Slashdot Mirror
Tech In the Hot Seat For Oct. 1st Obamacare Launch
bednarz writes "In four days, the health insurance marketplaces mandated by the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act are scheduled to open for business. Yet even before the sites launch, problems are emerging. Final security testing of the federal data hub isn't slated to happen until Sept. 30, one day before the rollout. Lawmakers have raised significant concerns about the ability of the system to protect personal health records and other private information. 'Lots and lots of late nights and weekends as people get ready for go-live,' says Patrick Howard, who leads Deloitte Consulting's public sector state health care practice."
The democrats really have no idea how mad they've made some people. This thing is intolerable. And I and those I support in politics will go for pretty much whatever option is open to frustrate or destroy it.
Understand... this will not be worth it for the democrats. They've stuck their foot into something that has grown larger and more involved and enflamed more passions then they could comprehend.
Their reactions throughout have been "so what" "what's the big deal"... they don't get it.
Every trick in the book is on the table with this thing. By hook, crook, nail, and claw... this thing is going down or it will be so horribly scrambled that the democrats will wish it did die.
Politically, the republicans were completely sidelined for this thing. Utterly emasculated. To survive as a political organization, the republicans need to so thoroughly annihilate this move that the democrats for generations to come remember it.
Anything less and we transition to a one party system.
Let me opt out and we have peace. That's all we've ever wanted in this venture. Let people vote with their feet. If its such a great program you wont' need to force people to join it. If you do need to force people then its not actually a great program you irredeemable lying aholes.
Doubtless I'm going to get some snarky replies from some democrats. That's fine. Game on, stooges.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't provide a " -1: Commenter is an idiot option", so I'll have to try to provide you with a clue. Brace yourself.
We are not discussing health insurance, and the ACA does not provide for it. The ACA is about health care coverage, and that is different.
Insurance is intended to protect against unforeseen or rare events, not expected costs. Auto insurance covers against collisions and theft, but it doesn't provide payouts for oil changes, tune-ups, tire rotation, etc. Homeowner's insurance will pay to repair or rebuild your home in the event of fire or disaster, but does not cover costs associated with maintaining the property or structure.
Actual heath insurance would cover serious injury or illness but would not cover regular doctor visits, routine check-ups, most medications and so forth. But that we don't have health insurance, we have a sorta-kinda-halfassed subsidy program for heath care we mistakenly refer to as insurance. And it is price opaque. In other words, you do not see the actual amount of the subsidy. You have no idea what the true cost of service is.
And that is the problem AlphaWolf was talking about. If it was obvious up front that you would be charged twelve dollars for a generic aspirin, no one would pay. If you knew that you were going to be billed 175 bucks for waiting an hour and than having a fifteen minute chat with a doctor, no one would go. Health care coverage hides cost and distorts the market, driving prices up.
Imagine that auto insurance worked the same way as so-called heath insurance. When you needed an oil change, you would take your car to an approved facility, hand over your insurance card, pay a co-pay and then get a paper saying 'paid by insurance'. With no dollar amount. An oil change might cost a hundred dollars. And why not? If you only pay the co-pay, what do you care if your insurance company gets bilked? It's not your money, after all.
(that non-partisan analysis group dems love to cite) said (just last week) that Obamacare will bankrupt the country. Social Security and Medicare are indeed good examples where the Democrats lied about the costs, demographics, levels of regulation, etc as they jammed a new program through... then the program had such a massive displacing effect in the markets that it destroyed all alternatives, then the middle class got hooked on it (because the alternatives were destroyed) but then the costs ballooned (exactly as Republicans had predicted/feared) and the federal government is being destroyed by it. During Obama's 5 years in office, the national debt has gone from $10 Trillion to $17 Trillion and it will cross the $20 trillion line by the time he leaves office (Obama alone will have doubled the national debt). The national debt does NOT even include all the promised future Social Security and Medicare outlays... the REAL debt is aver $100 Trillion... there's not enough money on EARTH to repay that. This house of cards needs to be reigned-in QUICKLY or there will be a currency crisis and a global economic collapse followed by unheard-of misery that will make pre-WWII Weimar Germany look positively happy sometime within the lifetime of most Slashdotters.
All the blind faith of left-wing Obamabots cannot defy the laws of economics; this is NOT sustainable. The single most basic law of economics says that unsustainable spending will not be sustained.
Once everybody is hooked on Obamacare (NOT because it is wonderful, but because the alternatives will be intentionally destroyed by it) everybody will owe their very lives to federal government bureaucrats and when the money runs out those bureaucrats will decide who lives and who dies. This has long been the openly-stated goal of the progressive movement since the start of the 20th century and it's something Obama himself slipped-up and admitted in a campaign event last year (he said that older people were going to have to be told to go home and take pain pills instead of getting surgeries to fix the underlying problems).