Slashdot Mirror
Obamacare Website Fixes Could Take Two Weeks Or Two Months
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like nobody is quite sure how long it will take to fix the health insurance marketplace website. '"One person familiar with the system's development said that the project was now roughly 70 percent of the way toward operating properly, but that predictions varied on when the remaining 30 percent would be done," the Times reported yesterday. "'I've heard as little as two weeks or as much as a couple of months,' that person said. Others warned that the fixes themselves were creating new problems, and said that the full extent of the problems might not be known because so many consumers had been stymied at the first step in the application process."'"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9RVy6FWkg
Honestly, I think the editors purposely put typos in their headlines to increase the number of comments on an article. Can't resisit........
"The first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time; the last 10% of the work takes the second 90% of the time".
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I love how all the Slashbots object to NSA collecting information on them, but they can't wait to get a "civilized" health care system like Europe or Canada. They will be falling all over themselves to hand over all their medical records to the gov't.
I was able to register fairly early (around the 3rd) - when the site was still undergoing the initial onslaught of gawkers. It seems to be working ok now - no more "please wait, we are too busy" page at initial login, logging in takes a few seconds. Once in - I am able to search and view policies for appropriate states. The only real issue I found so far is that some of the insurance companies make it difficult to find actual policy prospectus. BCBS does a decent job with direct links, a few others make you look it up in a list by name (which may or may not match the name they present on the main site) and one (Cigna) has broken links that lead nowhere (but their rates suck anyway).
All in all seems about as usable as I've ever seen in a government site. A heck of a lot better than the tax payment system feds have or any of the state DMV sites I had to deal with (and we are talking "red" states, who clearly should know better, right?)
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
Seems to me that I read that people using the Exchange need sign up for an approved insurance policy by Dec. 15, if they want to have it go into effect Jan 1.
Which suggests very strongly that if they take that two months, then a lot of people are going to be looking forward to penalties come tax-time next year.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What makes you think Slashbots have any love for the Obamacare site?
it's supposed to be a "market" but it's nothing of the sort. You can't actually see any products or prices. You are only allowed to "apply" and for that you need "register" and then to provide identifying information that Experian approves of.
If this were any industry website, my response would be "fuck that".
Even if the stupid thing were working as intended it would still be broken. It's broken by design.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For some reason people want health care that won't bankrupt them. They look at what citizens of other industrialized nations get and want the same.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That 20% of the code/problems take 80% of the time? Perhaps the developers picked the wrong 2 of: fast, cheap, or good..
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I doubt there's any real committee yet, at least not one comprised of people with sufficient project management and technical expertise to competently analyze this train wreck. Everyone working in an upper management role on this project should be terminated, although that's a difficult proposition when some of those personnel are likely the people needed to assist competent personnel with beginning to understand how badly this system is built. So they should be terminated immediately following resolution of most of the outstanding problems.
Everyone should keep in mind that we're still paying for this with our taxes, and the massive cost overruns on this project (USD $634 million and counting for shit that doesn't work) aren't likely to slow down any time soon.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Obamacare is a false choice of an answer. Our healthcare system needs a systematic change, but to say Obamacare is the answer is wrong. It isn't really a big surprise that the most regulated industry, outside of nuclear has the most out of control costs.
But there's still no guarantee your application will go anywhere. You can be disqualified and shunted into Medicaid.
This was an abortion from the start. If single payer is what you want, they should have just opened Medicare to everyone. Free if you're destitute, you pay otherwise.
Of course, we still don't have enough doctors and medical professionals, and that situation will only get worse. So many under BarryCare, Medicare, whatever will still have trouble getting treatment without supplemental insurance anyway.
Throwing more money at the problem by desperate Democrats will only cause the bills to increase. The cure will still be just as harsh.
True, but Obamacare does nothing to reduce the cost of health care.
Each state could use resources given to them by the federal government to build their own exchanges!
Oh, wait...
What a great idea. Deregulate health care! That will sure solve
That will sure solve the problem.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It isn't really a big surprise that the most regulated industry, outside of nuclear has the most out of control costs.
What? That's crazy talk. We all know that the health insurance industry is free to do whatever they want with no repercussions. There is no regulation of it at all.
(I hope the sarcasm is obvious there.)
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.
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
Nor does it pay to code it till it's designed, and debug it till it's tested.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
get a new team. start over from scratch. it's not that fucking hard a problem.
If single payer is what you want, they should have just opened Medicare to everyone.
That would have taken more of a Democratic majority than continued to exist once Ted Kennedy passed away.
Of course, we still don't have enough doctors and medical professionals
How much of that is due to AMA lobbying?
Libertarians don't believe in legal contracts?
Interesting. Tell me more, please.
