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Obamacare Software Glitch Will Limit Penalties Charged To Smokers
turbosaab writes "The Obama administration has quietly notified insurers that a computer system glitch will limit penalties that companies may charge smokers under the new healthcare law. The underlying reason for the limitation is another provision in the health care law that says insurers can't charge older customers more than three times what they charge the youngest adults in the pool. The government's computer system has been unable to accommodate the two. So younger smokers and older smokers must be charged the same penalty, or the system will kick it out. A fix will take at least a year to put in place."
but this is just lack of effort.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Ain't it wonderful?
And I'm sooo certain it'll never be abused. Oh not. Not by such a wonderful government, where senior administration officials just love the Constitution, especially the Fifth Amendment....
I'm sorry, I can't do that, Dave.
I'm hoping that this is because there's too many other things in the pipeline that are more critical to get done first, and not because, say, the system is so badly written that this one relatively minor looking task will take a year.....
If it's the latter, then I'm in the wrong business.
Finding God in a Dog
The people get fucked even harder, and the healthcare system still makes obscene profits. I guess its a win-win situation, right?
-- Ethanol-fueled
With any luck the next President will be from the sensible party and officially postpone implementation of Obamacare indefinitely.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There aren't enough lawyers on the planet to keep these wheels on.
As a Canada with Government Health Care and nothing from work I must say this isn't that terrible and I am glad that US is tip toeing into prevent its citizens going broke when their health fails them. Though I really like to know how many packs a day the programmer who wrote that bug into the system smoked and how he/she/it demo around it at review and demos.
Life is like untied shoe laces; it always tripping you up and getting in your way.
should of been more on the lines of other systems.
At least the 30 hour rule fixes B.S like having an 39.5 hour work week with no benefits.
also helps contractors and temps get real plans as well killing off the joke care mini med plans.
After the story about the Govt. department smashing mice and keyboards because of malware and now this story I really think independent audits of technology vendors should be required in government. Obviously the auditors could be just as crooked as the contractor who suggested smashing mice with a hammer but I would hope if we got some real oversight the quality of technology products in the government would increase.
As a software engineer, this bug seems like it should have been caught early. I also don't really believe it would take a year to fix (imagine how many man hours that is). If there was a competitive company reviewing the code (or if it was open source), hopefully someone competent would be able to call B.S. on the "It will take a year to fix" statement. Without that oversight it is just speculation.
...find complex bugs.
Without the insurance companies in the middle of this Republican proposed and Democrat commandeered bastard faux-single-payer system, this would not have been an issue.
Until people realize that we effectively have two single-payer systems already in place - one for those under 65, aka the commercial insurance market, and one for those over 65, aka medicare - things will be more complex and more expensive than it needs to be.
So Slashdotters object to government collecting their metadata, but sticking its nose into every health decision is A-OK?
ObamaCare has 100x the potential for abuse the NSA does.
Even apart from socialized medicine starving people to death.
easier to jack up the pre pack tax then to bill each user on there tax forums.
This sounds more like a problem with the law than a problem with the software. It seems that it contradicts itself.
Can't say you weren't told it would be a fiasco.
With each new story on this or that problem with implementing some part of the Affordable Care Act, and given how the various parts of it interlocked to keep it from breaking down, I just get the impression that there's going to be chaos when it really gets going. Assuming that it's allowed to. At some point maybe everyone agrees that it's not implementable in its present form, like one of those gigantic software projects that crashes to the ground because it was ill-conceived to begin with and nobody can figure out how to make it work.
Obama, software glitches, and smoking.
It's like the holy trilogy of contentious Slashdot topics.
All we need now is to tie this into movie or music piracy somehow, and maybe sprinkle in some Scientology for good measure.
BRB, making popcorn.
Schnapple
And what else is new? They're called "smoke-filled rooms" for a reason.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I bet it's because Obama smokes, so he doesn't want to penalize himself.
it's a feature
who is better a CEO who wants a new BMW or the GOV?
We can ignore it?!?!?!
You better get your keyboard checked out. Your shift key seems to be sticking.
Oh, your English sucks too.
The government not comping with its own laws for technical reasons or otherwise is unacceptable.
