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Obamacare Exchanges Months Behind In Testing IT Data Security
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"The federal government is months behind in testing data security for the main pillar of Obamacare: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1. The missed deadlines have pushed the government's decision on whether information technology security is up to snuff to exactly one day before that crucial date, the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general said in a report. As a result, experts say, the exchanges might open with security flaws or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.'They've removed their margin for error,' said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. 'There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint.' The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance."
By the history of large government IT projects, this is pretty well normal. The DOD, IRS, and just about every large department has had anything from minor to major disasters when setting up or updating systems.
I think too much of this is due to government bidding requirements that put too much emphasis on who you know more than what you know. I have seen too many stories where competence is the last thing looked at for contractors.
"hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance."
Why would anyone provide a social security number to be used for medical purposes?
Obamacare failing doesn't serve anyone's interests. And it won't succeed. Its too poorly set up to do anything but fail.
So if you want socialized medicine... this will only make your idea appear stupid or your political allies too inept to execute such a plan.
If you don't want socialized medical care this will effectively give it to you anyway... but it will be even more expensive... badly run... and generally all the negatives will be more negative.
So lets not do this... kill it and restart the debate on it. Does that mean the supporters will have to ACTUALLY get support for their program this time instead of sneaking it through? Yes. But they should have done that in the first place and this is so screwed up in large part because they broke the rules.
I know what the supporters are going to say... that they followed the letter of the law. Possibly by the narrowest possible definition. But you know damn well that you broke the spirit of the law in half getting there.
That said, that isn't the point of my post. My point is that indifferent to all that, Obamacare is unfixable. It needs to be put down like a rabid dog and THEN we can evaluate what our options are after that. But causing American insurance premiums to double is not in any one's interest. Stop it.
If you care about the poor. Stop it.
If you care about jobs. Stop it.
If you care about the country. Stop it.
At this point, the only reason to support it is ego... aka fear of looking like a fool after investing so much political capital into the issue... or ignorance.
That's all that's left.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Obama health care plan is less ambitious than the health care plan propose by Richard M Nixon in 1974.
Health care was a lot less ambitious in 1974. That predates open heart surgery, organ transplants, joint replacements, most cancer treatments, MRI, CAT scan, and even the discovery that ulcers were caused by H. pylori.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Why is it that I'm seeing half the stories on Slashdot, after they spent a day or two on Drudge Report? Especially ones that are only slightly "News for nerds" material?
Are that many /.ers closet Drudge readers?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
social security number = ID and citizenship check
Forcing successful people to pay for insurance for the dregs of society is just wrong.
Exactly, that's why I love public health insurance. I don't have to buy a 3rd yacht some insurance exec whose daddy got him a cushy job. I get better health care and CHEAPER then I ever got with my garbage "high end" health insurance in the states. Yeah I may pay a bit more than a poor person(and probably pay some of their share), but not having to support worthless execs means that it is cheaper than that private garbage.
Before mouthing off about costs, how about do a little research? Like the fact that the US spends roughly 2x as much(as a % of GDP) than any other industrialized nation(who all have public health insurance) and yet the health outcomes are not any better for all that cash spent. Oh I'm sorry, did I use facts with a Republican? My mistake.
Monstar L
Please explain what is so different about the USA that Obamacare-like systems work in pretty much the entire civilized world except the USA.
Is the rest of the civilized world so incredibly brilliant, is the USA so incredibly retarted, or is it just you?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Why's that? My brother is self employed and his insurance premiums have so far doubled under the "affordable care act". I don't know mine exactly only because I'm under a group policy through work, though with the numbers they post for what my insurance is worth, that's gone up by roughly $1000 a year and I'm single, early 30s, non-smoker, and at 5 foot 10 and 170 lbs, not exactly obese. As another data point, I'm currently working on my masters, and we are automatically enrolled in the campus health insurance plan and have to waive it. It was $798 PER SEMESTER! And it's not what I'd call great coverage. When I did my undergrad it was like 200 a semester, and I graduated in 2006. Not like it was eons ago.
I'd say calling obamacare a cluster is quite accurate so far. Seriously, can anybody come forward and say that their insurance premiums are cheaper now? I heard that the minimum coverage in cali was estimated to be something like 340 a month for a family of 4. Thats pretty much a BMW car payment. Not what I call affordable.