Also, tell me what you do with the 20% of your post-tax income you give to charity. Do you give it to only one national group, or do you split it among several local groups?
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.
Any "percent complete" provided by a developer is nonsense. Especially since the progression you'll typically hear is something like 50%, then 70%, then 90%, then 95%, then 96%, then 97%, then 99%, then "I just have to do XYZ", then "I just have to do ABC", ...
The way you actually figure out where you stand is by having a list of tasks and estimates that are small enough that each task is expected to be a couple of days worth of work at most, and then rate tasks either complete or not complete (and it's not complete until QA says it is).
I am officially gone from
Remember when Steam sucked? I sure do. Software typically takes a period of time to gestate to full functionality - I get that. Of course, Steam only managed my computer games - not my health insurance! I suppose I'll play Obamacare as a whole by ear at this point...
Mr. Obama is our saviour. He is doing what no other leader has done for us. He is giving equality to 99% of Americans. This is important. Health care is important to everyone, and it is now a right we all can have equally for 99% of us.
By us agreeing to have Mr. Obama and the 1% care for us, feed us, educate us, and providing for all of our needs, we are making a better place for everyone.
Mr. Obama is our saviour, we need to obey him, and the wealthy people who put him in power. If we don't Obey Mr. Obama, than the world will be in total darkness. Mr. Obama is our light, our love, our life. Without Mr. Obama, we are nothing, we are lost, we are in despair.
For me it will wildly increase my healthcare costs. Looking back over the last decade, there would have never been a single year that I would have passed the deductible on the cheapest plans available. Plus the total cost of all of my healthcare needs (that I paid 100% out of pocket) for that decade total to less than one year of premiums. For a plan, that if I had it at the time, would not have paid a cent.
Just fucking wonderful. I guess my only hope is that I develop serious and expensive medical problems soon.
What, you think that insurance companies will actually offer contracts that don't allow them to terminate the contract (or doesn't allow them to raise the rates to the affected individuals so that they cannot afford to continue the insurance) if the individual's medical costs get too high, unless the law forces them to do so? You must live in some other country.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector..."
This website is not even what I would call "private sector". A couple of days ago I looked at some javascript from the registration page. You can look at it yourself HERE, direct from healthcare.gov.
This javascript is hopelessly broken. Even simple string values are completely messed up. I just checked it again, straight from the website, and even the most basic (literally first day javascript student level) mistakes have not been changed!
This is a complete mess. 70% my smooth, shapely, lily-white ass. It ain't even close to working.
Clarification: when I said it's not even "private sector", I mean it's not representative of private sector coding. It looks closer to a middle-school student's "do what I mean, not what I say" style of almost-coding.
I don't know about the Federal site since I'm in California but the California site is great. You just have to enter your zip code (no registration) and it will show you all the plans in your area along with the costs and all of the details of deductibles, etc.
Easy.
The plans are cheaper than my current insurance so that's good too.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The other side of the problem is the insurance companies. Most conservative do not want to admit that large coorporation DO NOT want open fair market competition. They want a monopoly, and a large goverment beuracracy to keep things complicated enought that individuals do not know what they are buying. Make the bariers to entry so prohibative that only the established players can play.
The insurance system is the EXACT opposite of a free market. In a free market INDIVIDUALS would be buying their own health care and paying for the doctors and hospitals out of their own pocket. This would quickly eliminate the $40 aspirin. The system we have now pays the insurance companies who have a legal obligation to the stock holders to maximize profits ( minimize payments). A hospital system that will ramp up charges as much as the insurance companies are willing to pay, and a restricted supply of doctors (AMA). It would be much better to have 10000 mediocre doctors that could be seen right away than a few awesome specialists who are great but you are likely to die in the E.R. waiting to be seen by them.
The best system would be to outlaw medical insurance. Health care would quickly come to an equilibrium so that people could afford it.. The next best system would be to have a single party system, or something akin to regulated phone and utility system. The worst possible system would be to have an unholy alliance of governement and a profit driven private industry.
I do not understand why conservative do not understand that big business is the exact opposite of free market. Probably because they are brainwashed by the Rush Limbaugh, and Fox, who are in turn financed by big business (go figure).
30 or 40 years ago, our health care system worked? Then more and more employers started offering health insurance. This skewed the system, so that people were no longer in charge of the cost of health care. It is exactly the same with college. Used to be your could have a part time job and put yourself through shool. Now with goverment subsidies (college loans) and soldiers returning with GI bill, there is no incentive for colleges to cater to those who are unwilling to take out a 50K + morgage on their future.
Hopefully the costs of obamacare are a little more accurate or this could be a very short trip.
