Google, others to help with Obamacare website
Experts from top technology and Internet companies including Google Inc, Oracle Corp and Red Hat Inc have joined the Obama administration's effort to fix its troubled HealthCare.gov website, a U.S. official said on Thursday.
Individuals from Oracle and Red Hat have expertise in site reliability, stability and scalability, according to a blog post by Julie Bataille, spokeswoman for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which is overseeing the effort.
She also identified two experts by name: Michael erson, a site reliability engineer on leave from Google, and Greg Gershman, whom she identified as developer and entrepreneur. Gershman, a Baltimore-based innovation director with the firm Mobomo, previously worked for the White House and the General Services Administration.
http://my.chicagotribune.com/#sectio.../p2p-78001955/
Q: What former president said this about how he would evaluate the Obama presidency thus far?
“He’s done the best he could under the cir stances. His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.”
A: Jimmy Carter
Obamacare enrollments got off to very slow start, do ents show
(CBS News) WASHINGTON - For 31 days now, the Obama administration has been telling us that Americans by the millions are visiting the new health insurance website, despite all its problems. But no one in the administration has been willing to tell us how many policies have been purchased, and this may be the reason: CBS News has learned enrollments got off to an incredibly slow start.
Early enrollment figures are contained in notes from twice-a-day "war room" meetings convened within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after the website failed on Oct. 1. They were turned over in response to a do ent request from the House Oversight Committee.
The website launched on a Tuesday. Publicly, the government said there were 4.7 million unique visits in the first 24 hours. But at a meeting Wednesday morning, the war room notes say "six enrollments have occurred so far."
They were with BlueCross BlueShield North Carolina and Kansas City, CareSource and Healthcare Service Corporation.
By Wednesday afternoon, enrollments were up to "approximately 100." By the end of Wednesday, the notes reflect "248 enrollments" nationwide.
Obama's legacy=Bush's legacy
Romney care had horrible startup software problems AND crazy low startup enrollments. Apart from the healthcare.gov expected nightmare (FBI spent $1B and never got anything), people don't enroll (pay) 6 weeks before the deadline and 2 months before coverage starts. Romneycare had a huge rush of enrollments just before the deadline, and took 2 years to achieve it's long term average which is now 98% of MA covered.
you right-wing ankle-biters in the peanut gallery will eat your schadenfreude with sauce. ACA's success is inevitable, and it will be, like the shutdown and Repug filibusers, a huge electoral boost for the Dems.
5 Reasons Obama Never, Ever Should Have Trusted the Healthcare Industry
President Obama has become the health insurance industry’s top salesperson. Yesterday, in Massachusetts, he urged Americans to take a long view on implementing Obamacare. While it may provide coverage to millions who now lack it, the evidence is mounting that Obama never should have trusted the private health insurance industry to begin with. Let us count the ways.
1. Obamacare was written by the industry for the GOP.
The template for the Affordable Care Act was the Heritage Foundation’s 1992 report [3] for expanding the health insurance marketplace. Their plan had tax credits, while Obamacare has income-based subsidies paid directly to insurers to make it affordable to the poor, working class and middle class. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich points out [4], this was the Republican’s and insurance industry’s plan, not the Democrats, who wanted to expand existing government programs. Its reliance on the private sector was flawed from the start and is at the core of its current troubles.
2. Obamacare did not have meaningful price controls.
Even though the law passed in 2010, most of Obamacare was not slated to take effect until January 2014. That gave insurers several years to ratchet up premiums—with 18 percent to 25 percent annual jumps [5] in states like California where insurance premiums are unregulated. While the law limits the percent of administrative costs that are part of premiums and that took [6] effect in 2012, it does not regulate overall costs. Does anybody think insurers were not going to lock in profits and gouge the public when they could?
3. All insurers didn’t have to cooperate—and didn’t.
Not every health insurance company decided to participate in the ACA, which left many small states with very few options for uninsured residents. That means Obamacare is not offering a range of plans, in which compe ion is supposed to lower costs, in states like Maine [7]and New Hampshire [8]. That’s left state legislators wondering [9] if they will have to create interstate compacts with neighbors to create coverage pools to attract private insurers to give residents more choices. Again, insurers did what was best for their bottom lines, not for the public health.
4. Is anyone surprised policies now are canceled?
Nobody should be surprised at the latest outrage from the industry, which is canceling [10] hundreds of thousands of individuals’ policies, making the president eat his words that anyone can keep coverage they like. Obama ought to have known better. But as Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius told Congress Wednesday, insurers are canceling policies or offering higher-priced subs utes because the old policies don’t meet the law's minimum coverage requirements.