Let's face it: prevention is not profitable for the medical industrial complex. Waiting for things to be come an emergency means the costs are much higher and the hospitals (all most all owned by huge corporations) either get paid or write off the bad debt to offset taxes. Prevention just can't offer the revenue potential.
What's even dumber is the concept of state-level exchanges.
A primary driver of high health-care costs is the balkanization of healthcare across states.
Allow the voluntary harmonization of various states' health care codes, which would in turn allow insurance providers to offer the same plan in several states. The 'health care exchanges' offered in the Obamacare bill would have been a perfect opportunity to allow capitalism to work to lower costs and increase competitive pressures - this plan merely ossifies the state-level segmentation of the marketplace.
-Styopa
Amusingly, despite the government=bureaucracy equation that many people seem to assume, one of the big benefits is how much less bureaucratic it is, too. When I moved from the US to Denmark, my health care got immensely simpler. In the US, I had to read tons of fine print to buy insurance in the first place; then fill out claim forms, separate ones for each provider (if you end up in a hospital you will be billed separately for the hospital bed, for the anesthesiologist, for the laboratory work, etc.), then lawyer about these on the phone as they were inevitably filled out incorrectly and various claims were denied until the second or third try.
Now everything Just Works and I don't have to fill out a damn piece of paper ever. Well, I had to fill out one: when I moved to the country I had to fill out an application for the health-insurance card. It took about 15 minutes, and came in the mail two days later.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Please explain what is so different about the USA that Obamacare-like systems work in pretty much the entire civilized world except the USA.
The only thing wrong here is your assumption that there are other Obamacare-like systems elsewhere in the world.
is the USA so incredibly retarded
This. Due to the massive cost increases in health care that Obamacare encourages, I'm not even sure it'll succeed in its alleged primary goal, improving health care coverage.
And the law is so bad that allies of the people who passed the law are trying hard to get out from being covered by the law. There's been a series of waivers of various provisions of Obamacare that went to allies of the President and certain congresspeople. I'm sure we all appreciate the passage of laws which are supposed to be for our own good and for which the allies of the people who advocated the laws are at least partially exempt.
Like hell you don't pay a damned thing. Ever heard of taxes? Worse, there's a lot of corruption here hiding massive healthcare failures, including huge numbers of people who are now dead who shouldn't be due to poor care. I wouldn't hold up the UK's socialised healthcare system as an example to follow.
Heart surgery was first done in the 50s.
Organ transplants started in the 1900s, but major organs like kidneys in the 1950s.
Joint replacement was a little earlier in the we were replacing hips by 1948.
They were less common, but by 1974 all those were happening.
Why can't I at least opt for it if I have a "good plan". I have had this "good plan" and actual socialised medicine. I would love to go back to that system. Instead of finding out if my treatment will be covered or not only after it has happened.
A public option should have been made available.
Odd. One has to wonder how does pretty much all of Europe manage to finance that. Is Europe a so much more powerful economy that they can throw such incredible amounts of money into their "socialist" healthcare, or how do they do it? And most of all, can the US copy it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The effective income tax rate (i.e. taking into account exclusions and the different brackets) is more like 35-40% for a middle-class family. You don't pass even a 50% effective rate until you're making well north of €200k/yr.
And note that this rate includes health-care, which in the U.S. is billed separately. It also includes university education, which in the U.S. is billed separately. If you add up what a typical American pays for [federal income tax + state income tax + payroll tax + student-loan payments + healthcare premiums/copays], it's higher than what most Danes pay if you're in a middle-class bracket. The comparison is even more favorable to Denmark if you're an entrepreneur: once you add in that self-employed Americans have to pay double payroll taxes (15.3%) and have to buy individual health insurance, Denmark starts to look a lot cheaper!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It was so sad and funny at the same time - during the London Olympics open ceremony, while they were riding bicycles around heaping praise on their awesome National Health Service, General Electric ran a commercial about how they'd donated a bunch of neonatal incubators to a hospital in London because the NHS couldn't afford it!
Awesome health care, indeed.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Campus health care is often a scam. The University is getting a kickback for signing you up. They want the cheapest plans for the employees they care about, not some grad students.
$340 is not a BMW payment, more like a normal car payment for a normal term loan. A cheaper BMW like the base 3 series sedan goes for $32550, a 60 month term at 1% interest would result in a $556.40 monthly payment.