... at least ... to get it designed right. That's because they need to throw away everything they have done so far and start over. They need to actually build the site rather than try to mish-mash a bunch of separate web products.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There is some gold in this file. Some highlights:
:function() { //TODO: add functionality to show alert text after too many tries at log in
},
//$('#signUpButton').hide(); pod 6 doesn't want this hidden
// make sure we don;t try to do this before the saml has been posted
resources['ffe.ee.myAccount.TEST'] = 'Apples to Apples';
Seems like someone was trying to work out how to add resources. Looks like they also wanted to test out the quoting:
resources['ffe.ee.myAccount.quoteTest'] = '“Apes.”';
Hmm looks like you can't update your name at the moment. I guess you could call XXX-XXXX to do it: resources['ffe.ee.myAccount.profile.updateName'] = 'To change your name you must call 1-800-XXX-XXXX';
Hey I wonder what happens when you try to login too many times incorrectly? Apparently nothing:
showAlertText
I wonder who "Pod 6" is?
And then my personal favourite, which is written twice in the code:
Why is there a semicolon in the "don't" word? It is a typo or couldn't they figure out how to escape a single quote character in whatever is generating their JS? (This line is repeated twice) I'm guessing it was just a rushed developer who was running out of time.
I'm sure no one will get sick between now and then. And if they do, it won't matter. Because when government hurts people, government always gets a pass.
In a perfect libertarian world, an insurance company offering you a policy would have to abide by the terms of the policy, and if the terms prohibited them from kicking you off, then they couldn't do so.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I do not feel so great for Obamacare at all.
I mean, the code itself ( as referred to the following link: https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js ) is hopelessly broken.
The code looks more like a primary school coding project than a government project.
Or does this signify the quality of (or rather, the lack thereof) : care Obama wants give the US citizens ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
No one is going to buy the policy unless it is worth the premium. Of course if they want to pay $10,000/month they can find something better. The people forced to buy government insurance, on the other hand have zero guarantee of getting anything: "Your appointment with a veterinary school dropout is scheduled 15 months from now, citizen."
What people don't realize is the private sector contractors in Gov't IT have little to do with regular private IT contracting. In order to gain these contracts you need to basically game the formula used to award the contracts. It's a bit more complicated than just having the lowest bid. A lot of it has to do with things like the number of Phd and Master degree workers you have to offer. This often leads to staffing composed of people who have unrelated degrees or people who are from diploma mills.
The Obamacare IT is no more or less messed up than any other gov't system of recent times.
Sadly, Obama can't just raid Silicon valley for some top tier talent to make a new system. That's illegal. Instead the contracts go to companies you've likely never heard of that specialize in sucking off the gov't teet. I'm sure 1/2 the budget was wasted making a 5000 page technical specification document complete with overdone pie in the sky UML diagrams no one understands.
That's the way things will continue so long as the contracting process doesn't take into account the previous success of the contractors work force.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And if no policy can be found with such terms, you would die.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why didn't your state setup their own exchange like my own, New York? It worked great. The fed site redirected me right to new york's site.
Easy Peasy.
I guess if the state you live in just couldn't get the job done themselves, and NEEDS TO RELY ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DO IT FOR THEM, well, beggers can't be choosers, can they?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
you're funny. Obama has violated more of the Constitution than even Bush and Cheney.
It is "Obamacare", he used all his collateral to get that mess passed. He and the Democrat Congress owns it. And it's already failing.
Government Healthcare fixes YOU!!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I can't speak to Doctors, but right now the education industry has pumped out way more nurses than we can employ. If the ACA forces hospitals to expand, the nursing jobs will fill quickly.
As a side note, the lack of insurance has a tendency of making medical problems worse. Patients won't tend to pay out of pocket for preventative medicine, instead waiting until a medical issue requires emergency care. The ACA can certainly help correct this issue.
Apt platitude: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is fairly typical in government contracting...pay a lot and get something that barely functions but now you got to pay more to finish it because you've invested too much already to just throw it out. Once it's up and able to handle the customer base I'm sure they'll consider adding security or protect the data somehow which will cost another ton of money. They'll perfect it, but at what cost, how long, and why didn't they do this earlier? Some states' exchanges have been up and running great but they (the states) started creating them earlier.
You are under the false impression that an insurance company treats disease and cures medical conditions.
It's the doctors and hospitals that won't treat people unless they are paid that let people die.
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.
The libertarian ideal assumes that the nautral state of business is competition, when in reality the natural state of business is collusion and consolidation. In a libertarian paradise, one of two things happens:
1. The major insurance companies collude, offering customers no choice in plans. All plans offered have loopholes where the company can easily dump the sick. Customers are given no choice, and insurance companies more or less write a death clause* into their policy,
2. The major insurance companies consolidate to the point where you only have one or two options, neither offering any real choice or competitive reason to chose one over the other. You accept whatever plan is offered.
