Obamacare and you

[11B4V]

So, what is it? One day to get that jalopy of a website up and running running?

Health Site Likely to Miss Deadline

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303332904579228413800602836.html

But of course. What's the excuse this time.

[CountDeMoney]

But of course. What's the excuse this time.

what do you care?  You're rooting for failure, regardless of the reason.  Just be satisfied with what you get this holiday season, don't act so spoiled. 

[11B4V]

But of course. What's the excuse this time.

what do you care?  You're rooting for failure, regardless of the reason.  Just be satisfied with what you get this holiday season, don't act so spoiled. 

Theres where you are wrong. Too far into the process. It's too big to be allowed to fail now.

1. What I have is; no faith in the Federal Govmint abilities with something like this, without it turing into a clusterfuck. Overcost, missed deadlineds, bait and switch, no accoutability, etc.

2. The IRS' involvement in the process.

[jimmy olsen]

The government gave itself a passing grade even though it still doesn't work!

I'm shocked!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/business/white-house-praises-gains-on-health-site.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Insurers Claim Health Website Is Still Flawed
By ROBERT PEAR and REED ABELSON
Published: December 1, 2013

Weeks of frantic technical work appear to have made the government's health care website easier for consumers to use. But that does not mean everyone who signs up for insurance can enroll in a health plan.

The problem is that the systems that are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers still have not been fixed. And with coverage for many people scheduled to begin in just 30 days, insurers are worried the repairs may not be completed in time.

"Until the enrollment process is working from end to end, many consumers will not be able to enroll in coverage," said Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade group.

The issues are vexing and complex. Some insurers say they have been deluged with phone calls from people who believe they have signed up for a particular health plan, only to find that the company has no record of the enrollment. Others say information they received about new enrollees was inaccurate or incomplete, so they had to track down additional data — a laborious task that will not be feasible if data is missing for tens of thousands of consumers.

In still other cases, insurers said, they have not been told how much of a customer's premium will be subsidized by the government, so they do not know how much to charge the policyholder.

In trying to fix HealthCare.gov, President Obama has given top priority to the needs of consumers, assuming that arrangements with insurers can be worked out later.

The White House announced on Sunday that it had met its goal for improving HealthCare.gov so the website "will work smoothly for the vast majority of users."

In effect, the administration gave itself a passing grade. Because of hundreds of software fixes and hardware upgrades in the last month, it said, the website — the main channel for people to buy insurance under the 2010 health care law — is now working more than 90 percent of the time, up from 40 percent during some weeks in October.

Jeffrey D. Zients, the presidential adviser leading the repair effort, said he had shaken up management of the website so the team was now "working with the velocity and discipline of a high-performing private sector company."

Mr. Zients said 50,000 people could use the website at the same time and that the error rate, reflecting the failure of web pages to load properly, was consistently less than 1 percent, down from 6 percent before the overhaul.

Pages on the site generally load faster, in less than a second, compared with an average of eight seconds in late October, Mr. Zients said.

Whether Mr. Obama can fix his job approval ratings as well as the website is unclear. Public opinion polls suggest he may have done more political damage to himself in the last two months than Republican attacks on the health care law did in three years.

People who have tried to use the website in the last few days report a mixed experience, with some definitely noticing improvements.

"Every week, it's been getting better," said Lynne M. Thorp, who leads a team of counselors, or navigators, in southwestern Florida. "It's getting faster, and nobody's getting kicked out."

But neither Mr. Zients nor the Department of Health and Human Services indicated how many people were completing all the steps required to enroll in a health plan through the federal site, which serves residents of 36 states.

And unless enrollments are completed correctly, coverage may be in doubt.

For insurers the process is maddeningly inconsistent. Some people clearly are being enrolled. But insurers say they are still getting duplicate files and, more worrisome, sometimes not receiving information on every enrollment taking place.

"Health plans can't process enrollments they don't receive," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans.

Despite talk from time to time of finding some sort of workaround, experts say insurers have little choice but to wait for the government to fix these problems. The insurers are in "an unenviable position," said Brett Graham, a managing director at Leavitt Partners, which has been advising states and others on the exchanges. "Although they don't have the responsibility or the capability to fix the system, they're reliant on it."

