failure. In private industry or nearly any other field of endeavor, an employee who is responsible for such a visible failure would be subject to demotion or firing. But this is politics. And this is Maryland. So the Washington Post recommended that the employee responsible for this fiasco ... should be promoted. In its endorsement ahead of the June 24 primary the paper with the largest circulation in Maryland endorsed (Lieutenant Governor) Anthony Brown for Maryland governor. The key paragraph in the endorsement is here:
No doubt, Mr. Brown, who is Gov. Martin O’Malley’s anointed successor, is a mainstay of the Democratic establishment and a paragon of the status quo. That status quo includes the state’s blatant failure to build a functioning online market for private health insurance — a failure over which Mr. Brown presided, or was supposed to preside. It also includes substantive accomplishments, including making the state more welcoming to gays and immigrants and replenishing the transportation fund in support of public transit.
So let's see if I get this. Despite the fact that Brown messed up his most significant assignment as Lieutenant Governor - concrete failure - that should be balance out by the fact that he made Maryland more welcoming - an ephemeral accomplishment at the best? As far as the transportation fund, taxing people is what government does best. Had he (and his boss, Governor O'Malley) replenished the fund while limiting the growth of government, that would have a real accomplishment. But taxing and spending is hardly a defining skill for an executive. Then there's the previous paragraph that's also kind of baffling.

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 18, 2014 16 Comments
The Obama administration and some state exchanges have rolled out a number of curious advertising campaigns intended to sell the Affordable Care Act to the American people. Last fall we got a series of ads about 'Brosurance' featuring photos of college guys doing keg stands, then in December we were introduced to Pajama Boy. More recently, we were lectured to by Big Mother. Now, the White House has pulled out all the stops and is featuring animated GIFs you would expect to see in a BuzzFeed post about TV shows from the 1990s but not on the official White House website. The images are part of an interactive contest that encourages readers to vote for their favorite reason to get covered...
As millions of Americans scramble to fill out their March Madness brackets, we've got another big milestone coming up: the March 31st deadline to sign up for health insurance. If you need affordable coverage, head over to HealthCare.gov and #GetCoveredNow. If you've got insurance, help spread the word by voting for your favorite reason to get covered.
I can't help but wonder what Vladimir Putin and his associates in Moscow must think of all this. Read on to see examples of the ridiculous images which are actually posted on the website for the United States White House.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 25, 2013 20 Comments
The Washington Post article below documents one doctor's experience with federally mandated electronic health care records. The story is familiar, as I've heard it myself from doctors. Doctors always had to spend time filling out insurance forms, but now it is so much worse. To comply with federal Medicaid and Medicare regulations (plus new Obamacare regs) not only means having the staff to comply (hence, doctors moving to larger practice groups or hospital-affiliated groups), but also more and more time spent trying to comply with electronic medical records requirements. Read the full tale below. It's how we are destroying medicine one form at a time. Here's the punch line:
When I get back to the office, I turn on the computer to write a progress note in Mr. Edgars’s electronic health record, or EHR. In addition to recording the details of our visit, I must try to meet the new federal criteria for “meaningful use,” [explanation here] criteria that have been adopted by my office with threats that I won’t get paid for my work if I don’t.... I spent more time checking boxes than talking to patients and their families. I could see twice as many patients if I could write their notes at the bedside while visiting with them. I would happily do this on paper or using an EHR that created a logical note within the same amount of time. But that is not an option.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on December 01, 2013 12 Comments
The personal information of approximately 90,000 patients of Harborview Medical Center and University of Washington Medical Center, which are part of UW Medicine, has reportedly been compromised as the result of a malware attack that affected a facility computer that stored patient data. From KOMO News:
Early last month, a UW Medicine employee opened an email attachment that contained malicious software. The malware took control of the computer, which happened to be storing personal information from approximately 90,000 UW Medicine and Harborview Medical Center patients, according to a UW Medicine news release. The compromised patient data included names, phone numbers, addresses, medical record numbers and Social Security numbers, among other information. UW Medicine is now reaching out to the affected patients and has also set up a call center to work with victims.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 26, 2013 25 Comments
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel, was on Kelly File last night. (Video embed at bottom of post.) You may not remember Ezekiel. He was the Dr. Death Panel referred to by Sarah Palin in early August 2009 (emphasis added):
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil. Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion. Rep. Michele Bachmann highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff, in a floor speech to the House of Representatives. I commend her for being a voice for the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.
In response to Palin's us of the term "death panel," we explored Ezekiel's writing to which Palin was referring, Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions (full embed at bottom of post). On August 8, 2009, we wrote An Inconvenient Truth About The “Death Panel”:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 25, 2013 12 Comments
CBS News reports, Did White House Obamacare guidance stop ahead of 2012 election?: CBS News has been digging into the cause of the delays in preparing the website for the government's health insurance market and has learned was a major interruption in the months before President Obama's re-election. At the height of the 2012 presidential election campaign, it was crunch time for the Obama administration to release key instructions so contractors could work toward the October 2013 deadline. But a Health and Human Services official who was closely involved tells CBS News that in late summer, the administration stopped issuing proposed rules for the Affordable Health Care Act until after the election. The result was what many viewed as a serious delay as contractors, states and insurance companies awaited crucial guidance to move forward. CBS further reports on the cancellation of health care plans people liked:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 25, 2013 82 Comments
Republicans repeatedly have made proposals to protect the public from the Obamacare disaster. Not just the substance of the law, but also the timing of the individual mandate. Way back when (i.e, about two weeks ago), Democrats called such proposals extortion, terrorism, suicide-bombing and legislative arson. Now an increasing number of Democrats, particularly those up for re-election in 2014, are calling for similar delays. https://twitter.com/allahpundit/status/393742009246035970 Perhaps Republicans should take a "what goes around, comes around" attitude, and do nothing to help Democrats out of the bind they are now in. Democrats own Obamacare's failure completely. That's the primary outcome of the government scale-back, which now is over. Democrats were willing to shut a portion of the government to prevent any meaningful changes, and were willing to (erroneously) threaten a debt default rather than agree to the types of changes many Democrats now are proposing. So we should now help Democrats out of the healthcare.gov debacle? We should now, having been demonized, help the Democrats who demonized us? Erick Erickson says screw them (my characterization), Follow the Law:
No conservative wants things to get worse. We just know things will get worse. Obamacare will be deeply destructive. People are already seeing it. The only way Obamacare would ever work is if people behaved irrationally. It is a system that requires the young to go out and by their own insurance, but allows them to stay on their parents’ insurance until they are well into their twenties. The law operates only if people do not behave like people.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 23, 2013 36 Comments
Joan Walsh of Salon.com threw a classic Salon.com race-card fit the other day because Ted Cruz referred to healthcare.gov as being run by Nigerial scam artists:
Hey, did you hear the one about the disappearing “Nigerian email scammers”? They’ve “become a lot less active lately” because they’ve “all been hired to run the Obamacare website.” That’s Sen. Ted Cruz, folks, on his Reactionary Real America Victory Tour Monday night, and he’ll be here all week, maybe all decade. Tip your waiter! Declaring that our first black president’s signature policy achievement is being run by “Nigerian email scammers” is GOP dog-whistle politics at its finest. Of course, Cruz wasn’t just going for cheap laughs at the expense of the Affordable Care Act. He knows it’s a short hop from Nigeria to Kenya for his Obama-hating Houston audience.

