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Repug Excellence in Governance
House Panel Votes To Sue Obama
http://www.businessinsider.com/house...e-obama-2014-7
Sueing for breaking the law they want to repeal, but ing at him to break the law the Repugs passed on child immigrants.
Even After Open Enrollment, Activity Remains Unexpectedly High on Federal Health Insurance Exchange
New federal data, obtained by ProPublica under the Freedom of Information Act, shows nearly 1 million insurance transactions since mid-April.
It was not immediately clear how many of the records involved plan changes or cancellations and how many were for new enrollments.
An insurance industry official estimated that less than half of the transactions are new enrollments. The rest are changes: When an existing member makes a change to his or her policy, two 834s are created — one terminating the old plan and one opening the new one.
Charles Gaba, who runs the website acasignups.net that tracks enrollment numbers, estimates that between 6,000 and 7,000 people have signed up for coverage each day on the federal exchange after the official enrollment period ended. Gaba's predictions were remarkably accurate during the open enrollment period.
"That doesn't account for attrition. That doesn't mean that they paid," Gaba said. "That's been based on limited data from a half dozen of the smaller exchanges, extrapolated out nationally."
http://www.propublica.org/article/af...ailynewsletter
So we'll see in the next enrollment period in a few months if word-of-mouth has gotten around.
Remember, it took MA system 2 years to approach full enrollment, which would be 2016, two more enrollment periods for ACA.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-23-2014 at 09:18 PM.
Repug Excellence in Governance
House Panel Votes To Sue Obama
http://www.businessinsider.com/house...e-obama-2014-7
Sueing for breaking the law they want to repeal, but ing at him to break the law the Repugs passed on child immigrants.
I hope it fails because the next step is the public option which is where it should have gone in the first place.
What's really amazing is the much larger number of people, 10s of Ms, who will be fined, some seriously, and get nothing for it.
Fox and conservatives, spewing lies non-stop for years, are to blamed for many of the fined idiots being ignorant of both ACA benefits for them and of the fines.
ACA is here to stay, FOREVER, it will be fixed and improved, so eat , you right-wing-dingbats.
lol...nerve struck.
Millions of Americans can expect to get a refund from their insurance companies this year, at an average of about $80 dollars per family, thanks to a little-known Obamacare provision that’s helping people save money on their premiums. According to a new report released by the Health and Human Services Department on Thursday, Americans across the country have received a total of $1.9 billion dollars in rebates since this provision first took effect in 2011.
Obamacare’s medical loss ratio provision — which is also frequently referred to as the “80/20 rule” — requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent of every American’s premium costs on their medical care, rather than on the company’s own profits or administrative overhead. If insurance companies don’t hit the right balance, they have to issue a refund check to their customers to make up for it.
According to HHS’s calculations, 6.8 million Americans will save $330 million in refunds this year because of the 80/20 rule. Insurance companies are required to provide those reimbursements by no later than the beginning of August. Not everyone will actually receive a physical check in the mail; insurers are allowed to apply the reimbursements to future premiums, so the savings could show up that way.
In a press release announcing the new data, HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell said that the health reform law is giving Americans a “better value for their premium dollars.” The whole point of the 80/20 rule is to encourage insurance companies to operate more efficiently and cut down on their overhead — and it’s slowly working. The portion of premium dollars allocated to insurers’ profits and administrative costs dropped from 15.3 percent in 2011 to 11.7 percent in 2013.
HHS estimates that if insurers weren’t making those type of changes, Americans would have likely paid about $3.8 billion in additional premiums in 2013. Altogether, since the medical loss ratio took effect three years ago, the administration calculates that it’s averted $9 billion dollars worth of unnecessarily high insurance premiums.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...emium-savings/
Drop in uninsured is a mixed blessing for hospitals
Some of the big, urban hospitals around the country – the "safety net" hospitals that serve the poor – are getting hit with a dose of good news.