I hope someone in a position to file a suit for not being able to setup the benefits as desired and legal way under the law will sue.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
...which would make sense, if collecting state-level stamp taxes had anything whatsoever to do with this problem.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Here's a chart showing how the exchanges are supposed to work. Just a system in which the public looks at different health plans from different providers would be complex enough, but note the links to the IRS, Treasury, Social Security, HHS, Homeland Security, and state Medicaid systems. This thing must be giving nightmares to even top IT pros.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Medicare, which begin in 1965, is roughly the same in complexity, and we survived it. The difference may be that Congress was willing to make adjustments back then, whereas now we have a polarized crew in DC and heading businesses.
Table-ized A.I.
My hope is that they scrapped her project because of the Oculus Rift. Valve has been active in porting Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 to the Oculus Rift and hopefully they scrapped her department because of the superior product outside their company. I have high hopes for augmented reality wherever it gets developed.
I knew the health care system in the US was ridiculously expensive but that this is allowed... Even in the new healthcare system proposed by the neoliberal party in the Netherlands insurance companies have to offer the same price for the basic insurance for everybody. Taxing some more than others would cause uproar. Some are suggesting to let smokers pay more but the usual response that in that case it would also be fair to let them pay less for their retirement pension usually cuts that off.
Well, as it looks, the whole set of issues with Obamacare come down to a single issue:
Our politicians are acting exactly like Mel Brooks' character in Blazing Saddles....
ie: lacking common sense and utterly un-punished for it...
Correction: "began in...".
Table-ized A.I.
... we should have what this guy's advocating:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE
Who the hell was that guy? Why didn't we elect him?
Reid and Pelosi wrote the health care law. They're probably writing the programming, too.
Wouldn't you want to penalize the younger smokers more to try and discourage smoking in the first place. Your older smoker is possible to have gotten addicted before people were aware of the health risk. Otherwise charging them the same penalty is the correct choice, and isn't so much as a bug but what seemed logical to the person writing the code at the time.
The problem is not Obamacare. The problem is the disgusting, predatorial healthcare system in the US. The problem is that the US doesn't follow every other developed country in the world and treats healthcare as a privilege instead of a right. As such, the monopolies that run the healthcare system exploit the lack of competitive pressure since people in the hospital frequently can't "shop around" for better & cheaper service. This leads to the practice of charging patients literally 10x to 100x what things actually cost.
The fact that the US even has to deal with such an unethical, predatorial system to begin with--instead of just offering universal healthcare--is what failed, not Obamacare itself. In fact, even though Obamacare itself is flawed, I'm hoping that at least the constitutionally-validated mandate will eventually lead to the US offering universal healthcare, since the current system is unsustainable and people are now required to have coverage. No matter how bad Obamacare is, I think it's still a step forward. Consider if it hadn't been implemented... then in 5 more years we'd be right back to town hall meetings with constiuents (and Sarah Palin) screaming about death panels, etc. At least there's a chance to get to universal health care from Obamacare: the mandate is a good excuse to have a government option at least.
Obamacare is bound to go poorly because the US healthcare system is shit. There's nothing Obamacare could do to be "good". We just need to fix our system.
last i checked smokers are already taxed when they buy their tobacco. obamacare is a good reason to stop paying your federal taxes.
Oh that's just Joe. Don't mind him; he's just borderline retarded.
Although I work a European health insurance company, I am almost completely ignorant of our US counterparts. Can they seriously charge - up to! - three times as much for older patients? In my country there's a solidarity principle. There is no adjustment of premiums based on demographics such as age, drinking or smoking - everyone pays the same, regardless of income. For those with minimum incomes there's a partial subsidy from the state. Everyone is mandated by law to have a health insurance policy. This means that noone's application can be rejected, either. Irrespective of your physical condition, insurers must accept everyone.
Must suck to be a smoker in the US and not being able to afford your lung cancer treatment. Might force people to do something silly like cook meth and build a drug empire.
With any luck the next President will be from the sensible party and officially postpone implementation of Obamacare indefinitely.
