) until: A. He's full of it or B. Jimmies are rustled.
umm da majority of americans do not want it, you seen da polls?
Don't trust the prices on the Healthcare.gov site. That's one of the big problems they're having to iron out is that the prices have consistently been about half of the actual cost.
man....this whole thing is one giant cluster ****
[h1]Feds ask Blue Cross Blue Shield not to release exchange numbers[/h1]
Ugh I can't believe a young person would even think like this. Join the winning team? We'd love to have you on board?We'll just have to revisit this topic in March. Until then, just know and realize that the GOP is free-falling as fast as possible. Now's the time for you to jump ship champ and join the winning team. We would love to have you on board, we can use a hard-worker such as yourself. Think about it my man.
Ugh I can't believe a young person would even think like this. Join the winning team? We'd love to have you on board?We'll just have to revisit this topic in March. Until then, just know and realize that the GOP is free-falling as fast as possible. Now's the time for you to jump ship champ and join the winning team. We would love to have you on board, we can use a hard-worker such as yourself. Think about it my man
Do you really think Blue is looking out for you? Both of these parties are hilariously incapable. They pander to big business and lobbyists. Open your eyes and stop being that guy who needs to cling to a team. I bet you also cling to the company that makes your cell phone as well. Wake up homie. This law is horrible and the execution is even worse.
Dude is just teasing/joking with Ninja, calm the hell down B
[h1]Obamacare, Failing Ahead of Schedule[/h1][h6]By ROSS DOUTHAT[/h6][h6]Published: October 19, 2013 411 Comments[/h6]
- Google+
- Save
- Share
- Reprints
THIS is not the column about the Obamacare rollout I expected to write.
Enlarge This Image
[img]http://graphics8.nytimes.com...uthat_New/Douthat_New-articleInline.jpg[/img]
[h6]Josh Haner/The New York Times[/h6]
Ross Douthat
[h6]Go to Columnist Page »[/h6]
[h3]Ross Douthat’s Evaluations[/h3]
The columnist’s blog on politics and culture.
More From Evaluations »
[h3]Readers’ Comments[/h3]
If you had told me, months ago, that weeks after the health care law’s coverage expansion went into effect I would be writing about the problems its launch had exposed, I would have assumed I’d be writing about rate shock, rising premiums and the disappearance of many cheap insuranceplans — basically, all the problems conservatives have worried will make Obamacare a ruinously expensive failure if they play out as we fear they might.
I may be writing about those issues soon enough. But for now there is a more pressing subject: The online federal health care exchange, the heart of the Obamacare project, is such a rolling catastrophe that it may end up creating a major policy fiasco immediately rather than eventually.
This fiasco has always been a possibility, for reasons inherent in the architecture of the law. When The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, the most rigorous defender of the entire reform project, wrote up his “five Obamacare anxieties” in May, the first one was structural: The system’s sustainability depends on getting enough healthy people to sign up
Cohn thought such a death spiral was unlikely, and frankly so did I. Between the stick of the mandate, the carrot of subsidies and the planned P.R. blitz, it seemed as if enough Americans would sign up
But it seemed that way because it was hard to imagine the Obama White House botching the design and execution of its national health care exchange. Building Web sites
Except this time Team Obama didn’t. Like the Bush administration in Iraq, the White House seems to have invaded the health insurance marketplace with woefully inadequate postinvasion planning, and let the occupation turn into a disaster of hack work and incompetence. Right now, the problems with the exchange Web site appear to be systemic — a mess on the front end, where people are supposed to shop for plans, and also a thicket at the back end, where insurers are supposed to process applications.
The disaster can presumably be fixed. As Cohn pointed out on Friday, many of the state-level exchanges are working better than the federal one, and somewhere there must be a tech-world David Petraeus capable of stabilizing HealthCare.gov. And the White House has some time to work with: weeks before the end-of-year enrollment
But if the fix-it effort moves too slowly, it’s possible to envision a worst-case scenario unfolding. If the Web site doesn’t work soon, even liberals concede that the mandate would have to be delayed, because you can’t very well fine people for failing to buy a product they can’t access. And that combination — a hard-to-navigate online portal and no penalty for staying uninsured — could effectively discourage all but the most desperate customers from shopping, which in turn would create an unsustainably expensive insurance pool, driving prices up and driving people away, and potentially wrecking the entire individual insurance
If this happens, there will be a lot of schadenfreude on the right at the spectacle of technocratic failure. But the wreck of the exchanges may actually be worse for conservative policy objectives than a more successful rollout would have been.