People might be angry that their policy is being canceled or might cost more if they can’t get a federal subsidy, but they would feel a lot worse if they were hospitalized and faced thousands in unexpected bills and hounding by debt collectors. Who’s more at fault here, Obama for being played like a card, or insurers for selling bad policies in the first place?
5. And now Republicans prefer a public option?
There’s a lot more to be seen in the Obamacare drama before the nation’s new healthcare regimen emerges. But for now, a final—and perverse—reason why the health insurance industry shouldn’t have been trusted in the first place goes beyond the previous four.
Some Republicans whose states are taking federal money to expand coverage for the poor though state-run Medicaid are predicting that the market reforms won’t work. Ohio Gov. John Kasich wants the law’s public portion to work, the New York Times reported [11] this week, but predicted the private insurance requirements won’t. “It’s going to throw people out of work and not control costs,” he said.
That’s beyond ironic, as it reminds everyone that the best approach to healthcare reform is what Democrats and progressives have called for all along—a so-called public option via expanding existing government-run programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.
“Had Democrats stuck to the original Democratic vision and built comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare, it would have been cheaper, simpler, and more widely accepted by the public,” wrote [4] Reich. “And Republicans would be hollering anyway.”
Instead, Obama and the Democrats trusted the private insurance industry, thought it would do its part, and not keep stabbing them—and policyholders—in the back. That doesn’t mean the ACA doesn’t have positive features, as Obama keeps saying [12] in speeches, but with the President as a punching bag the industry can keep doing what it has always done: put its profits first.
Is anyone really surprised?
http://www.alternet.org/print/obama-...ealth-insurers
Sounds like they should have defunded it
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...r-health-plan/
“That means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
– President Obama, speech to the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009 (as the health-care law was being written.)
“And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.”
– Obama, remarks in Portland, April 1, 2010, after the health-care law was signed into law.
“FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.”
– tweet by Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, Oct. 28, 2013, after NBC News airs a report that the Obama administration knew “millions” could not keep their health insurance.
Many readers have asked us to step back into time and review these statements by the president now that it appears that as many as 2 million people may need to get a new insurance plan as the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, goes into effect in 2014. As we were considering those requests, one of the president’s most senior advisers then tweeted a statement on the same issue that cried out for fact checking.
The Facts
The president’s pledge that “if you like your insurance, you will keep it” is one of the most memorable of his presidency. It was also an extraordinarily bold — and possibly foolish — pledge, unless he thought he simply could dictate exactly how the insurance industry must work.
At the time, some observers noted the problems with Obama’s promise.
After Obama made his speech before the AMA, the Associated Press ran a smart analysis — “Promises, Promises: Obama’s Health Plan Guarantee” — that demonstrated how it would be all but impossible for the president to keep that pledge. The article noted that the Congressional Budget Office assumed that 10 million Americans would need to seek new insurance under the Senate version of the bill.
Meanwhile, in the Republican weekly address on Aug. 24, 2009, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), a doctor, made this point: “On the stump, the president regularly tells Americans that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.’ But if you read the bill, that just isn’t so. For starters, within five years, every health-care plan will have to meet a new federal definition for coverage — one that your current plan might not match, even if you like it.”
One might excuse the president for making an aspirational pledge as the health-care bill was being drafted, but it turns out he kept saying it after the bill was signed into law. By that point, there should have been no question about the potential impact of the law on insurance plans, especially in the individual market.
As we have noted, a key part of the law is forcing insurers to offer an “essential health benefits” package, providing coverage in 10 categories. The list includes: ambulatory patient services; emergency services; hospitalization; maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.
For some plans, this would be a big change. In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services noted: “62 percent of enrollees do not have coverage for maternity services; 34 percent of enrollees do not have coverage for substance abuse services; 18 percent of enrollees do not have coverage for mental health services; 9 percent of enrollees do not have coverage for prescription drugs.”
The law did allow “grandfathered” plans — for people who had obtained their insurance before the law was signed on March 23, 2010 — to escape this requirement and some other aspects of the law. But the regulations written by HHS while implementing the law set some tough guidelines, so that if an insurance company makes changes to a plan’s benefits or how much members pay through premiums, co-pays or deductibles, then a person’s plan likely loses that status.
If you dig into the regulations (go to page 34560), you will see that HHS wrote them extremely tight. One provision says that if co-payment increases by more than $5, plus medical cost of inflation, then the plan can no longer be grandfathered. (With last year’s inflation rate of 4 percent, that means the co-pay could not increase by more than $5.20.) Another provision says the co-insurance rate could not be increased at all above the level it was on March 23, 2010.