In either case, start-ups are quickly squelched.
You more or less see this in the drug trade. In mexico, the drug market is more or less deregulated, since the government has no power to control the cartels. While the major cartels do squabble, they prefer not to compete against each other directly, as doing so tends to weaken both, allowing a 3rd cartel to grab for power. Regardless, upstart operations are quickly squashed.
You may argue that this situation is the result of government regulation. I'd agree, but point out that the only thing government regulation has done is artificially raised the value of the commodity. A commodity that is 'necessary' and sufficiently rare or expensive will tend towards the same result if left unregulated (see various oil and communication companies. See also diamonds, where the DeBeers conglomerate created the same artificial scarcity as seen in the drug trade.)
* Prior to the ACA, insurance companies did not have 'death panels' but they did have a 'death clause' in the form of a $3.5 million dollar lifetime cap on coverage. If you hit this cap, your 'pre-existing' condition would disqualify you from purchasing insurance from a competitive provider, and unless you were extremely rich, you clearly would not be able to insure yourself. At this point, you would be stabilized and sent home by the hospital as soon as your medical costs had left your family destitute.
Basically, no they don't, because the market has been 'fixed' by licensing issues brought about by AMA lobbying over decades.
It's not healthcare, it is healthcare INSURANCE.
You have not found, or paid for, the the healthcare yet.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
This left wing screed brought you by George Soros.
We don't have a problem with that, because it is not the Koch Brothers.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I'm pretty sure that 2.5% of my income will more than cover any emergency room visits I'll be making in the long run. Especially as they'll be paid out of my credit card.
Obligitory: "We have to code it before we know what's in it."
Care to refute anything I said with facts?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I particularly like all of the "TODO" comments in production code.
You haven't refuted anything. Your move.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
That isn't always the case in any field. Sometimes it really is less expensive to just fix the stuff that comes up.
Further, you can take any preventative measure and apply it in a way that the thing it's supposed to prevent would be cheaper to handle than the measure itself.
For instance, do you own a car? Change the oil ever 5k miles (7k some models) as the manufacturer recommends? How about every 3k miles as your mechanic recommends, that must be better, right? And if that's good, how about changing the oil every trip! That'd be the most preventative, and would obviously be really effective at avoiding engine problems resulting from dirty oil, and who cares if it would be cheaper to just buy a new car every year...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Here, lets look at your "facts", which are really just half statements with commentary.
*** The fact is that the ACA (aka Obamacare) sets up exchanges for people to purchase insurance from private companies. The government is not providing the coverage -- the private sector is.
You left out the part about doing it with other people's money, aka Taxdollars.
*** And yet there's a hue and cry about "government-run healthcare." Guess what: it already exists, it's called the VA. Single-payer? That already exists too, it's called Medicare (probably Medicaid too.)
Forgetting to mention those are huge expensive boondoggles with very poor outcomes in the case of the VA.
***The main point is that medical-insurance coverage is now open to tens of millions of people who would not be able to purchase it otherwise.
Again, open, but at the cost of taxdollars, and for people that don't want the health insurance because they don't really need it, like young healthy adults.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Get used to it. Those of us who have been carrying health insurance for years have been required to pay for you dumb fucks who don't carry health insurance because you "never get sick" and now just got cancer or ran your car into a tree.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
If you're destitute, you're already covered by Medicaid.
The problem with opening Medicare is that it is in effect heavily subsidized and there is no good way of pricing it.
Insurance is a bet. Just like Blackjack Insurance is a bet that mitigates the possibility of the dealer getting a blackjack, regular insurance is a bet that mitigates "something bad and unlikely happened to me"
If you could wait until the cards were shown, it wouldn't be a bet any more, and no one would bother getting it until they needed something paid for. Which is a fancy way of saying that no one would get it at all, because if everyone who bought insurance for some condition needed that insurance to pay for treatment of that condition, the cost of insurance would, necessarily, be equal to the cost of treatment of the condition.
Under a "perfect libertarian world" the insurance companies would not be overburdened with regulations about what they had to provide insurance for *, and would be able to offer a plan that excludes already-known conditions, concentrating on what insurance is good at - hedge bets. It would still be a good deal for someone who had an existing condition, though, because it would cover everything else, and the chance that they would also get one of everything else is not changed by having the one condition.
* Although some regulations or standards should exist to define the default level of care. Exclusions should require special extra language, and so also be easier to scrutinize. Libertarians aren't anarchists.