That’s because while conservatives think the Obamacare exchanges are overregulated and oversubsidized, they are actually closer to the right-of-center vision for health care reform than the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which is happening no matter what transpires with Healthcare.gov. So if the exchanges fail and the Medicaid expansion takes effect (and, inevitably, becomes difficult to roll back), we’ll be left with an individual market that’s completely dysfunctional and a more socialized system over all.
In that scenario, the Democratic Party would probably end up pushing, not for the pipe dream of true single payer, but for a further bottom-up/top-down socialization, in which Medicare is offered to 55- to 65-year-olds and Medicaid is eventually expanded even more.
Meanwhile, the task for serious conservative reformers — already not the most politically effective bunch — might actually become harder, because they would have to explain how their plan to build an effective, exchange-based marketplace differed from the Obama White House’s exchange fiasco.
So while Republican politicians may be salivating over a potential Obamacare crisis, the conservative policy thinkers I know are not. They’re hoping, as I’m hoping, that this isn’t as bad as it looks. The chance to say “I told you so” is always nice, but not if the price is a potentially irrecoverable disaster.
[h1]Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site[/h1]
Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune, via Associated Press
Help navigating the federal online insurance
[h6]By SHARON LaFRANIERE, IAN AUSTEN and ROBERT PEAR[/h6][h6]Published: October 20, 2013 718 Comments[/h6]
- Google+
- Save
- Share
- Reprints
Federal contractors have identified most of the main problems crippling President Obama’s online health insurance
[h5]Contribute to Our Reporting [/h5]
The Times would like to hear from Americans who have begun to sign up for health care under the Affordable Care Act.
Share Your Experience »
Continuing coverage of the health care law.
- Graphic: Tracking the Progress of the Health Exchanges
- White House to Tweak Tax-Penalty Deadline
- Sebelius Finds a Friendly Crowd in Boston
[h4]Connect With Us on Twitter[/h4]
Follow @NYTNational for breaking news and headlines.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
[h3]Readers’ Comments[/h3]
Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. 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
“The account creation and registration
The scrambling underscores the pressures on the administration to fix what is widely viewed as the president’s biggest domestic achievement. Millions of Americans have spent countless hours in frustration trying to use the federal Web site, healthcare.gov, and its extensive problems have become a political crisis for the administration, providing new opportunities for Republicans who want to roll back the health care law.
Over the weekend, officials sought to counter pronouncements of failure by announcing that almost half a million people have submitted applications for health insurance through the federal and state marketplaces, about half of them through state exchanges. But officials declined to say how many have actually enrolled in insurance plans, and executives from insurance companies, which receive the enrollment
On Monday, Mr. Obama will host a Rose Garden event with people who have successfully enrolled in the health care exchanges. White House aides said he will acknowledge that the technical problems are “inexcusable,” but will note, as one adviser said, that the health care law is “more than a Web site.”
“There’s great demand for the affordable health care coverage made available by the A.C.A.,” Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director, said Sunday, referring to the Affordable Care Act. “The challenge for all of us — the state and federal governments and contractors alike — is to make sure the American people can access it simply. We won’t rest until they can.”
Senior officials took to the Sunday talk shows to defend the Affordable Care Act, and Republicans countered them. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said on “Fox News Sunday” that the early failures do not bode well for the rest of the health care law, adding: “In the 21st century, setting up a Web site where people can go on and buy something is not that complicated.”
One major problem slowing repairs, people close to the program say, is that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency in charge of the exchange, is responsible for making sure that the separately designed databases and pieces of software from 55 contractors work together. It is not common for a federal agency to assume that role, and numerous people involved in the project said the agency did not have the expertise to do the job
The people close to the project spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the system’s problems.
