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Obamacare Tag

Posted by Hans Bader on October 29, 2013 17 Comments
Obamacare contains many racial preferences. But that fact has drawn remarkably little attention, even though the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded back in 2009 that the healthcare bill was racially discriminatory, in two ways. First, Obamacare is filled with “sections that factor in race when awarding billions in contracts, scholarships and grants” and give “preferential treatment to minority students for scholarships.” Second, as an African-American member of the Commission noted, it “creates separate and unequal operating standards for long-term care facilities that serve racial and ethnic minorities.” By granting HHS “the discretion to waive substantial penalties . . . for failing to report elder abuse and other crimes committed against residents of long-term care facilities that serve racial and ethnic minorities,” it “could increase the probability that residents of such facilities won’t receive the same level of protection as residents of nursing homes that serve non-minority populations.”

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 29, 2013 23 Comments

Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), will testify Tuesday morning before the House Ways and Means Committee about the administration's implementation of the Affordable Care Act. A livestream of the hearing will be available at C-SPAN when the hearing...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 28, 2013 75 Comments
The repeated promises that you could keep your doctor and health plan never had a basis. These were false promises of historic magnitude, and the ramifications are that the "Dem Party is F****d" and Democrats "will own this problem forever." One of the benefits of Ted Cruz's defund effort is that most Republicans can say we tried our best, but the Democrats and the Democrats alone are the reason your life has been messed up. Our hands are clean. The loss of health plans was not just a coincidence, however, or a mere byproduct of health plan mandates requiring people to buy coverage they don't want or need (although that was a root cause). Rather the Obama administration passed regulations that guaranteed people would lose their health plans.  As I've always said, watch the regs. The mechanism was to eviscerate so-called grandfathering of older plans. If there was even the slightest change in the plan, even an change in a co-pay, the grandfathering was lost under the regulations. Since details of plans change all the time, and people buy new plans, the regulations guaranteed that millions, and likely tens of millions, of people would not be able to keep their plans, and as a result in many cases, lose their doctors from networks. NBC reports, Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insurance [original link dead, new url here, see Update No. 2]:
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 28, 2013 45 Comments
By now the statements are legion. You can keep your doctor and your insurance plan if you want to.  Guaranteed. It was more of a "lie" than George W. Bush's statements regarding Iraq having WMD stockpiles, which were in reliance on faulty intelligence that most Democrats and others in the world believed too. With Obama, there was no bi-partisan cheering section as there was with Iraq. There never was a basis for the categorical sales pitch. To the contrary, a loud chorus of voices insisted that there was no basis for Obama's statements and that the result would be what it is today: Millions and eventually possibly tens of millions of American will not get to keep their doctor and their insurance plan. Obama himself played the central role in the creation of BernieMadoff.healthcare.gov. Jonah Goldberg calls it possibly the greatest policy lie by any President ever.  It's hard to dispute that.

Posted by Laurel Conrad on October 28, 2013 8 Comments
The launch of healthcare.gov, the Obamacare website, continues to be extremely unpopular due to glitches and long wait times. According to Pew Research, only three-in-ten Americans responded favorably to its launch. The glitches are even turning-off many liberals. Some top Democrats insist on making excuses and down-playing the failures of the website as just "glitches."  Here are 5 of the website glitchers:

1. Pres. Obama

During the week following the failed launch of the Obamacare website, Obama defended the policy and went after Republican critics in his weekly address. But even liberals are not buying the president's hyper-positive rhetoric. On Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," Stewart compares clips of Obama speaking at a press conference to the character of Gill, a desperate and unsuccessful salesman from "The Simpsons". The clips, which are from 5:02- 5:25, reveal Obama enthusiastically proclaiming things like, "the health insurance that is available to people is working just fine," "The product is good," and "I want people to be able to get this great product; and that product is working, it's really good!" (language warning)

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 27, 2013 8 Comments
This upcoming week is going to be an interesting one, as more hearings are scheduled on the Hill to address the troubled rollout of the Obamacare website. From the StarTribune:
Republicans said Sunday they intend to press Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the Obama administration's troubled launch of healthcare.gov, the online portal to buy insurance, and concerns about the privacy of information that applicants submit under the new system. The Obama administration will face intense pressure next week to be more forthcoming about how many people have actually succeeded in enrolling for coverage in the new insurance markets. Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner is to testify during a House hearing on Tuesday, followed Wednesday by Sebelius before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The officials will also be grilled on how such crippling technical problems could have gone undetected prior to the website's Oct. 1 launch. "The incompetence in building this website is staggering," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the second ranking Republican on the panel and an opponent of the law.
Democratic Senator Jeanee Shaheen of New Hampshire, a supporter of the Affordable Care Act, told Face the Nation on Sunday that “The rollout has been a disaster,” and proposed that the enrollment period be extended beyond the March 31st deadline. (h/t Washington Free Beacon) Indeed, other Senate Democrats have joined Shaheen in support of such a proposal. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has also joined with Republicans in calling for a one-year delay of the individual mandate.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 25, 2013 22 Comments
A few more updates today on the ongoing healthcare.gov website issues and what's apparently being done to address them. The most important of those being that the administration says the site will be in proper working order in a month, and that QSSI - which has been one of the contractors on the current website project - will serve as a general contractor in overseeing this cleanup phase. From USA Today:
The troubled HealthCare.gov website will be running properly by late November, said Jeffrey Zients, President Obama's appointee to fix the problems that have plagued the site since its Oct. 1 opening. "By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users," Zients said Friday. "The HealthCare.gov site is fixable. It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed." Zients, former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, was called in Monday to help with the site until it is fixed. He helped with other website glitches during Obama's first term. QSSI, a division of UnitedHealth Group, will serve as a general contractor to oversee the effort, he said. Their existing contract for the site has been renegotiated.
Philip Klein over at Washington Examiner was on a conference call this afternoon with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Jeff Zients, and offers a few additional pieces of information. (This is only an excerpt of several he mentions):