While one might applaud an effort to rid the country of inadequate insurance, the net effect is that over time, the plans would no longer meet the many tests for staying grandfathered. Already, the percentage of people who get coverage from their job via a grandfathered plan has dropped from 56 percent in 2011 to 36 percent in 2013.
In the individual insurance market, few plans were expected to meet the “grandfathered” requirements, which is why many people are now receiving notices that their old plan is terminated and they need to sign up for different coverage. Again, this should be no surprise. As HHS noted in a footnote of a report earlier this year: “We note that, as the Affordable Care Act is implemented, we expect grandfathered coverage to diminish, particularly in the individual market.”
Indeed, at least six states — Virginia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Wyoming and Kansas — require insurance companies to cancel existing policies, rather than amend them, if the grandfathered coverage lapses.
Now, it’s important to note that many people — perhaps a large majority — are receiving notices that they have lost their insurance plan because they were never grandfathered in the first place. In other words, they got a plan after the bill was signed into law back in 2010. If that’s the case, they have no option but to accept the more comprehensive insurance mandated by the law.
Still, it’s worth remembering that insurance companies pressed throughout the health-care debate to allow people to keep the policy they had effective at the end of 2013. The consequences of the unusual March 23, 2010, cut-off date are now being felt. HHS, when it drafted the interim rules, estimated that between 40 and 67 percent of policies in the individual market are in effect for less than one year. “These estimates assume that the policies that terminate are replaced by new individual policies, and that these new policies are not, by definition, grandfathered,” the rules noted. (See page 34553.)
Moreover, it’s certainly incorrect to claim, as some Republicans have, that people are losing insurance coverage. Instead, in virtually all cases, it’s being replaced with probably better (and possibly more expensive) insurance.
In recent days, administration officials have argued that the plans that are going away are “substandard” and lacked essential protections — and that many people may qualify for tax credits to mitigate the higher premiums that may result from the new requirements.
“Now folks are transitioning to the new standards of the Affordable Care Act which guarantee you can’t be denied, you won’t be kicked off of a policy because you developed a problem, you may be eligible for tax credits, depending on your income,” said Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “So these are important protections that are now available through the Affordable Care Act.”
Or, as White House spokesman Jay Carney put it: “It’s correct that substandard plans that don’t provide minimum services that have a lot of fine print that leaves consumers in the lurch, often because of annual caps or lifetime caps or carve-outs for some preexisting conditions, those are no longer allowed — because the Affordable Care Act is built on the premise that health care is not a privilege, it’s a right, and there should be minimum standards for the plans available to Americans across the country.”
But such assertions do not really explain the president’s promise — or Jarrett’s tweet. There may be a certain percentage of people who were happy with their “substandard” plan, presumably because it cost relatively little. And while Jarrett claimed that “nothing” in the law is forcing people out of their plans “unless insurance companies change plans,” she is describing rules written by the president’s aides that were designed to make it difficult for plans to remain grandfathered for very long.
As the HHS footnote mentioned above stated: “We note that, as the Affordable Care Act is implemented, we expect grandfathered coverage to diminish, particularly in the individual market.”
The Pinocchio Test
The administration is defending this pledge with a rather slim reed — that there is nothing in the law that makes insurance companies force people out of plans they were enrolled in before the law passed. That explanation conveniently ignores the regulations written by the administration to implement the law. Moreover, it also ignores the fact that the purpose of the law was to bolster coverage and mandate a robust set of benefits, whether someone wanted to pay for it or not.
The president’s statements were sweeping and unequivocal — and made both before and after the bill became law. The White House now cites technicalities to avoid admitting that he went too far in his repeated pledge, which, after all, is one of the most famous statements of his presidency.
The president’s promise apparently came with a very large caveat: “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan — if we deem it to be adequate.”
Four Pinocchios
“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan — if we deem it to be adequate.”
yep, that was known when the ACA became law. junk insurance policies aka gateways to medical bankruptcy, were out. Obama badly misled. So one of you gun fellators should shoot him. Murder solves everything, right?
the Repugs should have gotten the out of the way, should never have sabotaged it. Dems helped Repugs launch Medicare Advantage and Part D, Repugs helped MA Dems launch Romneycare.Sounds like they should have defunded it
tea baggers and Repugs sabotaging ACA shows how low those mofo's have sunk into nihilistic anarchism.
Dems just have to kick the Repugs in the teeth with simple majority vote in the Senate. Dems gotta out crazy the mofos.
A Month in to Healthcare.gov, Real-Life Winners and Losers
Winners
On a very obvious level, winners include young adults who can now remain on their parents health plans until age 26.
They include consumers with medical ailments who have been denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.
They include residents of states that opted to expand their Medicaid programs for the poor to cover those with incomes of up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($15,856 for an individual and $32,499 for a family of four).