If you're asking where someone who, at the time of diagnosis of a condition, was not insured for that condition would get the resources to treat it, we need an answer that doesn't encourage everyone to skip trying to provide for themselves and simply run to the state solution, because the state solution is not paid for voluntarily.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
No, they don't, because the supply of medical professionals has been artificially limited and the market is highly regulated. But that's true for many professions, from longshoremen to lawyers. Everything from unions to the AMA sees to it.
So the Obamacare servers were stated to be designed to handle up to 50,000 people per day (seriously? What does slashdot do, ten times that?).
The deadline is six months from now.
Something like 15,000,000 people are going to be required to sign up.
At maximum load, only 12,000,000 people could sign up before the deadline, if everything worked at absolute peak without failure.
So just what the fuck is going on here? Heads should roll for this shit math.
The reality of health care in many other nations is spiraling costs, health care rationing, and long waiting times. It's people buying expensive supplemental insurance to escape public health care systems. Some industrialized nations still have mostly private health care delivery and fee for service.
In reality, it makes very little difference for health care and outcomes what kind of health care system we have. The only difference is how much money insurance companies and doctors can suck out of people's pockets, and Obamacare does little to reduce that.
Here, lets look at your "facts", which are really just half statements with commentary.
*** The fact is that the ACA (aka Obamacare) sets up exchanges for people to purchase insurance from private companies. The government is not providing the coverage -- the private sector is.
You left out the part about doing it with other people's money, aka Taxdollars.
Only if low-income people need help with the premiums. That's hardly a precedent.
*** And yet there's a hue and cry about "government-run healthcare." Guess what: it already exists, it's called the VA. Single-payer? That already exists too, it's called Medicare (probably Medicaid too.)
Forgetting to mention those are huge expensive boondoggles with very poor outcomes in the case of the VA.
Actually, the VA has a high satisfaction rating compared to the private sector.
***The main point is that medical-insurance coverage is now open to tens of millions of people who would not be able to purchase it otherwise.
Again, open, but at the cost of taxdollars, and for people that don't want the health insurance because they don't really need it, like young healthy adults.
The fact is, nobody needs health insurance...until they do. And then, if they don't have it, we all pick up the tab when they go to the emergency room. And that's where the requirement that we all have insurance comes in. All of us have to contribute to our heath insurance. If we don't, we're mooching. Plain and simple.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2452404/Obamacare-website-cost-634MILLION-doesnt-work.html
You mean take something normally done my the private sector, make it government run, and contract it BACK to the private sector?
Don't sell it, just have everyone covered without conditions.
The police dept doesn't require that you "sign up" before they'll respond to a 911 call, the fire dept doesn't require forms filled out before they'll respond to a fire, why do we require this for health care?
There are quite a lot of "lorem ipsum" references as well. Looks like someone didn't have enough time to finish the project.
It's Gall's Law in action. All the way down. Forever. Like turtles.
Folks, it's the second decade of the 21st Century. Why is we still let the government spend money on stuff like this? No only can they not get it right, they'll never say it's wrong until we're a few $Billion into it. Face it, universal top-down-imposed-government solutions are only effective at one thing: blowing lots of cash. Everything else it incidental, even accidental. The tyranny, the identity theft, you name it: all unintended consequences. But I'm sure that anyone who said whoa-whoa-whoa let's do X right in the course of the project was told to quit screwing up the gravy train and take a hike.
Perhaps because the law in question pays for some-to-all of the insurance for the people who couldn't afford it before, and does a bunch of other cool shit like getting rid of denying children and people with pre-existing conditions insurance?
That's a terrible comparison. Changing the oil according to the manufacturers recommended specifications *is* preventative care. Reactionary care would be ignoring the oil until the engine starts making clanking noises. At that point, you're performing a full rebuild, replacing all the components that were damaged by the oil system failure.
The preventative option costs $50 a few times a year. The reactionary option costs thousands of dollars.
Obama care isn't going to mandate that you go to the doctor every time you stub your toe.
Why didn't your state setup their own exchange like my own, New York? It worked great. The fed site redirected me right to new york's site.
Easy Peasy.
I guess if the state you live in just couldn't get the job done themselves, and NEEDS TO RELY ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DO IT FOR THEM, well, beggers can't be choosers, can they?
Are you sure the domain name for your state's site should end in .ru?
Hey I wonder what happens when you try to login too many times incorrectly? Apparently nothing:
Holy cow, that seems an open invitation to crack logins left and right...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why didn't your state setup their own exchange
Because it is an unfunded federal mandate. The feds make all the rules, can change the rules in the future, the states have no say, and the feds only pay for the first three years and the state is on the hook for all costs from year four and onward. If the state is going to pay for 100% then the state wants to decide upon the rules.
I tried 3 times just to get a quote from the healthcare.gov site. Every time it said "Try again later". Spent 30-45 mins.