Under the Affordable Care Act, the number of uninsured patients is dropping sharply. Hospitals like Our Lady of Lourdesin Camden, New Jersey, are now spending millions less on providing charity care.
That’s a $3.5 million of savings at the Camden hospital.
“$3.5 million can make a difference between breaking even or operating in the red,” Hatala says.
What’s happening in Camden is happening around the country – at least for hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare.
This summer the Colorado Hospital Association – looking at stats from 30 states – found a 30 percent jump in Medicaid charges, and a 30 percent drop in charity care costs.
That puts hospitals on track to save billions this year.
“Yeah, there’s more money. But it also comes with a caveat,” says Ellen Kugler, Executive Director of the National Association of Urban Hospitals. “There are a number of federal cuts coming and many more that are coming.”
Federal, state, and local government funding currently covers about 65 percent of charity care costs. Under the ACA, the plan has been to reduce that funding - at least at the federal level - as more Americans gain insurance coverage.
In this new landscape, the Urban Ins ute’s Teresa Coughlin says these hospitals will now have to fight to keep their newly-insured patients: “Do they have contracts with [insurers]? Are they able to retain patients who became newly insured and still continue to come to their facility? Or will they go elsewhere now that they have a choice?”
Coughlin says some of these hospitals are considered second-tier facilities, and to keep their doors open, they must build relationships with insurers and convince consumers they offer excellent service for a fair price.
A whole new world, says Coughlin - a world where not all safety net hospitals may survive.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/health-care/drop-uninsured-mixed-blessing-hospitals
"not all safety net hospitals may survive" ... esp in sadistic, death-panel (Repug) states that refused to expand Medicaid.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stor...Obamacare.aspx
A Doctor's Perspective On Obamacare Plans
This story is part of a partnership that includes WNPR , NPR and Kaiser Health News. It can be republished for free. (details)
On a recent afternoon at his office in Hartford, Conn., Dr. Doug Gerard examines a patient complaining of joint pain. Gerard, an internist, checks her out, asks her a few questions about her symptoms and then orders a few tests before sending her on her way.
For a typical quick visit like this, Gerard could get reimbursed $100 or more from a private insurer. For the same visit, Medicare pays less — about $80. And now, with the new private plans under the Affordable Care Act, Gerard says he would get something in between, but closer to the lower Medicare rates.
That's not something he's willing to accept.
"I cannot accept a plan [in which] potentially commercial-type reimbursement rates were now going to be reimbursed at Medicare rates,” Gerard says. “You have to maintain a certain mix in private practice between the low reimbursers and the high reimbursers to be able to keep the lights on."
Three insurers offered plans on Connecticut’s ACA marketplacein 2014, and Gerard is only accepting one. He won't say which, but he will say it pays the highest rate to doctors.
"I don't think most physicians know what they're being reimbursed. Only when they start seeing some of those rates come through will they realize how low the rates are they agreed to."
Gerard's decision to reject two plans is something officials in Connecticut are concerned about. If reimbursement rates to doctors stay low in Obamacare plans, more doctors could reject those plans. And that could mean that people will get access to insurance, but they may not get access to a lot of doctors.
That worries Kevin Counihan, who runs Connecticut's health insurance marketplace.
"I think it could lead potentially to this kind of distinction that there are these different tiers of quality of care," Counihan says.
His agency recently approved rules geared at getting more providers into plans on the exchange. The goal is to make sure that everyone gets good care regardless of their income.
He doesn't want the impression left that someone who gets a subsidy to buy ACA coverage will get inferior care. “That's been something, at least in our state, that we're trying to work against. And the carriers are, as well," Counihan says.
All three of the insurers on Connecticut's exchange were asked to comment. Two declined. One agreed. Ken Lalime is the CEO of Healthy CT — an insurance co-op. He says insurers face a real challenge figuring out how to pay doctors enough but also keep consumer premiums low.
"Every time you increase payments to providers, you have to offset that with increased reimbursements from the consumer,” says Lalime. “So there's this balance between how much do you want to cost to provide that service and how much you can pass along in your premiums rates. It's a balancing act."