Minimum coverage costs have gone up now that minimum coverage actually has to cover something. Some of those very cheap plans had low lifetime cost ceilings. Meaning when you needed it most, like you had a major medical problem, you would run out of insurance coverage.
If the exchanges are to be run by the states, why is the federal government responsible for their IT data security? The states want more flexibility and responsibility, let them manage that aspect on their own.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
What will happen next is you will end up in the ER for a real medical condition, the hospital will write it off and I and other taxpayers will be stuck paying. If you are very lucky someone like my mother will get the hospital to transfer you from the ER to a regular bed and they will pay for your treatment as an act of charity. Then the hospital will have even more cost to write off and for the rest of us to pay.
If you are less lucky you will be treated only in the ER and released to die at home. Cheaper for the taxpayer, but clearly not the superior choice.
Where did you get these numbers? Their are low cost plans for those who cannot pay.
The only article that even seems to come close is one from the Daily Mail. As usual they do not cite their sources nor do they get commentary from anyone but an alarmist charity.
How about some actual citations?
The Daily Mail has had people make up stories to fit their viewpoint.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/173261/daily-mail-reporter-cant-explain-how-false-report-got-published/
The other option of course being what we have in the USA that people simply die from lack of treatment.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/insurance-24-year-dies-toothache/story?id=14438171
Before you claim that man was stupid try to remember the pain he was in. No one makes good decisions in that kind of state.
From a purely precedent standpoint, the OP is at least somewhat correct. This is the first time in the history of the US that any government - federal, state, or local - has been given the power to force a citizen (with the threat of fines and arrest) to purchase a commercial product. It was very obvious that Obama wanted to make this a precedent - he didn't take the easy way out and claim it was a tax, he wanted it to be clear that this was a new power for government.
Think about it a little - what other things can you think of that a citizen is required to do by a government as a result of being born and NOT as the result of a personal choice?
* Must you have a SSN? Nope. You are not required to apply for one.
* Do you have to pay taxes? If you choose to not work, no job, no income, no taxes (I assume your family is willing to support you).
* Do you have to attend public school? No, you can be home-schooled or just not attend (your parents might get in trouble if the gov't knows about you, or you could've been born at home).
The only thing I can think of is that males of a certain age must register for the draft. That's literally all, except now you must also buy insurance.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
That's not true at all. We don't hear about it because a government body was set up under the last government with the remit to hide failures and prevent them coming to light, under the euphemism Care Quality Commission. The Commission has two jobs, (1) to cover up its own failings and (2) to cover up its own failings. It also occasionally provides cursory inspections of hospitals, failing to publish the truth about poor practice at any available opportunity.
The only reason we're hearing about it now is because of some very brave relatives. Also remember that UK FOI is much weaker than US FOI.
Nationalized, rationed healthcare is no problem while you are healthy. But when you get sick (and sooner or later you will), you face things like this:
Since when do private insurance companies not ration care? Many have yearly and lifetime limits on coverage amounts. Many will deny or try to weasel out of paying for covering treatments. It's quite easy to find numerous cases of people dying because their insurance company denied them coverage.
We don't ballyhoo our [non-existent] National Health Service to the world as the pinnacle of Socialism while accepting charity from a country we look down our noses at for being uncivilized and barbaric with regard to health care.
It would be like us claiming our system is perfect in the face of Obamacare while accepting donations of chicken bones and rattles from Amazonian witch doctors.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Problems with your argument:
- GP didn't say what party (if any) he was affiliated with;
- Obamacare does nothing to enforce a ceiling on health care costs-- it just forces you to a lowest-common-denominator pool if you can't afford it,
- The GP didn't say the current system was OK, so you've created a false dilemma by claiming that if he doesn't like Obamacare, then he must be OK with the status quo.
- Obamacare is not single-payer, so claiming that we will get results similar to nations with single payer is supported by nothing.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Sometimes private companies do deny treatments, and I find this immoral. But we have a legal system in place to punish them. When the NHS lets you die because cancer treatments cost too much, the subject has no recourse. The government is supreme, and holds the power of life and death over you.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The current system is a bigger clusterf**k than anything you're imagining.
which they turn around and fund their R&D with.