Losers
By contrast, losers include those with lower incomes who live in (RED REPUG TEA BAGGER) states that decided not to expand their Medicaid programs. The Daily Briefing run by the consulting firm The Advisory Board Co. had a smart look this summer at which states will have the most uninsured residents in 2016. Being uninsured means you’re losing out.
Also sure losers are undo ented immigrants, who are ineligible for benefits or subsidies under the act.
And for now, at least, small businesses lose out because of the Obama administration’s ongoing delays launching a health insurance marketplace for small businesses. (Healthcare.gov, by contrast, is an insurance marketplace for individual consumers.)
Too Soon to Say
Another group that many commentators count as losers are the hundreds of thousands of consumers who have received cancellation notices from their individual health insurance companies because their policies don’t meet criteria set forth in the Affordable Care Act.
I hesitate to call all of them losers because some of them will be eligible for subsidies from the federal government to offset the cost of their new health insurance, and others will pay less in the new marketplace for better coverage. To be sure, some people clearly will lose out because they will pay more for their coverage — and their benefits won’t be all that much better to offset it.
What Others Say
The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza had an interesting piece this week in which he spoke to economist Jon Gruber, who broke down winners and losers this way:
About eighty per cent of Americans are more or less left alone by the health-care act—largely people who have health insurance through their employers. About fourteen per cent of Americans are clear winners: they are currently uninsured and will have access to an affordable insurance policy under the A.C.A.
But much of the current controversy involves the six per cent of Americans who buy their own health care on the individual market, which the A.C.A. has dramatically reformed. Gruber argued that half of these people (three per cent of all Americans) will have little change to their polices. “They have to buy new plans, but they will be pretty similar to what they had before,” he said. “It will essentially be relabeling.”
The other half, however, also three per cent of the population, will have to buy a new product that complies with the A.C.A.’s more stringent requirements for individual plans. A significant portion of these roughly nine million Americans will be forced to buy a new insurance policy with higher premiums than they currently pay.
http://www.propublica.org/article/a-...ers-and-losers
You have been reported to the FBI you sick .
The ACA is doing fine sabotaging itself.
Not a knock on you SA, but the math on that it's hilariously bad... $360 million spread over 317 million people is slightly over $1 dollar per person.
lol no bro..I just shared it, was on fb. The remainder is prob part of the savings
Maybe the remainder is part of the savings
Health Care Shocker For N.J. Students Looking For Low-Cost Insurance
Some Students Have Been Left Without Insurance
October 31, 2013 8:22 PM
CRANFORD, N.J.(CBSNewYork) — It was a health care shocker for college students in New Jersey who found out that they can’t buy low-cost health insurance at their schools because of the Affordable Care Act.
Now, they are at the risk of being without insurance, CBS 2′s Christine Sloan reported.
Alex McTaggert is majoring in Computer Science but even he is having trouble signing up for health insurance on the Federal website.
“It said, ‘info you entered is not valid’ so I have to call this number,” McTaggart said.
For Carolina Mendonca it was easier to put together a creative Halloween costume than it was to call the number on the website.
“I got no answer so I left it for another day and the other day never came and I went to the dentist yesterday and I have to pay $2,000 out-of-pocket,” she said.
Many students have found themselves in health care limbo this semester. Community colleges in New Jersey used to offer cheap health insurance for hundreds of dollars a year but they had to drop the practice because Federal Law prohibits the sale of bare bones policies.
Under the Affordable Care Act it would have cost more to run the program and the cost would have been passed on to students.
“More than a thousand dollars per student and that is dramatically different,” said Union County Community College, Vice President of Administrative Services, Stephen Nacco said.
Students like Carlos Arias depended on the low-cost health care.
“I’m kind of healthy right now but I am worried that when something happens I’m not going to go to the hospital,” Arias said.
The college has started to help students sign up for affordable care through their website. Other students have remained on their parents plans.
“I am fortunate, but I feel for these students,” Gillian Cardona said.
Some schools have also offered more expensive health plans but have not required students to purchase them.
New Jersey recently repealed a law that required students to show proof of health insurance if they did not want to buy the school’s plan.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/10/...ost-insurance/
Would these students rather be considered idiots or suckers?
You posted:
But I read:
Too Stupid Asshole:
educate yourself as to size of the individual insurance market, how it's unaffordable for many people, and then how many bought junk insurance now forbidden by ACA.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/News...Consumers.aspx
Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare
10/31/2013 @ 3:33AM
0bama knew long ago millions were going to lose their health plans, but in order to get this steaming pile of passed he had to lie out his ass to the American people. Nixon was impeached for a much smaller lie than that.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapoth...der-obamacare/
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