Healthy CT may have missed the balance – just 3 percent of the exchange's consumers bought the co-op's insurance in 2014. Lalime says he also thinks low reimbursement rates are forcing some doctors to decide against accepting insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
Dr. Bob Russo is sure of it. He's a radiologist and he's also the president-elect of the Connecticut State Medical Society. He says that the low rates and administrative burdens that come along with the ACA could make it a financial loser.
"You get what you pay for,” Russo says. “If you can't convince [doctors] that they're not losing money doing their job, then it's a problem. And they haven't been able to convince people of that."
He, like Counihan, worries about creating a tiered health care system. He says, think about Medicaid. Before a recent rise in rates, it paid doctors even less than Medicare, so many stopped accepting Medicaid patients.
"There's no question that Medicaid, under its old rates, wasn't working. So, have we just invented a new Medicaid that kind of slid the scale up a little more to make access a little more?" Russo says.
The experience of these doctors is a good reminder that the Affordable Care Act is more than a thought exercise in health care. It's happening. And here's another reminder: open enrollment for 2015 begins in just over three months.
http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(14)00121-8/abstract
Increased Use of the Emergency Department After Health Care Reform in Massachusetts
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6168/263.abstract
Medicaid Increases Emergency-Department Use: Evidence from Oregon's Health Insurance Experiment
MAP: Your State Lost Billions by Refusing to Expand Medicaid
Conservatives who oppose the Medicaid expansion make other arguments, of course. They say they don’t want to increase federal spending, they think Medicaid is a lousy insurance program, and, more generally, they don’t like big government. Those are fine arguments to have. But the idea that expanding Medicaid is a poor financial decision for states is not just wrong. It appears to be the opposite of the truth.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1...xpand-medicaid
Feds: Texas Responsible for Misspent Medicaid Dollars
For nearly five years, the Texas Medicaid and Healthcare Partnership (TMHP), a subsidiary of Xerox, allowed workers with limited expertise to approve dental claims for Texas’ Medicaid program, the joint state-federal insurer.
State spending on orthodontic services spiraled out of control: Between 2003 and 2010, Texas Medicaid payments for orthodontic services grew by more than 3,000 percent — from $6.5 million to $220.5 million — while program enrollment only grew 33 percent.
By 2012, federal and state auditors found that the contractor’s actions had opened the door to a “massive Medicaid fraud scheme” that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
http://www.texastribune.org/2014/08/...icaid-dollars/
One of the many reasons Repug's prefer block grants rather than Federal string attached. The Repugs can re-allocate, steal the Federal block grant for other purposes, fraud.
Five Biggest Lies About Obamacare
On the evidence available to us so far, nearly everything that the more vocal conservative critics have said about the ACA has been wrong. No. “Wrong” implies a statement made in good faith.
These charges were often made in the worst possible faith. And they were lies.
1. Healthy People Won’t Sign Up
Or call this “Death Spiral Part I.” The idea here, spread lustily by many conservatives since 2010 but especially during last fall’s disastrous roll out, was that healthy people simply wouldn’t buy insurance. Senator Orrin Hatch said last November that “at this pace, the Obama administration will never be able to meet their enrollment goals.” Speaker John Boehner at the time groused that “the idea that the federal government should come in and create a one size fits all for the entire country never was going to work.”
Their hope was that only really sick people would sign up, which would lead rates to e—the much-feared death spiral (more on that later). But lo and behold it turned out that millions of healthy people did want health insurance. As noted above, the precise numbers are hard to come by. But Gallup’s estimate is that the country has roughly 10 million newly insured citizens under Obamacare.
2. You Won’t Be Able to Choose/Keep Your Doctor/Plan
It’s true that this happened in a limited number of cases—maybe six or seven million people who bought policies on the individual market got cancellation letters from insurers telling them that their plans didn’t meet the minimum requirements under the new law, as NBC News explosively reported last fall.