They'd like you to believe that. And it seems that you do. Sure, some do some R&D. But all use a lot of that money for fat bonuses for their execs, and other dubious purposes such as advertising. I have not heard of insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield doing any research at all. Those who do, don't do much basic R&D. Instead they lean on publicly funded institutions of higher education for that. They get a free ride there. What good is the heavy advertising they do for name brand drugs? Why are these ads aimed at patients? Most patients are not medical professionals. Then, what of the money they spend on "intellectual property" to "protect" their precious drugs? Some of the monies that should be spent on our health goes towards lobbyists whose jobs are to persuade or bribe government to shore up monopolies and destroy competition. And the whole thing is aided and abetted by people like you who blindly believe in Big Pharma and friends.
Formerly free society? You talk like our current health care system is some paragon of competitive efficiency. It's not. It's full of fraud and waste. It's dirty pool. Price controls? There's an excellent method of price control: Competition. Too bad there isn't much competition, not that there's scope for it in all areas. But where there could be competition, there isn't. A person who needs emergency medical treatment obviously has no time or opportunity to comparison shop. Such people are the perfect captive consumers who routinely get bilked. It is no coincidence that our care is geared towards emergencies and not prevention. Obamacare has a lot of flaws, not least thanks to Republican attempts to deliberately screw it up. But it's a start. The medical community has only themselves to blame for bringing this upon them. They've had decades to demonstrate the effectiveness of the current system. Instead, they've abused their position of authority, their power, to bleed us all.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I would guess that most actual socialists who wanted actual universal health care are, like me, really disappointed with ACA. Far-right Republicans like to slam ACA as being "socialized medicine" when it's really just a massive handout to private insurance companies.
I am still amused by people that complain that ACA will suddenly put their health care decisions in the hands of bureaucrats. Apparently they don't understand how it works now.
I would assume this fellow is, since he stated he would have to stop eating to pay that.
Then he could also pay the fine. Why there is no public option I still do not understand.
Honestly, I have never seen ONE Government IT or IS project that was not staffed by morons and run by bigger morons. Why the hell cant they hire people that have a clue? And on top of that hire people to manage it that have the balls and authority to tell any elected official to "DIAF" any time they suggest something stupid?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm glad to see it's not working,
What's not working? The parts that are implemented are working just fine.
And why would you be glad? You want people to not be able to see a doctor? Really?
I don't respond to AC's.
look at greece. the facts are that they cant afford it.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Awesome health care, indeed.
Anecdotal evidence which is easily trumped by, you know, actual research (key chart starts on page 18). It turns out that by any objective measure, the NHS gets better results than the US does: The UK is in the top 20, the US is competing with Costa Rica, Cuba, and Slovenia. And if you want to see really all-out socialized medicine, check out France, sitting comfortably as the best in the world.
A big part of what's going on is that your perception of health care is coming from your own experiences using it as someone who probably has a good job and decent insurance. It completely ignores the experiences of those who have a bad job and no insurance. The US has a health care underclass, and you aren't in it, so you don't notice how badly the people in it are treated.
I am officially gone from
Denmark's population is also ~5 million. There is no guarantee that the system there could scale to the entire United States. Most countries with actual efficient public medicine are more akin to a single state (eg. Canada is well down the efficiency curve at only 30 million) than to all the states combined. While the system may be more efficient for a combination of more than one person (eg. 1 million), scalability matters.
... much of the paperwork in the states is likely government mandated. Finally, the discussion here is about Obamacare, which is nothing like the model you're touting in Denmark. It does in fact seem to be worse than what it replaces, which is a funny way to move forward ...
Also, your claim about government = bureaucracy
If one can look at Europe's huge deficits, debt, and unfunded liabilities - which are not even included in their debt numbers - and say they can afford it...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It amazes me that libertarian health reformers -- while they have some good ideas -- are blind to the fact that "free" markets themselves have corruption and abuse. Government isn't an all-or-nothing affair. It is a question of whether the government solution has more or less corruption than the private solution. That is an empirical question, not an ideological debate. If the government solution has less corruption, then why prop up some corrupt plutocrat?
In Britain, doctors get paid for patients they have who do not visit. That's a financial incentive to keep people healthy. My health plan (in the US) gives free preventative services. I've lived in Australia and Canada, and they have vastly superior and cheaper healthcare systems than the US -- and that includes preventative services. But my US healthcare, whilst much more expensive, is vastly inferior to what I got in Australia (in particular)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Very few people successfully sue an insurance company. So actually unless you're a multi-millionaire who can hire the best lawyers possible you're unlikely to get any legal recourse. But at that point you likely didn't need insurance. Oh and if you died you can't get any recourse either way.