I tried once to get a quote on 2 private sector sites (One a 'market place' style with 4 companies, one directly from a insurance provider). Both of them I had an estimate in about 3-5 minutes.
YMMV.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
I would have bought the now illegal catastrophic insurance but now I guess I will just let you guys pay for me when I go bankrupt. Enjoy paying those premiums on those high deductible plans. I'll be pocketing the money and retiring early.
***Again, open, but at the cost of taxdollars, and for people that don't want the health insurance because they don't really need it, like young healthy adults***
Mandatory insurance is perfectly reasonable, it's quite the norm for vehicles already so you could imagine it's acceptable to have it for your liver and other body parts if a fucking car has to be covered already. Irresponsible people can pay the penalty (as wikipedia tells me, this is an option for your car in Virginia), or leave the US. So they're still free to not get covered.
At what level of coverage? Does everybody get the latest stem cell therapy? Cancer treatments that have a 1:10 chance of working? Robotic replacement limbs? Who decides who gets what? Why should I be forced to pay for insurance that I neither want nor need? Why shouldn't you be forced to pay extra if you are obese or smoke?
As you may notice, police and fire departments have been causing huge financial problems for cities around the country, and that's providing services that are nowhere near as expensive as medical services. And they have started charging for their services too.
..regarding obesity and smoking: you tax fat, sugars and the smokes.
who decides who gets cancer treatment on private medical insurance? provided everyone are on equal payments. would you rather have profit of the private company be on the line when they're deciding if you need that chemo or not?
if you as a citizens need to pay(privately) for your own police and fire department then you(usa) will officially be a 3rd world country - again.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
That's the real point - the ACA was a compromise, where the conservatives wanted to avoid single payer, and to keep a large and ongoing role for the existing businesses in the industry, and the got what they asked for. Now, they keep trying to force re-negotiation after re-negotiation, to get more. If we just use the humorous definition of an "honest" politician - one who once bought, stays bought, there are a large percentage of conservatives who can't live up to even that tongue in cheek definition of honest. That's not normal politics. Some people keep saying both sides are part of the problem, because they see both sides making some of the usual back room deals, and some people aren't yet noticing it's overwhelmingly one side that won't stick to the deals they made and wants to keep re-negotiating until the "compromise" is 100% their way.
To the people who have elected a politician who won't stick to his "final" deals, I don't care how popular that rep is in their home district, they weill never be able to get anyting they promise you for you, once it becomes obvious to the people they have to work with that they don't regard their promises to other politicians as binding. There's a lot of new representitives who are already getting that reputation, and you can keep sending them to Washington, but they won't get on any of the powerful comittees, they certainly won't be able to keep any promises they make to you in the future, and they will have literally hundreds of powerful people looking to sink their careers on any pretext possible.
While we are at it, the Earned income Tax Credit was a conservative idea, to move people from wellfare to "workfare". It's an idea that was once too conservative for Richard M. Nixon. It was supposed to fix every "problem" America was having with "entitlement programs". it was conservative politicians who promised that adopting the EITC would mean continuous surplusses and never having to touch Social Security. Now we have a breed of conservatives who keep referring to the EITC as a liberal creation, blaming it on conveniently dead liberals such as Teddy Kennedy, and saying it's "part of the problem", and pushing to get rid of it. Given that example, can anyone honestly claim that the conservative faction will keep ANY parts of the ACA, such as the no excusion for prior conditions rules, or people being able to keep their college age child on their health insurance? If you're thinking that there are some good ideas in the ACA, but as a whole, the thing is too big, complex, and unweildy, I sympathise, but there have been people fighting against every single tiny part, and for moving back to a pre-New Deal model for Medicare as well,
Who is John Cabal?
For some reason people want health care that won't bankrupt them. They look at what citizens of other industrialized nations get and want the same.
You mean eight hour waits in ambulances to game national healthcare system metrics, going to the US for treatment to avoid waits, and crackdowns on treatment for immigrants? Americans don't want the first, the second is redundant, and Obamacare will probably rule out the third.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
Because government employee programmers, who probably belong to a union and cannot be fired for anything less than murdering the boss, would have done better?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
.. if they had some sort of staggered entry to the website. A very simple rule such as only those born before 1950 can register in the first week, those born before 1960 in the second week and so on. This would have alleviated a lot of the traffic issues and given the developers some breathing room to fix bugs and scale their solution.
Controlling traffic, while you scale your solution, is not a novel concept. Gmail did this through an invitation system when it first started. Facebook only allowed certain universities at first etc...