It harmed the administration’s credibility, and rightly so. But it didn’t represent much of a change from the past — the “churn-rate” in the individual market has always been high.
in a country where some 260 million people have health insurance, no one has adduced any proof that the ACA has resulted in anything remotely like the cataclysm opponents predicted.
In fact, last fall, Factcheck.orgrated such claims as outright falsehoods. And Gruber noted to me that if some people are “losing” their doctors, it’s often by their own choice, because now that they have so many different coverage options, many are choosing less expensive or so-called “limited network” plans. “No one is making people buy these plans,” Gruber says. “They’re cheaper alternatives. This is capitalism at its finest. For the right to criticize that is just ludicrous.”
3. Obamacare Will Explode the Federal Deficit
You heard this one a jillion times back when the law was being debated. Still today, Republicans and conservatives are deft at cherry-picking numbers out of official reports that can convey the misleading impression that fiscal watchdogs think the law will be a disaster.
The truth is that the Congressional Budget Office said in 2010 and reaffirmed this summer that the Affordable Care Act’s budget impact would be positive. The 2010 estimate was that the ACA would cut deficits by $124 billion over its first decade. And in June, CBO head Douglas Elmendorf reported that his experts “have no reason to think that their initial assessment that the ACA would reduce budget deficits was incorrect.”
The CBO has estimated that the law will especially reduce the deficit in its second decade, and there’s every reason to believe that those estimates are on course.”
4. Okay, Then, It Will Bust States’ Budgets
Texas’ Rick Perry, Florida’s Rick Scott, and numerous other Republican governors have said that Obamacare will bust their budgets. They’re basing that on the fact that the federal government will pay 100 percent of the costs of Medicaid expansion through 2016, but a little less than that thereafter (although never less than 90 percent).
here’s the part Perry and Scott leave out. All states have, of course, an existing relationship with the Medicaid program in which states pay for some portion of the program’s implementation. And a number of studies estimate that in that pool of funds, states will save significant amounts of money that will offset most of the new expenses incurred under Obamacare. For example, Massachusetts found that after implementation of Romneycare, its costs for “uncompensated care”—charity work, basically—decreased considerably. Andone study released in June found that uncompensated care costs are already dropping dramatically under the ACA—but only in the states that have taken the Medicaid money.
Perry, Scott, et alia are perhaps agents of a self-fulfilling prophecy
5. Premium Rates Will Shoot Through the Roof
This is the big enchilada, and the culmination of the alleged death spiral. The charge here is that the lack of healthy enrollees will force insurers to jack rates up to the heavens, because they’ll have all these sick and dying people on their hands.
let’s step back. What’s a typical, pre-ACA rate increase? Good question. In 2008 it was 9.9 percent; 2009, 10.8 percent; 2010, 11.7 percent. Within those broad averages, numbers were all over the map: In 2010, rates went up in Kentucky by just 5.5 percent, but in Nebraska by 21.8 percent.
The Health Research Ins ute at PricewaterhouseCoopers looked at rate requests from insurers that have been filed across 29 states and the District of Columbia and found that the average increase is 8.2 percent, which is impressively low and definitely not “sticker shock.” And remember, these are mostly just requests (in Rhode Island and Oregon, the rates are final), which aggressive state insurance commissioners might seek to make still lower. "So far, the filings suggest modest increases for 2015, well below the double digit hikes many feared,
This is another area where Republican saboteurs of the law can, if they choose to, make it not work.
That is, Republican state insurance commissioners can approve big premium hikes just to make the law look bad. Says Sally McCarty, the former Indiana state insurance commissioner, now at the Georgetown Center on Health Insurance Reforms: “States that are in earnest about implementing the law will likely see lower increases, and states not so concerned about seeing the law succeed will see higher increases.”
Republicans aren’t bashing it quite so much anymore, because even they see it’s kind of working.
The damage they’ve already done is considerable.