The sequestration act was intentionally lousy in the hopes that when faced with no choice but to allow it to go into effect, the politicians would take action and write a better bill. Similarly, the health insurance bailout act is total garbage that doesn't solve the terrible problems that exist in our terrible system. Hopefully now that it is coming close to being enacted people will actually sit down and write a law that fixes the system. For decades we have continued with doing nothing while the system has only fucked over more people. It is time that someone actually do something to fix this broken system. The rest of the industrialized world has a better system than ours, it is time we take into consideration that this is simply the wrong thing to do when dealing with life and death.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yes, the third has been violated in very recent history. If you count militarized police officers as soldiers: http://usahitman.com/hpafrohl/
The problem is not Obamacare. The problem is the disgusting, predatorial healthcare system in the US. The problem is that the US doesn't follow every other developed country in the world and treats healthcare as a privilege instead of a right. As such, the monopolies that run the healthcare system exploit the lack of competitive pressure since people in the hospital frequently can't "shop around" for better & cheaper service. This leads to the practice of charging patients literally 10x to 100x what things actually cost.
I think you are slightly confused. You have it right when you are talking about the lack of competitive pressure increasing prices, but the solution is not to remove even more competitive pressure by switching to one plan to rule them all, which is essentially what Obamacare does. (You can have "competiting" plans, but they have to be the same, or you get hit for having a "cadillac plan".) The solution is to restore competitive pressure by implementing things like healthcare spending accounts (HSA) etc. which would place the consumer in the drivers seat for their own care. "... but doctor, is there a less expensive med that I can take?" (or test, or proceedure, etc.)
But this is where others start complaining that this leaves out the poor, etc. since they can't afford to contribute to a HSA. (I am afraid I don't have a good answer, except to say that Obamacare isn't shaping up to fix this issue either.)
Don't forget, there are people in Canada who come to the US to use our "shit" system, because they can't get care in a reasonable time-frame in their socialized healthcare system. It is well and good to have a "right" to healthcare, but if you have to wait in line for a year to treat something that is going to kill you in six months without treatment, it doesn't do you any good.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Does this include provisions to exempt electronic cigarette users?
This is just the way the rules are written. The ratios between prices for policies for younger people and older people are checked after the smoking penalty is added on. The ratio cannot exceed 3x. So it is not possible to charge a much smaller penalty to younger smokers than for older smokers without breaking that rule.
It may be more of a case of unintended consequences, or legislators and bill writers that can't do math. The article says a fix will take a year, but doesn't say why. I suspect it is because either a legislative fix will be required or HHS will just rewrite the rule on it's own and has to go through the regular proposed rule-making/comment period/final rule-making rig-amoral.
But why are we choosing to charge smokers more? I thought smoking was an addiction and we are supposed to offer health care regardless of pre-existing condition?
Are we going to charge single women or "slutty" women more for reproductive health care because, like, they shouldn't be "doing it"?
Are we going to charge fat persons more?
Are we going to charge people more if they admit to other drug dependencies?
Are we going to charge gay men more unless they can prove they are monogamous? Straight men more unless they can prove they are not "cheating"?
And how do we enforce this? If we catch you smoking and we cancel your health insurance? Put you in jail?
What about an occasional cigar smoker or someone who takes a drag when "a joint is passed around"?
Are the authorities going to stick a OBD-II dongle in your car to make sure you aren't driving too fast?
What about drinking and binge drinking? Are you going to get a rate break for abstaining, and does your rate go up if someone spots you taking a sip of champaign at a wedding?
That same good ol' NRA that is against taking away the guns of people that have used said guns to physically threaten their ex-partners? Yup. No logic at all.
The system can't charge a discounted penalty for younger smokers.
So its not that the system will limit, its actually that the system won't limit the penalties.
Instead of leveling the playing field by making insurance compulsory for everyone, how about we just do away with insurance altogether. Just add up the salaries and bonuses for all those insurance execs and you'll have a good rough estimate of the potential savings. Instead of companies paying increasing premiums each year, pay employees better wages (and I do me employees, not upper management). Maybe we could even concentrate on making health care more affordable. If the hospitals don't have insurance to milk, maybe they won't insist on an MRI for every-damn-thing. We won't need to charge smokers and the obese higher premiums; they'll just have to pay their own damn bills like everyone else. Will this mean some people can't afford the care they need? Absolutely. We should try to keep that to a minimum, but ultimately we could use a bit more Spartan in us. Some people are just born unhealthy. Those people will either be successful enough to pay for the care they need, or die. There's already enough piss in our gene pool. If you want society to take care of you, try being an asset to society.