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 23, 2013 11 Comments
The House GOP Conference issued the following statement today (received via email) regarding a conversation between a potential customer and an online chat customer service representative for Healthcare.gov:
Earlier today, the House Republican Conference released a video highlighting actual excerpts from an online chat between a potential customer and a customer service representative for Healthcare.gov.  The individual who experienced the chat session was Adrian Smith, 34, of New Jersey.  Smith released the following statement to confirm his story with Healthcare.gov: “Thank you for your inquiry about my experience on October 11, 2013 using the healthcare.gov support chat.  I can confirm that the excerpts used in the YouTube video and the full transcript posted at www.gop.gov/yourstory is authentic and exactly as I experienced on October 11. I am a resident of New Jersey and work for a higher education institution. I am not employed by the Republican Party. “After a recent job transition, my family needed to make an informed decision about healthcare options for the approaching year. After repeated registration problems, I was able to create a healthcare.gov account on October 11 and began the tedious process of entering specific personal information about our family. Each page resulted in a long wait before being able to proceed. At some point in the process it appeared that our family information became corrupted and I was unable to proceed with the family profile.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 22, 2013 25 Comments
The fallout of the launch of the Obamacare website continues, and as the administration spins and deflects questions, media outlets are digging deeper for answers that are sure to bring new concerns to light.  And that's aside from all the other general concerns about the impact of the law itself. The Washington Post came out with a report yesterday that contained a few key pieces of information that reaffirms what many have already suspected.
Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously. Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead. When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project.
Later in the report, it indicates that "U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has said that the government expected HealthCare.gov to draw 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users but that the site was overwhelmed by up to five times as many users in the first week."  CGI, which worked on the shopping and enrollment applications, reportedly built it to accommodate 60,000 concurrent users, according to the Post.

Posted by David Gerstman on October 20, 2013 14 Comments
Last year the big technology news was how President Obama's re-election campaign used technology to beat Mitt Romney. This year's big technology news is the failure of the introduction of Obamacare's healthcare exchanges. https://twitter.com/JayCaruso/status/390835631493898240 Last year, even before the election, President Obama's IT operation got noticed. A June 2012 article in Politico asserted:
The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 17, 2013 51 Comments

Two weeks into the launch of the Obamacare website, issues continue to be unearthed and the administration remains short on answers. A few interesting paragraphs from this piece in Politico last night: At a summit of health care advocacy groups at the Newseum on Tuesday, the audience...

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 14, 2013 31 Comments

As the Obamacare website continues to struggle with issues since its rollout, more and more information is emerging that tells us the problems extend beyond “glitches.” The NY Times published a lengthy article over the weekend, detailing more of the issues as viewed by various sources....

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 12, 2013 16 Comments

More technology experts are warning that glitches in the Obamacare system could take longer to iron out, as many remain unable to get beyond the earliest steps in the signup process. From Politico: The glitch-plagued Obamacare rollout might be just the beginning: A series of potential technology...

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 06, 2013 39 Comments
The other day, I wrote that long wait times are not the only issue with the Obamacare website, highlighting my skepticism of the administration’s claims that high volume was to blame for all the glitches in the system. It turns out that Reuters news agency spoke with five technology experts who expressed similar skepticism and question the architecture of the Obamacare website.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw development of the [Obamacare] site, declined to make any of its IT experts available for interviews. CGI Group Inc, the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov, is "declining to comment at this time," said spokeswoman Linda Odorisio. Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems. For instance, when a user tries to create an account on HealthCare.gov, which serves insurance exchanges in 36 states, it prompts the computer to load an unusually large amount of files and software, overwhelming the browser, experts said. If they are right, then just bringing more servers online, as officials say they are doing, will not fix the site.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on October 04, 2013 33 Comments

Since its initial rollout on Tuesday, the Healthcare.gov system has been plagued by technical glitches and long wait times. Some have tried to offer potential reasons, explaining that the system must communicate with many other systems and that's further complicated by the fact that the...

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on July 26, 2013 35 Comments

First the Teamsters, UFCW, and UNITE-HERE expressed their belated disapproval of the ObamaCare Tax monstrosity, and now the IRS employee union wants to be exempted from Obamacare.  The Teamsters, et al., made points that we've been making since 2009, points they willfully ignored and openly...

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