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Obamacare Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 32 Comments
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.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 47 Comments

A follow up to An increasingly dangerous presidency and More on Obama lawlessness. You can read the full testimonies at the links. The key thing is that there may be no remedy -- other than at the ballot box in 2014 -- to Obama's lawlessness. There...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 02, 2013 28 Comments
Yesterday the Obama administration declared Mission Accomplished on the healthcare.gov website. But the mission that was accomplished was something of a Potemkin Village -- the "front end" has been improved to a lower level of failure. Taking the glass half-full approach, 80-90% of users will be able to use the website. But that's just the appearance side of the story. The "back end" still doesn't work right and much of the system hasn't even been built yet. Add to that the sticker shock not only from premiums, but from outsized deductibles, and the declaration of Mission Accomplished is worthy of the Tsars and Tsarninas. Here are some other historical references which may apply:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 01, 2013 23 Comments
The Obama administration just announced that it has met the completely arbitrary, dumbed-down goals it set for healthcare.gov. These goals were not what was supposed to exist on October 1, but what the administration believed it could meet and therefore met in order to declare the website fixed.  Operation Fixed Website: Feds will declare healthcare.gov fixed no matter what. https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller/status/407148182011777024 https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/407149347533361152

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2013 13 Comments
Operation Fixed Website is about to get under way.
Tomorrow, the Obama administration will unleash a public relations campaign declaring healthcare.gov fixed: Obama administration officials said Saturday they were "on track" to have the problematic ObamaCare website running smoothly by their self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline. "With the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we're on track to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of users," Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News, in a statement. Administration officials have since announcing the deadline qualified expectations and outcomes by repeatedly saying the site would work for the “vast majority of people.” The Washington Post earlier Saturday reported the administration was prepared to announce Sunday that they have met deadlines for improving HealthCare.gov.
Fixed has been so far defined downward for healthcare.gov, that almost anything other than a 404 Error message is "fixed". Via NPR, How Will We Know If HealthCare.gov Is Fixed?

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2013 64 Comments
Compensation means how much you get paid, right? Or payment for a loss? Or any of the other common usages, right? Reader Bronwyn was not happy when she learned that in Common Core mathematics, compensation means encouraging students to guess the wrong but easier answer, then teaching them how to compensate for the wrong answer to get to the right result:
My 4th grade daughter attends a Christian school here in Orange Co., Ca. I do not like their choice in a common core math book at all, but I have been particularly amused by the use of the term "compensation." The teachers actually had to send home an email because none of the parents had any idea what the term meant. I attached a copy of the definition in the book because it just seems so fitting during this Obama Administration. "compensation: you choose numbers close to the numbers in the problem to make the computation easier and then adjust the answer for the numbers chosen." All this under the lesson- Using mental math to multiply. This must be Obama's math! Here we parents thought it was how we got paid?
Here's the question posed to the students to which the featured image was the answer:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2013 247 Comments

Charles Krauthamer observes the lawlessness of the Obama administration: Remember how for months Democrats denounced Republicans for daring to vote to defund or postpone Obamacare? Saboteurs! Terrorists! How dare you alter “the law of the land.” This was nonsense from the beginning. Every law is subject to...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2013 15 Comments
It may be the biggest Obamacare lie of all. Not that you can keep your health care plan if you like your plan. Not that you can keep your doctor if you like your doctor. Not all of the phony cost estimates and supposed efficiencies. The biggest lie of all is that 15-30 million additional people who will be enticed or shoved onto Medicaid will receive quality health care.  In reality, they will receive health care "insurance," but there will be few doctors willing to see them because the reimbursement rates are so low. I have mentioned before how, anecdotally, almost every doctor with whom I speak sings that same song, that Medicaid reimbursements are so low they either have to restrict or eliminate Medicaid patients. It's not just anecdotal.  Even The New York Times notes that the problem will become much worse under Obamacare, Medicaid Growth Could Aggravate Doctor Shortage (h/t @Drudge_Report):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2013 30 Comments

It will stand the test of time. Those who were willing to stand against Obamacare despite all the name calling, and who are proven to have been correct. Obama and Democrats now are scrambling to delay various portions of the Obamacare rollout, even though such delays when...

