Health plan cancellations were a known known
To the Obama administration....
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...
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.
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...
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."
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.
Some 106,185 people signed up for Obamacare in its first month of operation, a period marred by major technological problems with both the federal and state enrollment websites. Fewer than 27,000 Americans selected an insurance plan through the federal healthcare.gov site, which is handling enrollment for 36 states, according to figures released Wednesday by the Obama administration. The site is still far from fully operational, leaving tech experts racing to get it working by month’s end, as the administration promised. Nearly 79,400 people signed up for coverage through state-based exchanges, with California leading the way with nearly 35,400 selecting a plan. States have also been battling system errors, with Oregon having yet to accept online applications. These figures reflect people who have selected insurance plans through the exchanges, but not necessarily paid for them. Americans have until Dec. 15 to pay if they want coverage to begin on Jan. 1. Open enrollment lasts through March 31.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is holding a hearing Wednesday morning at 9:30am with top administration Information Technology officials to examine the rollout of HealthCare.gov. You can watch below. Among the issues likely to be addressed at the hearing are security and testing of...
Henry Chao, the Deputy Chief Information Officer and Deputy Director of the Office of Information Services at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), testified during a November 1 transcribed interview with Committee investigators that he was surprised he was never made aware of a September 3, 2013, memo outlining serious security vulnerabilities present in the Federal Facilitated Marketplaces (the “exchange”). Chao, CMS’s top operational official for the Federal exchange testified he found it “disturbing” that he had been excluded from a memo about significant problems with security. The September 3, 2013, memo that Chao testified he had previously never seen was authored by CMS Chief Information Officer Tony Trenkle. The memo noted six security problems, two of which were described as “open high findings.” Chao initially expressed disbelief when first shown the memo during his transcribed interview. In reviewing the memo, Chao agreed that one finding, “presented a significant risk to the system,” and did not know if it had been corrected.The statement is followed by several excerpts from the interview, which reveals that “lines of communication about security issues prior to launch may not have been working properly.”
The fight over how to define the new health law’s success is coming down to one question: Who counts as an Obamacare enrollee? Health insurance plans only count subscribers as enrolled in a health plan once they’ve submited [sic] a payment. That is when the carrier sends out a member card and begins paying doctor bills. When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid. “In the data that will be released this week, ‘enrollment’ will measure people who have filled out an application and selected a qualified health plan in the marketplace,” said an administration official, who requested anonymity to frankly describe the methodology.Does this mean I have to pay for all the stuff in my "cart"? To top it off, James O'Keefe mounted an undercover operation which caught a "navigator" trainee suggesting a fraudulent application be submitted:
THE Anthem Blue Cross representative who answered my call told me that there was a silver lining in the cancellation of my individual P.P.O. policy and the $5,400 annual increase that I would have to pay for the Affordable Care Act-compliant option: now if I have Stage 4 cancer or need a sex-change operation, I’d be covered regardless of pre-existing conditions. Never mind that the new provider network would eliminate coverage for my and my son’s long-term doctors and hospitals. The Anthem rep cheerily explained that despite the company’s — I paraphrase — draconian rates and limited network, my benefits, which also include maternity coverage (handy for a 46-year-old), would “be actually much richer.”I, of course, would be actually much poorer. And it was this aspect of the bum deal that, to my surprise, turned out to be a very unpopular thing to gripe about.
I thought what was revealing in that answer, when I asked him that direct question about this, was this a political lie that you started to believe it, was he talked about well, you know, it turns out we had trouble in crafting the law.John Nolte at Breitbart finds that "bordering on pathological," in light of the almost overwhelming evidence that Obama knew very well that what he said would turn out to be untrue:
Obama's brazen and reckless lying is bad enough. But if Todd is correct (and I think he is) that Obama doesn't believe or understand that he lied, that means it can and will happen again.It's not difficult to predict that it will happen again, because this is hardly the first time it has happened. But in order to understand what's going on here, it helps to understand that Obama is a man of the left, and that he is demonstrating the tried-and-true leftist practice known as doublethink, as described by George Orwell in his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell wrote that “doublethink” requires:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies...to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
The first minute of his clip needs to be embedded on every blog, facebook page, etc. to ensure that everyone knows with unequivocal certainty that Obama deliberately and repeatedly lied to facilitate passing Obamacare under fraudulent conditions. Everybody in his administration was complicit in the fraud. As was much of academia.Transcript via John Nolte who also has a longer video clip:
As efforts move forward toward an end of November deadline to fix the troubled healthcare.gov website, new issues are being revealed in the process, according to a report from Reuters/via Yahoo: The Obama administration's HealthCare.gov adviser Jeffrey Zients said on Friday that the trouble-plagued federal healthcare website...
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