Twitter - @Salon - Nigerian scammer dog whistle

It's actually not a short hop from Nigeria to Kenya, over 2000 miles, but whatever. I think the Nigerian scam artist analogy fits, although there is no single perfect analogy for the redistribution of wealth scheme that is Obamacare. The American people were promised one thing, and are receiving another.  The thing they were promised -- you can keep your doctor and your insurance, and pay less through easy to use exchanges -- never existed, any more than "Mohammed Abacha,the son of the late Nigerian Head of State." But since we have to be absurdly sensitive to "short hops" from Nigeria to Kenya so as to stay off of Salon.com's radar, perhaps we can refer to healthcare.gov, and Obamacare more generally, as BernieMadoff.healthcare.gov.  Again, not a perfect analogy, but it demonstrates a point.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 23, 2013 36 Comments
Kathleen Sebelius is insistent that no one told Obama prior to October 1 that testing and evaluation had indicated healthcare.gov likely would fail. Not even as a government "shutdown" was looming over the issue of delaying the individual mandate for a year?  Even though an inoperable healthcare.gov website would justify the Republican position?  Even though a failure of the website would be a major embarrassment? HHS chief: President didn't know of Obamacare website woes beforehand
President Barack Obama didn't know of problems with the Affordable Care Act's website -- despite insurance companies' complaints and the site's crashing during a test run -- until after its now well-documented abysmal launch, the nation's health chief told CNN on Tuesday. In an exclusive interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked when the President first learned about the considerable issues with the Obamacare website. Sebelius responded that it was in "the first couple of days" after the site went live October 1. "But not before that?" Gupta followed up. To which Sebelius replied, "No, sir."
This all sounds eerily familiar:

WaPo IRS Scandal No One Told Obama

Senior White House officials, including Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, learned last month about a review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, but they did not inform President Obama, the White House said Monday.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2013 19 Comments
At first I thought this was a joke, a parody.  But it's real. As part of it "ingenius" marketing, a coalition of progressive groups has started a Thanks Obamacare website and Twitter account. The Colorado affiliate has produced the ads imaged above. This is Obamacare on drugs. They should tax the keg as a medical device, and then see how much the Bros love their Obamacare. Here's the full set of ads, most of which encourage dangerous behavior because, hell, they've got Obamacare:

Thanks Obamacare Ads

Here are some of the individual ads, with my commentary:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 21, 2013 40 Comments
who collectively have done more damage to Obamacare the brand than Republicans in Congress could have dreamed. The problems, according to the NY Times, are deep, deeeep, deeeeeeep, Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site:

NYTimes - Contractors seek weeks of work

Federal contractors have identified most of the main problems crippling President Obama’s online health insurance marketplace, but the administration has been slow to issue orders for fixing those flaws, and some contractors worry that the system may be weeks away from operating smoothly, people close to the project say.... Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.

In interviews, experts said the technological problems of the site went far beyond the roadblocks to creating accounts that continue to prevent legions of users from even registering. Indeed, several said, the login problems, though vexing to consumers, may be the easiest to solve. One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.

You know what we need according to Michael Scherer of Time? For Obama to get Mad:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 13, 2013 22 Comments

There was one singularly most important aspect of the Obamacare computer problems detailed in this NY Times article, From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal. Not this: In March, Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace, told industry...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 11, 2013 34 Comments

One thing you have to remember about Obamacare is that much of the financial pain, such as steep penalties, is back ended so that by the time people wake up to reality, the law has been operating for years and it's too late. Here's yet another...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 09, 2013 28 Comments

Is this really a surprise, considering who is in charge? Via AP, Questionable design blamed for health website woes: A decision by the Obama administration to require that consumers create online accounts before they can browse health overhaul insurance plans appears to have led to many of...

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