The software did not implement what the law says. The could just fix the software to make it allow for what the law says. But the bureaucracy won't allow just fixing the software because ... apparently this was all contracted out, and they have to do an all new contract to have it fixed. So not only will it take a year or more, but it will cost at least 3.75 million dollars to do it because the old computers with the wrong software will have to be smashed and replaced with all new computers, including new mice, with the new software.
Your tax dollars at waste.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What cracks me up is the people who claim that difficulties mean the sky is falling. Every major change in anything requires iterations to get right. Stupid criticism is not relevant except for identifying the stupid people.
if you'd ever written any software or worked on any project at full scale in the real world you'd recognize this as the kind of small issue every major system works through.
...which would make sense, if collecting state-level stamp taxes had anything whatsoever to do with this problem.
1. There are also federal taxes on cigarettes.
2. States cover lots of medical expenses, so if the real concern was defraying the (imaginary) additional healthcare costs of smokers, all state cigarette taxes could be dedicated to healthcare expenditures instead of the general fund.
If you are addicted to their propped up carcinogens and manipulated nicotine levels. They don't care if you get sick or die. Let the government charge those companies for manslaughter and fine them $100.00 for every pack of cigarettes they sell. That should clear out half the hospitals and satisfy the government's lack of control over these run away corporations.
Or it might be an inadequate spec.
So what does the law say? I looked up Section 2701(a)(1)(A) where the two ratios are specified. 1.5:1 for tobacco use vs. non-tabacco use, and a maximum 3:1 ratio for adults. This section doesn't say anything about whether the age rating limit should be applied after or before the tobacco rating limit is applied. Someone should have thought of this when drafting the law.
You might be able to make an argument that it should work either way. Did HHS ever issue guidance on how to apply this section of the law or was it intentionally or unintentionally left vague?
The murderer is EDS with dot-net in citrix. Am I getting warm?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seriously. Google it. It was outsourced. God Bless America, and the H1-B.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The smoking penalty applies to INDIVIDUAL policies. Individual policies have mostly been subject to underwriting which takes into account the age, sex, and health of the applicant before setting the price of the policy. Smoking has been part of this equation for both health and life insurance policies for DECADES.
If obamacare prohibited health insurance companies from charging smokers more for health insurance the same brain dead teabaggers whining about the smoking penalty will whine about the government meddling with the insurance companies giving smokers a free pass.
What's next, people complaining that drunk drivers have to pay more for car insurance?
In the so called "socialist country" (sweden/germany/france) we do not have a penalty if you smoke. You do not pay more. Frankly it seems to be really a US habits of making stuff more complex and try to punish people on the side for bad habits in law. If you had made the law without such exception, the law would be 1) easier 2) you would not have to make the expansive (more than zero) change 3) software would have been cheaper to design. And what does it makes of a change to have a penalty ? Probably not much in the long run.
Really, you do not need to reinvent the wheel. If you wanted socialized medicine, you could have made it simpler and consulted specialist (european country) rather than make the complicated horror you got.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"In US political dialogue, "socialism" is just a vague term used to smear people or plans that you don't like." , oh man, they must really hate police and fire station, one of the socialized service in the US ;).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
based on my experience in the fed. Getting through the procurement and contracting process is a job in itself. The contractor will claim a different interpretation of requirements and it will be charged as growth work, which will push the schedule...Or, perhaps they have a build schedule that they are sticking to. Is this software live or just in beta testing?
The lazy fed worker is just a tired stereotype,
#1 My group in a gov agency that competes with private industry all the time and have underbid private industry and OEMs on jobs, and we have completed the jobs SAT without rework
#2 we have identified and corrected flaws that required our OEMs to reevaluate their quality control systems.
#3 Getting hands on training or "bootcamp" style training for software and systems that we work with is almost impossible. It's as if the concept of enrichment is foreign.
#4 Private industry has a place in government because they pay more for talent and they (may) have a great depth and breadth of experience. However, maintaining those systems once delieverd is not outside of our ability(at least that's my eval of myself and some of my coworkers experience with our systems). The fed encourages pushing the 'heavy-lifting' into the private sector(see #3), often to our detriment, not necessarily because the contractor is bad but the restrictions in contracting make integrating with the contractor a PITA!