Insurers said they were alarmed when Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the federal website, estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the federal insurance marketplace was still being built. He told Congress on Nov. 19 that the government was still developing "the back-office systems, the accounting systems, the payment systems" needed to pay insurers in January.

While insurers will start covering people who pay their share of the premium, many insurers worry that the government will be late on the payments they were expecting in mid-January for the first people covered.

"We want to be paid," said one executive, speaking frankly on the condition of anonymity. "If we want to pay claims, we need to get paid."

Insurers said they had received calls from consumers requesting insurance cards because they thought they had enrolled in a health plan through the federal website, but the insurers said they had not been notified.

"Somehow people are getting lost in the process," the insurance executive said. "If they go to a doctor or a hospital and we have no record of them, that will be very upsetting to consumers."

Thomas W. Rubino, a spokesman for Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, which says it has about 70 percent of the individual insurance market in the state, said the company had received "some but not a lot" of enrollments from the federal exchange.

Federal officials are encouraging insurers to let consumers sign up directly with them. But in the middle of this online enrollment process, consumers must be transferred to the federal website if they want to obtain tax credit subsidies to pay some or all of their premiums in 2014.

In a document describing problems with the federal website in late November, the administration said some consumers were "incorrectly determined to be ineligible for" tax credits. In some cases, it said, enrollment notices sent to insurers were missing the amount of the premium to be paid by a consumer, the amount of subsidies to be paid by the government and even the identification number for a subscriber.

In some cases, according to the document, government computers blocked the enrollment of people found eligible for subsidies that would pay the entire amount of their premiums. In other cases, the government system failed to retrieve information on a consumer's eligibility for financial assistance.

Mr. Zients said that software fixes installed on Saturday night should improve not only the consumer experience, but also the "the back end of the system," which consumers rarely see.

Ben Jumper, 29, of Dallas, said he had repeatedly been thwarted trying to use HealthCare.gov, most recently on Wednesday.

"I would get one or two steps further along, and then something else would be broken," Mr. Jumper said. "It is not very user-friendly. It is not very intuitive. Eventually, we just gave up."

But Urian Diaz Franco, a navigator with VNA Health Care in Aurora, Ill., said on Saturday, "We've seen nothing but improvements."

A week ago, he said, it often took 10 to 15 seconds for a page to load, but "now it's just boom, boom, boom — it comes up as soon as you click the button."

Jess Bidgood, Dan Frosch and Jennifer Preston contributed reporting.

[11B4V]

Not shocking, but par for the course.

[DGuller]

If 3 steps out of 5 work, isn't it still a passing grade?

[Admiral Yi]

3 out of 5 gets you first dibs on jobs in the UK.

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like enrollment is picking up speed

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/11/obamacare-enrollment_n_4421797.html?1386770148

WASHINGTON -- More than two months after Obamacare's ugly debut, the number of Americans using the system is starting to grow: Nearly 1.2 million people are on track to have health coverage in place next year from the law's health insurance exchanges, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday.

From Oct. 1 through Nov. 30, almost 365,000 people enrolled into private health insurance via the federal and state marketplaces and more than 803,000 were deemed eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program, according to the department.

The federally run exchanges in more than 30 states accounted for 137,000 of the enrollments in private coverage, and the remaining states signed up 227,000. About 1.9 million more people had been determined eligible for coverage through the marketplaces, but hadn't yet chosen a health plan. The new data don't include an apparent flurry of enrollments in the early days of December.

[citizen k]

White House interns at it again:

https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/411231710227857409/photo/1



Must be trying to appeal to the zombie demographic.

[11B4V]

Obama 'Wins' Lie of the Year

(Newser) – "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." Barack Obama has been raked over the coals for that one in recent months, and now he's getting, umm, honored for it: PolitiFact has awarded the phrase its Lie of the Year Award, it announced on CNN last night. The editors' pick was backed up by an online poll that overwhelmingly agreed. It's the fourth year out of five that the top lie has been health care-related (see 2009, 2010, and 2011), and the three runners-up lies this year are all related to conservative attacks on the law.