Administration officials have been debating whether to designate one or more companies as the quarterback for information technology work on the federal exchange, a complex project that has cost more than $400 million.
Communications between the administration and contractors improved over the weekend as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began negotiating agreements with contractors on responsibility and deadlines for repairs, people involved in the project say. They hope to have a plan before a Congressional hearing set for Thursday.
“The issue right now is between C.M.S. and the White House,” a specialist said Friday before communications improved. “Everybody sits and waits and the meter runs.”
A part of the system, hidden from users, draws data from several federal and state databases to determine if consumers qualify for coverage and then calculates the subsidies for which they may be eligible. Another part of the system sends enrollment data to insurers. Several people involved in the project say that problems like those of the last three weeks are not uncommon when software from several companies is combined into a large, complex system.
Insurance executives said in interviews that they were frustrated because they did not know the government’s plan or schedule for repairs. Insurers have found that the system provides them with incorrect information about some enrollees, repeatedly enrolls and cancels the enrollments of others, and simply loses the enrollments of still others.
Correcting those errors, specialists said, could require extensive rewriting of software code. Insurers said it could be weeks before their data and the government’s could be reconciled.
Accurate enrollment data is essential. Even if consumers bypass the federal Web site and go directly to insurance companies to sign up for coverage, the Treasury Department will still need enrollment data to pay tens of billions of dollars in subsidies promised to insurers.
Confidential government documents show that some technical fixes have been made to the federal Web site, and specialists say the site is slowly improving.
Nevertheless, disarray has distinguished the project. In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times. It went live on Oct. 1 before the government and contractors had fully tested the complete system. Delays by the government in issuing specifications for the system reduced the time available for testing.
CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI Group, based in Montreal, has the biggest contract and is responsible for the architecture of major parts of the system, but not for its integration. Quality Software Services Inc., or Q.S.S.I., a unit of the UnitedHealth Group, developed the identity management system, another major component that allowed consumers to register and establish accounts.
The identity management system from Q.S.S.I., which also taps into government databases to retrieve users’ personal information, was a particular source of trouble when the exchange opened. Change orders show that on Oct. 4 — after millions of people had been trapped in technological loops trying merely to log in — the government asked CGI to help it devise a new identity management system to replace the one provided by Q.S.S.I. But specialists said that approach was abandoned as too risky. Ultimately it was decided to fix the current identity system.
According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size.
yup i just got a letter from my insurance company and job saying they were changing our health planhttp://investigations.nbcnews.com/_...ns-could-not-keep-their-health-insurance?lite
An yet another lie...
-Nancy Pelosi
it actually is going up changing parts of my policy because of the change in law.
And that's all because of "Obamacare"? I see insurance premiums deductions yearly for Self Employed individuals, and guess what... premiums have gone up each and every year regardless.
But I mean yah why not blame it on Obamacare... gotta blame someone or something right!?!
This is a bad thing? Let's review some of these minimal essential coverage that was mandated.
^ So if your insurance coverage doesn't provide all of these services to YOU, then yah you will be getting a cancellation letter. Imagine thinking you have health insurance, your child's fever is 100.4, but your health insurance doesn't even cover emergency care. What's the point in having insurance then? Thank goodness for this mandated coverage.
And that's all because of "Obamacare"? I see insurance premiums deductions yearly for Self Employed individuals, and guess what... premiums have gone up each and every year regardless.
But I mean yah why not blame it on Obamacare... gotta blame someone or something right!?!
This is a bad thing? Let's review some of these minimal essential coverage that was mandated.
^ So if your insurance coverage doesn't provide all of these services to YOU, then yah you will be getting a cancellation letter. Imagine thinking you have health insurance, your child's fever is 100.4, but your health insurance doesn't even cover emergency care. What's the point in having insurance then? Thank goodness for this mandated coverage.
yeah this **** going down da toilet...might as well, i ain't even mad at a single payer at this point.
You would be surprised. It's about the same as people that get auto or home insurance and aren't exactly sure or for certain what is covered and what is not.
»