At this point, I am considering paying for my own skill building and hope that our agency stays alive long enough for me to make a career and switch to private industry with enough time to qualify for some bit of a pension..
is in invisible ink ;-)
1. If it was an IRS computer glitch that prevented the IRS from collecting a few extra dollars from everybody, you can be damned sure it would be fixed in less than a year.
But, as usual, it's someone else's money.
2. I'm surprised someone doesn't sue -- the law says one thing, the software does another -- the government has no power whatsoever to force you to behave (and lose money) according to faulty software.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Medicare promises to give all seniors lots of exotic and expensive heathcare, which it does indeed "provide" but it does this by underpaying hospitals and doctors, who in-turn must make up the difference by "cost-shifting" the difference to their other patients. Those patients who are low-income Americans without insurance or illegal aliens are, of course, unable to pay the inflated prices for healthcare (the costs for the illegals are in fact generally not pursued at all because it would cost money and it's presumed they have no money even though a particular alien might have a home and car and savings in his/her home country) and these patient costs are further cost-shifted onto the remaining pool of patients. The remaining pool of patients who end-up paying for ALL the cost shifting are the people with private health insurance. These people get billed $10.00 for an aspirin pill, $15.00 for a band-aid, etc (not because hospitals are evil, but because of cost-shifting) and so their health insurance rates go up and up. All the rising healthcare costs trace back to government mandated low-reimbursment rates for selected groups of voters... the cost shifting that occurs because government claims to provide free or low-cost healthcare to various constituencies. None of this was happening before the federal government started Medicare
Medicare advantage was put in place because there are many American seniors who live in small towns who payed-in to the medicare system throughout their working years but then did not get a fair shake in their retirement years... traditional Medicare might work well in big cities with lots of docs and clinics and hospitals but if you live in a place with only three docs and medicare reimbursement is so low non will take medicare patients, then your traditional medicare scheme is just a scam to rip-off hard working people in "fly-over" country and provide benefits to residents of NYC and LA.
Your problem, is that you refuse to face reality... medicare was never going to be solvent and has been doomed since day one; like any ponzi scheme, it was setup to provide people with far more than they paid for (and to make-up the difference by passing-on the extra costs to future generations). Such a scheme can only last as long as each new generation is both much larger and much wealthier than the preceding generation; it looked great in 1965 with American high-tech employment, aerospace employment, car manufacturing, steel mills, coal mines, oil fields, etc booming, and a wave of "baby boom" babies being born. Unfortunately, with all the great manufacturing jobs exported or shutdown to "save the planet" and baby boomers unable to afford to have even enough kids to replace themselves (and replacement workers being brought-in from the third world at the bottom of the pay scale) the basic economic insanity of the plan is obvious. Medicare has become a giant beast that consumes an ever-growing portion of the federal budget... so much so that even the Obama admin has admitted under oath on capitol hill that all the US government computer models for the US budget fail in about 2030... there's no way to close the budget gaps beyond that time. This stuff needs fixing NOW... it'll be VERY unpleasant to be a person trying to retire in 2030 or later if nobody makes changes now to soften the crunch
to any health care worker or anyone for that matter.
he just wanted to safe money in later life ;)
Except when it comes to smoking. Or trans fats. Or sodas. Or seatbelts. Or motorcycle helments.
Come to think of it, that phrase seems to only apply to the right to kill another human because they are an inconvenience.
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And now we see just how much better government run health care will be! Maybe the guys who put the limit in place were smokers!
You are assuming these things are connected. They are not.
The health providers and drug companies charge what they can regardless of what they are charged elsewhere. That's business.
What they can charge (in the US) is high because the ability of the customer to discriminate and choose based on price has been erased by a third party that does the direct paying. Nor is the government mandating prices for health provision universally, they are mandating prices for a minority of customers based on their status as a big customer.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I thought cigarette taxes were supposed to cover the costs to society of smoking. Where is that money going, then, if it's not being used to cover those costs?
This was new to me as well.
http://lungcancer.about.com/od/Lung-Cancer-And-Smoking/a/Third-Hand-Smoke.htm
You may have valid points there, but it's hard to ignore the parenthetical "imaginary" as your primary proclamation. Back that one up, and then the other two points become worth looking at.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Law cannot be changed, nor policy arbitrarily created just by adding a software bug. If this isn't fought it will set a bad precedent.