When Obama first made the statement, back in 2009, PolitiFact rated it as "Half True." But when cancellations started pouring in, Obama dropped this whopper: "What we said was you can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law passed." That earned a "pants on fire" rating—Obama publicly made his promise, without any conditions, 37 times by PolitiFact's count. Besides, editor Angie Drobnic Holan explained on CNN, "the lie of the year is not the most wrong statement, it's the most significant impact."

http://www.newser.com/story/179149/obama-wins-lie-of-the-year.html

Lie of the Year: Readers' Poll results

By Angie Drobnic Holan
Published on Thursday, December 12th, 2013 at 3:59 p.m.
Share this article:

We offered readers 10 finalists for the Lie of the Year for 2013. It's the fifth year in a row we've asked readers to weigh in via an online poll. We received 14,278 votes this year, a record turnout.

First place among readers overwhelmingly went to President Barack Obama, for his repeated statement, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it."   

Here are the full results:

If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Obama repeatedly made this claim in previous years; back then we rated it Half True. When people got cancellation notices in the individual market this year, Obama claimed, "What we said was, you can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law passed." That got a Pants on Fire.
   

59%

Congress is exempt from the health care law. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said, "President Obama just granted all of Congress an exception" to Obamacare during an August speech in Iowa. False.
   

8%

The IRS will keep a database of health secrets. In May, Michele Bachmann gave a TV interview in which she claimed the IRS is going to be "in charge" of "a huge national database" on health care that will include Americans' "personal, intimate, most close-to-the-vest-secrets." Pants on Fire.
   

7%

No U.S.-trained doctors will accept Obamacare. In an October column, Ann Coulter wrote, "No doctors who went to an American medical school will be accepting Obamacare." Pants on Fire.
   

7%

The United Nations is coming for your guns. Chain emails repeatedly claimed that the United Nations has "adopted a proposed agenda" to enable member nations to "disarm civilians within their borders." False.
   

5%

The FISA Court is transparent. In a June interview, President Barack Obama defended the government's monitoring of telephone and Internet traffic by invoking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and saying the court "is transparent." Pants on Fire.
   

4%

The United States doesn't tolerate genocide. After Syria entered a civil war and many civilians were killed, U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said, "The United States has never stood by and seen innocent people slaughtered to the extent that's happening in Syria." History shows we have. Pants on Fire.
   

3%

Muslims are exempt from Obamacare. A chain email claimed the word "Dhimmitude" is on page 107 of the health care law and means "Muslims are specifically exempted from the government mandate to purchase insurance." Pants on Fire.
   

3%

Other (write-in votes)
   

3%

Obamacare means forced home inspections. Bloggers passed around a claim in August that a health care law provision will allow "forced home inspections" by government agents. Pants on Fire.
   

1%

Obamacare will question your sex life. Betsy McCaughey wrote an op-ed for the New York Post in September that said doctors will be required to ask about your sex life under Obamacare. Pants on Fire.
   

1%

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-readers-poll-results-2013/

[11B4V]

Preposterous 

Sick Find Key Drugs Missing From ObamaCare Plans

(Newser) – Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, heath insurers now can't turn away sick people. That's the good news. The bad news: They don't actually have to cover the drugs those patients need. Key drugs are missing from some plans, the Washington Post reports, in what patient advocates believe is a bid to drive sick customers away. Some plans omit certain medicines for HIV, cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and more altogether, or else require patients to pay as much as 50% out-of-pocket—which is often more than $1,000 a month.

Consumers might not realize, either; some plan don't detail their formulary (that's the list of covered drugs) until patients formally apply, the Wall Street Journal reports. And, as Scott Gottlieb at Forbes explains, if a drug isn't on the formulary, it won't even count toward your out-of-pocket cap ($12,700 for a family, $6,350 for an individual). The Obama administration says that if your plan doesn't cover a crucial drug, you should ask for an exception; the government is asking insurers to respond to these requests within three days.

http://www.newser.com/story/178943/sick-find-key-drugs-missing-from-obamacare-plans.html

[CountDeMoney]

Preposterous 

Obamacare's not exactly the out-of-control, full-blown communist locomotive that mowed everything and everybody down on its way to legality you panicky GOP retards thought it was, was it?  Compromises were made with the healthcare industry.  Imagine that.

[derspiess]

Right, Seedy.  It was some grade-A legislation

[Admiral Yi]

I imagine the insurance companies would have been perfectly satisfied with packing even more requirements onto the plans people are required to purchase.

[CountDeMoney]

Right, Seedy.  It was some grade-A legislation

Legislation rarely is.