Posted by Laurel Conrad on November 28, 2013 14 Comments
Democrats have prepared a guide to confronting Republican relatives at Thanksgiving: https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats/status/405706375096827904 For those Democrats who are too dumb to remember the talking points, they even have a cheat sheet (h/t Noah Rothman): https://twitter.com/dccc/statuses/405770354314190848 And what a fantastic idea; nothing says, "this would make for interesting dinner conversation" quite like debating Obamacare.  After all, over the past month, signing up for Obamacare has really put people in the holiday spirit. Democrats are just doing what the leader of the Party wants: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/405765118492811264 To get the warm-fuzzies going, a month ago BarackObama.com introduced the idea of "it's time to have the talk" in a video on its website.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 27, 2013 7 Comments
This is a follow up to the undercover video by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas in which Chris Tarango, Texas Communications Director for Enroll America, was caught offering to help make a connection between the non-profit Obamacare enrollment group and what he thought was a Democratic Party operative. The operative was part of O'Keefe's sting operation. The video gave rise to a challenge to Enroll America's non-profit status, Fox News reported:
On Friday, a self-described nonprofit, nonpartisan government accountability group filed a complaint with the IRS that Enroll America was violating its tax-exempt status by participating in partisan politics, citing the Project Veritas video as evidence. The group, Cause for Action, has also written a letter to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot, asking him to investigate whether Enroll America and other groups have violated the state’s laws and the IRS code.
Now Tarango has resigned according to O'Keefe's website:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 22, 2013 56 Comments
It's not for nothing that Obama nuked the filibuster rule.  Yes, Obama.  Harry Reid would not have done it except with marching orders. There's plenty of commentary all around about how this is a desperate move by Obama, as he sinks in the polls and his most "historic" achievement -- Obamacare -- eats away at the Democratic Party like a flesh-eating wound. Obama can pack open judicial seats with hard core partisans, and put his desired apparatchiks in positions of administrative power. I expressed my view on the opportunity this presents, Democrats nuked the ratchet. Oddly, I find myself agreeing with some commentators who normally are not on my side of the fence.  This Dana Milbank column makes some important points, although he inaccurately also blames Republicans for allegedly abusing the filibuster, The Democrats’ naked power grab:
“Congress is broken,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday before holding a party-line vote that disposed of rules that have guided and protected the chamber since 1789.... Here’s what then-Sen. Joe Biden said in 2005 when a Republican Senate majority threatened to use a similar “nuclear option” to allow a simple majority to carry the day: “The nuclear option abandons America’s sense of fair play . . . tilting the playing field on the side of those who control and own the field. I say to my friends on the Republican side: You may own the field right now, but you won’t own it forever. I pray God when the Democrats take back control, we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 21, 2013 15 Comments
California, with over 1 million canceled health policies due to Obamacare, has formally rejected Obama's so-called fix. https://twitter.com/CoveredCA/statuses/403645916596273152 Via The L.A. Times:
Spurning President Obama’s plan for canceled policies, California's health insurance exchange voted against any extension for about 1 million policyholders in the state. The five-member board of the exchange voted unanimously to keep its current requirement that insurers terminate most individual policies Dec. 31 because they don't meet all the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The decision ends a weeklong drama over what would happen for policyholders who will lose their existing coverage at year-end and face finding replacement insurance that may cost them substantially more in many instances. Covered California, the state exchange, considered allowing renewals into 2014 as Obama proposed or a short-term extension through March to give people more time to shop. But state leaders ultimately rejected those options. They expressed concerns about further confusing consumers and worried that widespread renewals could keep too many healthy customers out of the broader risk pool that will shape future rates.
At the same time, the California Health Exchange released figures purporting to show great progress is signing up new enrollees, close to 3000 a day, but the numbers are dwarfed by the scope of policy cancellations. Via The Wall Street Journal:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 20, 2013 17 Comments
James O'Keefe's Project Veritas is out with another investigative video exposing highly questionable "cross-pollination" between Enroll America and Texas Democratic political operatives. Enroll America bills itself as:
a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to maximize the number of uninsured Americans who enroll in health coverage made available by the Affordable Care Act.
As such, Enroll America cannot get involved in any political activity. Project Veritas, however, discovered that a Texas-based Enroll America official was willing to push the limits (to put it charitably) or even break the law (to put it not charitably) in order to help someone he thought was a Democratic operative. Here's the explanation from the Project Veritas website, Enroll America Director Conspires to Release Private Data (emphasis in original):
Do you know where your personal data is going? After meeting with several Obamacare Navigators who openly encouraged our undercover reporters to lie about income status, health history and more, it became clear that personal data was also being “cross-pollinated.” Enter Enroll America, a Sebelius-linked group dedicated to signing people up for Obamacare and Chris Tarango, Texas Enroll America Communications Director who Project Veritas caught on tape agreeing to help obtain a private list of potential Obamacare enrollee data for election/political purposes. Tarango goes so far to say he’ll “Do whatever it f****** takes.”
Here's the video, the first 15 minutes of which are the edited video, the remainder the raw video: Eliana Johnson at National Review has a more complete explanation:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 20, 2013 36 Comments
So often we hear Democrats demand Republican capitulation on a host of issues -- some social, some economic -- because Republicans are on "the wrong side of history." That argument was made, in highly perjorative, eliminationist ways during the epic struggle of Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and others to stop Obamacare before it inflicted more pain. That effort to stop Obamacare prior to the failed rollout of healthcare.gov was belittled by people like Timothy Egan in The New York Times as being on the Wrong Side of History, writing on October 3, 2013:
They are not righteous rebels or principled provocateurs. They are not constitutionalists, using the ruling framework built by the founders. Just the opposite: they are a militant fringe of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government trying to nullify an established law by extortion. This is not the design of the Constitution. Nor are they Martin Luther King Jr., or Rosa Parks or Winston Churchill — preposterous comparisons made on the floor of Congress by those whose only real fight is with progress.... We know now why Senator Ted Cruz, the most hated man in Washington, said he fears that once Obamacare is up and running people will like it — and then it will be too late for the obstructionists.... They wrecked the car, dug their own grave; no matter what you call it, history’s verdict came early.
Little did Egan or the others belittling the warnings about Obamacare realize that history's verdict would be against them; that Obamacare was it was not as it was sold and would cause Democrats to scramble for distance; that the Tea Party would be viewed as more in touch with American values than the ideology behind Obamacare; that big government would become the most hated thing outside Washington, even if Ted Cruz remained "the most hated man in Washington." The sweep of history is upon us, and it is not with the bigger government Democratic Party.
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