At least that is an attempt at treatment. I am speaking about someone dying because they had to decide between a painkiller and an antibiotic.
In the USA if left to the states the whole middle of the country would have no health care for those that could not afford it. Neither would the south.
I would consider myself very libertarian minded... What I've often said that I wouldn't mind seeing is a migration from currently federally paid for health care options (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, Federal Employees) to be migrated to a Federally Initiated non-profit health insurance company. The spending shouldn't go up, but it should allow for better management. From there, you could migrate the federally funded state level initiatives to said program and open it up to individual contribution. You could then allow for businesses to "sign up".
This would not be forced upon anyone not already getting federal benefits, but would allow for a baseline of competition. Much in the same way FedEx, UPS and others exist despite the USPS (whose own mismanagement, or inability to adapt not withstanding). This would force more competition instead of less, and allow for a baseline for anyone to buy into as an option.
From there, I would require all employers (of persons who work more than 10 hours a week) to provide health insurance at least as good as the baseline. None of the exceptions that are in Obamacare. And the reason for the 10 hour baseline, is the abuse of some businesses to have more "part time" workers to avoid providing coverage.
I know that some of these suggestions are far more about pragmatism than a libertarian idealogy... just the same, there are plenty of ways to provide broader coverage without a solution that makes things worse in reality.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
You do understand that the only thing that's going to change is the way that some people buy insurance, right? That government is not going to have a bigger hand in healthcare than it already has? That the exchanges exist to allow people to buy individual insurance from the big private insurers like Blue Cross, Tufts, and so forth? That the 'public option' died an ignominious death before the ACA passed? That insurers are still free to charge whatever exorbitant premiums they like, so long as they spend at least 80 cents on the dollar on actual care and not executive bonuses? That insurers will still be free to assign whatever arbitrary "guidelines" they like regarding what THEY think is appropriate care (instead of, say YOUR DOCTOR)? That government subsidies to the poor so they can afford coverage are really just Medicaid reconfigured (in other words, the taxpayers were paying for their insurance ALREADY)?
The ACA makes some minor changes to the rules about when a private insurer can decline to insure someone (no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps on coverage, etc) but that's really about it. While it's not going to impact quality of care, it also isn't going to fix the thing that is REALLY wrong with healthcare in the USA: Companies and shareholders can make money off of other people having cancer. For-profit companies shouldn't be able to enter the healthcare market. Their profit motive (spend as little on care as you can) puts money in the pockets of the rich while denying prescription formula to starving babies.
If you read the phrase "Government takeover of healthcare" without instantly thinking "Well that's total bullshit" please punch yourself in the crotch.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
We do not nurture people to adulthood as a society. That is the responsibility of the parents.
I take it you've never heard of Child Services?
If we're going to say the government is the be all and end all, then why not go whole hog?
You mean why not go all slippery slope?
Your health is your responsibility, not mine.
Couldn't you apply the same logic to protection? "Can't afford a gun? Can't afford to protect your family!" How about education? "Can't afford an education? More jobs for *my* kids!"
That said, you asked what the benefits were, there they are. Your mechanic died due to lack of healthcare? Oh well, it's gonna take longer to get your car fixed and we're gonna have to charge extra to hire and train a new guy. Or do underpaid professionals not get sick in your world?
The main point is that society puts an investment in its citizens because *surprise* the citizens are part of the wealth of the country. If we lose 5% of our productive hours due to preventable or treatable illnesses, what would that do to our GDP?
Second point? Not everybody that gets sick deserves it and is a worthless human being. Get that through your head. Sometimes you're better off fixing something than throwing it away.
Let's make government our protectors and we can all share in the grief of higher taxes without personal responsibility.
Nice straw man. Just look at our current taxes + cost of private insurance (don't forget to include the portion your employer pays) vs what other countries with *better* systems pay in taxes + zero private, you'll see we're getting ripped off.
So to summarize, the problems with your arguments:
* You failed to address the facts presented (benefits of ensuring a healthy populace - see original post)
* You employed several logical fallacies (Slippery slope, straw man)
* You presented the same talking points (we get it, you don't want to pay for anything that would benefit other people) while failing to advance the discourse.
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