“Health care is a topic that people feel particularly close to as it involves the most important decisions people make; it is also a topic people can feel incredibly anxious about for the same reason,”
“The right wing has preyed upon those anxieties by manufacturing one lie after another to create a veil of opposition against a bill that has so far been pretty effective at covering people and lowering costs.
It is an indictment of our policy deliberations as a country that these lies have been so effective.” Slowly, the truth is catching up.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...obamacare.html
As ALWAYS, the Repugs are either flat-out wrong, hurting people and the country, or LYING.
Thanks, asshole, lying Repugs, and you asshole right-wingers who keep voting them into office.
GOP Governor In Tough Re-election Bid Prepares To Implement Obamacare
Pennsylvania will soon become the 12th Republican-led state to expand its Medicaid program in accordance with the Affordable Care Act at a time when conservatives across the country are downplaying their opposition to the law.
On Thursday, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will announce that it had granted a waiver and reached agreement with the state to provide health care coverage to 500,000 low-income residents through private insurance. The waiver will make Pennsylvania the 27th state, plus the District of Columbia, to accept federal Medicaid dollars.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...amacare-funds/
Last edited by boutons_deux; 08-28-2014 at 08:24 PM.
As always intended, the racist Confederate South screwing the blacks
Southern Blacks Are Biggest Victims Of GOP's Obamacare Obstructionism
Medicaid expansion is making progress. As TPM reported yesterday, even states as conservative as Wyoming are coming around. Others like Indiana and Pennsylvania are making progress as well. But a handful remain hardened in their opposition. They are largely contained to the South, and that means that the people being left out of Obamacare's safety-net expansion are disproportionately poor blacks.
Nelson Lichtnestein, director of the University of California-Santa-Barbara's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy, flagged the ongoing disparity in an email to TPM on Monday, responding to the Wyoming story. "There is a large elephant that escapes your notice," he said. "Republican governors in North and West are indeed climbing aboard, but not those in the South."
And it's true. A map of Medicaid expansion leaves out the five states that, at least by the standard definition, comprise the Deep South. You can tack on two huge adjoining states -- Florida and Texas -- and go by the "original Confederate States" definition. Arkansas and Kentucky are the most Southern states so far to expand, and both are led by Democrats. GOP-led Tennessee is working on it.
In a June op-ed for Reuters, Lichtenstein used the South's obstruction of Medicaid expansion as "Exhibit A" in his argument that the region was reverting to the "New South," formerly the description of the period between the Civil War (or Reconstruction, more precisely) and civil rights.
"A ruling white caste (is) now putting in place policies likely to create a vast economic and social gap between most Southern states and those in the North, upper Midwest and Pacific region," he wrote. "Of course, such regressive social policies... are supported by a fierce white partisanship."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/medi...+%28TPMNews%29
The Repug party nation-wide is hard-core racist, has been for 50 years since Dems helped the blacks in the 1960s.
Federal Appeals Court Withdraws Decision Defunding Obamacare
In July, two Republican judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed down a decision defunding much of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This effort to implement Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) top policy priority from the bench waswithdrawn on Thursday by the DC Circuit, and the case will be reheard by the full court — a panel that will most likely include 13 judges. In practical terms, this means that July’s judgment cutting off subsidies to consumers who buy insurance plans in federally-operated health exchanges is no more. It has ceased to be. It is, in fact, an ex-judgment.
The reason why this matters is because the plaintiffs in this lawsuit, known as Halbig v. Burwell, are hustling to try to convince the GOP-dominated Supreme Court to hear this case, where they no doubt believe that they have a greater chance of succeeding than in the DC Circuit, as a majority of the active judges in the DC Circuit are Democrats. The Supreme Court takes only a tiny fraction of the cases brought to their attention by parties who lost in a lower court — a study of the Court’s 2005 term, for example, found that the justices granted a full argument to only 78 of the 8,517 pe ions seeking the high Court’s review that term. The justices, however, are particularly likely to hear cases where two federal appeals courts disagree about the same question of law.