Its strange but this reminds me of why, they say, we have mirrors in elevators. Folklore suggests that in the early days of high rises, people tended to have an unrealistic expectation of elevator speeds, probably, because they had nothing to do in the elevator. Adding mirrors in the elevators gave people something to do and took the pressure off the elevator engineers.
If people expected a government run web site to scale perfectly for millions of users within the first month of its deployment, those are very unrealistic expectations.
If people took better care of themselves and, as smart consumers able to vote with thier loud voices (and thick wallets) for better food and medical choices to start with, they would be healthier to begin with and not need nanny government to wipe their noses and butts for them.
You're awesome. Why not write "If people had more money, then they would be wealthier and thus would have less medical problems and afford any insurance plan".
So your idea is, let's make everyone rich, nice fantasy but hardly doable, what are you suggesting exactly to do that?
And anyway let's say you're a guy that earns $20K (apparently a salary you can consider yourself lucky to get in the US nowadays), have sound food and health choices (like cycling to work, spending a third on your income on food - funded by lack of car, cable TV and phone data), have no debt. You can still get something like cancer or kidney failure or whatever thing which puts you into bankruptcy or death and guess what private insurance covers those "accidents".. It's healthcare insurance.
30 or 40 years ago, our health care system worked? Then more and more employers started offering health insurance. This skewed the system, so that people were no longer in charge of the cost of health care. It is exactly the same with college. Used to be your could have a part time job and put yourself through shool. Now with goverment subsidies (college loans) and soldiers returning with GI bill, there is no incentive for colleges to cater to those who are unwilling to take out a 50K + morgage on their future.
The dominoes started to fall when FDR decided to cap wages. Companies quickly figured out health insurance was a great way to get by that, and used that new benefit to entice and keep workers. A significant amount of the issues we are running into today we brought on by FDR and his Raw Deal.
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But I can choose not to have a car and not pay a penalty for it. (in fact, one might call it a bonus)
Where is my choice to opt out in the ACA without penalty?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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"we all pick up the tab when they go to the emergency room."
You can also go to county services and pay on a sliding scale for your preventive medicine. I did that as a college student and while I worked a McJob. Getting an infected insect bite cleaned out, cauterized and the local anesthetic plus antibiotics cost me something like $3000, of which I paid $65. Still a better deal than the cost of the ER if I had waited a few more days to go there and had blood poisoning or gone septic.
The problem is people that don't do that end up in the emergency room.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I guess if the state you live in just couldn't get the job done themselves, and NEEDS TO RELY ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DO IT FOR THEM, well, beggers can't be choosers, can they?
The whole point of obamacare is to do an end run around a state's desire to "do the job themselves", and youre lambasting them for it now?
Wow.
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But I can choose not to have a car and not pay a penalty for it. (in fact, one might call it a bonus)
You can't choose not to have a body. And when your body needs health care, are you going to "choose" to die instead of going to the emergency room?
The fact is, you'll become a burden on the rest of us if you get sick and you don't have health insurance.
Where is my choice to opt out in the ACA without penalty?
It's in the same place as your choice to opt-out of paying taxes. Freedom isn't free. Suck it up.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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The fact is, nobody needs health insurance...until they do.
Seems to me thats a personal decision, not a government one. I might remark the same thing about computer backups, but the government issuing a personal mandate for a cloud-stored computer backup would rightfully be seen as a violation of personal rights (I hope).
I hope they have a paper alternative
Table-ized A.I.
when in reality the natural state of business is collusion and consolidation.
Interesting, but not the end-state. In a truly free market, someone always crops up to challenge the status quo with innovation, and the cycle begins again.
MCI broke the 'Bells back in the early 1980s, Apple broke the 'traditional' mini-computer industry, FOX broke CNN, Internet pr0n killed the nudie mags and DVDs, Netflix/Hulu/etc is now threatening to kill the physical disc-based (DVD/Blu-Ray) movie industry, Apple's iPhone rose up and slammed the cozy BlackBerry/Palm/Nokia/Carrier relationships, and so on, and so on...
Sure, many of those challenged are still around, but now they're forced to innovate, to follow or be left in the dirt.
Hell, Napster began the wave that completely re-forced how music is distributed these days, and BitTorrent did the same to the movie industry - the only reason that the RIAA/MPAA cartels have any power left is because they (get this...) relied on (or rather, bought) laws to do for them what the free market would not (that is, rent-seeking.)
This "natural state" of collusion is only kept in stasis because of governmental intervention (be it witting or not.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
What the hell do you call the nearly $700 million spent on the boondoggle of a website, the very point of this article in the first place, if not taxpayer dollars?!
Uh huh. That seems pretty cheap, compared to the $300 million per day that the pointless government shutdown is costing taxpayers. At this writing, we're in day 14 and the tab is $4.2 billion. All courtesy of the Tea Part Republicans and their Obamacare Tourette's Syndrome.