Two hours after the divided DC Circuit panel released its opinion attempted to defund Obamacare, a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit upheld the health subsidies that are at issue in Halbig. Thus, so long as both decisions remained in effect, Supreme Court review was very likely. Now that the full DC Circuit has vacated the two Republican judges’ July judgement, Supreme Court review is much less likely.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...ing-obamacare/
Repugs get ed for trying to Americans.
but they'll keep trying, that's what you Repugs are best at, America, the environment.
America Shocked As It's Revealed: Bill Kristol May Be Right About Something
But way back in 1992, Kristol wrote a memo to the GOP warning that the Clinton healthcare reforms would make the GOP look like assholes and make the Democrats look like the good guys. Wrote Kristol:
"But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse — much worse.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...?detail=email#
It will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation.
It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests.
And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."
"Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government"
Number of Americans Without Health Insurance Falls
Federal researchers reported on Tuesday that the number of Americans without health insurance had declined substantially in the first quarter of this year, the first federal measure of the number of uninsured Americans since the Affordable Care Act extended coverage to millions of people in January.
The number of uninsured Americans fell by about 8 percent to 41 million people in the first quarter of this year, compared with 2013, a drop that represented about 3.8 million people
there should be no doubt at this point that the law is increasing the number of people insured,”
“It is too early,” said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at M.I.T. whose work was used in shaping the law. “This is really a three-year process of implementation,” he said, pointing out that federal estimates assume the law will take three years to take full effect, similar to the timing around health care overhaul in Massachusetts. “Trying to draw strong conclusions from one quarter of one year is impossible.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/us...=top-news&_r=0
Cruz-Backed GOPer Continues Bizarre Dodging About Health Care Coverage
why is New Hampshire state Rep. Marilinda Garcia (R), a vocal critic of Obamacare, so defensive about what kind of health care coverage she has?
she first said she didn't want to talk about it, then clarified she wasn't getting insurance through Obamacare, then followed up with the NHPR to say she was definitely covered but didn't say how.
her campaign clarified that she has a catastrophic care short-term plan while she runs for New Hampshire's 2nd Congressional District, that she purchased it month-to-month, and that it's outside of Obamacare.
Is it compliant with Obamacare requirements for new health insurance policies?
campaign official did acknowledge Monday that Garcia's plan was non-compliant
New Hampshire has a part-time legislature that does not provide health coverage. Garcia, according to the Union Leader, also lives with her parents and sister Bianca, also a member of the state legislature. She's older than the age-26 cutoff for obtaining coverage under her parents' health insurance plan. She has also said she supplements her income with work as a harp teacher
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/mari...+%28TPMNews%29
non-ACA-compliant plans are still sold?
she could be Krazy Kruz's sister.
A New Way Insurers are Shifting Costs to the Sick
By charging higher prices for generic drugs that treat certain illness, health insurers may be violating the spirit of the Affordable Care Act, which bans discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions.
Health insurance companies are no longer allowed to turn away patients because of their pre-existing conditions or charge them more because of those conditions. But some health policy experts say insurers may be doing so in a more subtle way: by forcing people with a variety of illnesses — including Parkinson's disease, diabetes and epilepsy — to pay more for their drugs.
what sort of consumer behavior is encouraged when all generic medicines for particular diseases are 'non-preferred' and subject to higher co-pays."
Specifically, the complaint contended that the plans placed all of their H.I.V. medications, including generics, in their highest of five cost tiers, meaning that patients had to pay 40 percent of the cost after paying a deductible. The complaint is pending.
"It seems that the plans are trying to find this wiggle room to design their benefits to prevent people who have high health needs from enrolling,"
http://www.propublica.org/article/a-...ts-to-the-sick
The basic strategy of for-profit medicine is to ALWAYS screws the patients to increase profits. tiest possible product for the highest possible price
Today, ACA Boosts Voluntary Part-Time Employment
In today’s EconoBytes, economists Helene Jorgensen and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research on how the Affordable Care Act has contributed to an increase in voluntary part-time employment.By allowing people to buy insurance through the exchanges and extending Medicaid coverage to millions of people, the ACA largely ends workers’ dependence on their employer for insurance.
- This gives tens of millions of people the option to change their job, to work part-time, or take time off to be with young children or family members in need of care, or to retire early.
There has been a notable uptick in voluntary part-time employment in the first seven months that the exchanges have been in operation.
- Table 1 shows that the monthly average of workers who reported they were voluntarily working part-time (less than 35 hours a week) was 372,000 higher in the first seven months of 2014 than in the same months of 2013.
- While this may in part reflect cyclical dynamics (there was a larger increase in 2012), there is not a simple relationship between a strengthening labor market and increased part-time employment.
- Voluntary part-time employment rose by just 43,000 in 2013 and actually fell as a share of total employment.
- Voluntary part-time workers are people who report that they have chosen to work part-time. The number of people who report that they are working part-time but would like full-time employment has been dropping throughout the recovery.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/...epr+%28CEPR%29
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014...cmp=latestnews
Watchdog report: HealthCare.gov still has security issues
Despite efforts to protect patient information on the HealthCare.gov website, a new government watchdog report scheduled to be released Thursday says security issues are still a concern.
According to the Government Accountability Office report, “weaknesses remained in the security and privacy protections applied to HealthCare.gov and its supporting systems.”
The agency will present its findings to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday.
In the report, the GAO makes six recommendations to the Department of Health and Human Services to implement security and privacy controls to protect sensitive material. The report also makes 22 recommendations to resolve technical weaknesses in security controls.
Problems with the site ranged from the agency not setting up an alternate processing site for HealthCare.gov systems to allow them to be recovered if the site was hacked or went down to the strength of passwords.
“In addition to these weaknesses, we also identified weaknesses in security controls related to boundary protection, identification and authentication, authorization and configuration management,” the report states. “Collectively, these weaknesses put HealthCare.gov systems and the information they contain at increased and unnecessary risk of unauthorized access, use, disclosure, modification or loss.”
According to the GAO report, HHS has agreed with three of the six recommendations and has agreed with all 22 technical recommendations.
Many Republican lawmakers have criticized the technology used to run and maintain the HealthCare.gov site since it was launched last fall. They argue that the Obama administration rushed through the system despite knowing problems existed.
HealthCare.gov is used in 30 states as a one-stop shop for health-insurance plans. Signing up for plans as well as applying for tax credits requires them to enter personal data about themselves including their Social Security number.
The government report says the agency in charge of the site also failed to ensure system-security plans were in place and instead was relying on a draft data-use agreement with a contractor who is paid to verify user iden ies.
The newest security warnings follow demands earlier this month from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa that a key ObamaCare official testify before his committee after the Obama administration revealed hackers successfully breached the site.
Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement that Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, “must testify” before Sept. 18 to discuss “transparency, accountability, and information security.” regarding the federal website.
The health care site had numerous technical problems when it was launched last fall and was initially unworkable for most consumers. Among the issues that concerned the administration's own technical experts at the time was that security testing could not be completed because the system was undergoing so many last-minute changes.
The part of HealthCare.gov that serves as the entry way for consumers eventually passed security certification, but the GAO revealed that security testing continued well into this year on other important components that deal with health plan information and financial management. The administration said that's because those components were still in stages of development.
The report also confirmed security flaws in state computer systems linking to the federal network, a problem reported earlier this year by The Associated Press.
OT, but hey
roughly the same approval ratings at the same time of their second terms.
the media made damn well sure we all knew about how ty GWB was, but they're a bit more secretive about Barry
OT, but hey
roughly the same approval ratings at the same time of their second terms.
the media made damn well sure we all knew about how ty GWB was, but they're a bit more secretive about Barry
what an absolutely ty 16 years of presidency this will have been.
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