Yes, I agree - not buying something is mooching. That's when I don't buy coffee from Starbucks because it's overpriced, I'm mooching from Seattle. When I refuse to buy bananas from the supermarket because they're too green, I'm mooching.
So, what you're saying is coffee = bananas = health insurance. If there was ever an example of false equivalence, this is it.
You can live without coffee or bananas. But at some point, you will need health care. And if you develop a serious illness, you'll need a lot of it. If you don't have health insurance, the rest of us taxpayers will need to pay for it. That makes you a mooch.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
For some reason people want health care that won't bankrupt them. They look at what citizens of other industrialized nations get and want the same.
You mean eight hour waits in ambulances to game national healthcare system metrics, going to the US for treatment to avoid waits, and crackdowns on treatment for immigrants? Americans don't want the first, the second is redundant, and Obamacare will probably rule out the third.
Of course in the UK you're free to engage companies like BUPA to give you private medical care.
The average person in the UK pays $3,433 per year of medical care. The average person in the US pays $8,233
That leaves plenty of money for a £170 pcm ($3600/year) "Comprehensive plan" with BUPA. With a $800 "deducatble" that drops to $2300/year, if you wish.
The Oregon website seems to be working well also. I was surprised by the number of insurance carriers, and the number of plans.
Who knows how long some folks will scream and kick about it all, or if their tantrums will prevent progress.
The lowest tier plans along with subsidies should work as intended to promote preventive care and health partnerships instead of bankrupting folks going to emergency rooms, and leaving the rest of the system holding the bag. It will still leave a lot to be desired, like dismantling the "we've got a pill for that" western medicine profit machines.
Perhaps he is a responsible individual that has set aside enough money to pay for an unexpected emergency in the event he gets sick?
Obviously you don't have a clue as to how much it can cost to treat a serious illness. Very few of us have the means to set aside cash for that kind of event.
You know it is possible to survive in this world without health insurance. People have been doing it in this country pretty much since the day it was founded.
Wrong. People die from lack of health insurance.
Your negative view of the general population is actually quite disturbing. You seem to feel we need a nanny state to protect us from ourselves.
Actually I'm not concerned about protecting us from ourselves. Rather, I am concerned about protecting us from people like you, who would choose to forego getting health insurance and put the burden on the rest of us.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Youre starting with the false premise that it is society's responsibility to provide medical care for you. It isnt. This can be done at a local community level, and thats generally OK so long as it isnt mandated, but the whole "socialism" thing has been tried and fundamentally doesnt work because it removes incentives. Doing socialism piecemeal isnt going to work any better than just going whole hog, except perhaps it wont fail quite as badly, as quickly.
We all die, in the end.
You had other plans?
Because a website contracted at a bidded $93.7 million shouldn't be a pathetic joke? Particularly since it ran north of that number (although it's unclear how far north).
I guess beggars can't be choosers because the federal government blew everyone's money, can they?
We can argue about that premise. If it's false in a given society, that society doesn't even deserve to be called as such or at the least isn't worth living in.
We can argue about that premise
For most societies up until the last 100 years or so, it hasnt been society's responsiblity. Hows that?
Really, the planned to spend $90 million on a site that simply redirected you to 1 of 50 other websites? And you think the states were incompetent?
In a perfect libertarian world, an insurance company offering you a policy would have to abide by the terms of the policy, and if the terms prohibited them from kicking you off, then they couldn't do so.
In this world they would never have to pay out because your flying unicorn would never crash.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Don't forget how it incentivizes the private sector, to shift all full time jobs, to part time jobs, to avoid having to pay for health insurance, which is 3 times higher than was promised.
Obamacare sucks.
It's no surprise, since Obama sucks at nearly everything except reading inflammatory rhetoric and lies from a teleprompter.
Something you don't need... until you do.
Shockingly, most everyone doesn't expect to be laid up in the hospital. Hence: you being horrified at buying insurance "because you don't need it."
The human brain just isn't very good at judging risk.
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/03/SECURITY_MATTERS0322
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
The problem with contracting to the government is that any company looks at government contracts as a license to print money.
Whenever a government tender goes out, their eyes light up and the start seeing dollar signs everywhere. Practically no-one signs a fixed price contract unless they've got an off the shelf product with a no-modifications clause otherwise it's time and materials in which case expect every little thing to take longer and cost extra... Why? because it's the government and they're an endless bucket of money... at least according to the people who do government contracts.
There's an old saying about contracting, "If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem" and this is extremely true with government contractors.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
For some reason people want health care that won't bankrupt them. They look at what citizens of other industrialized nations get and want the same.
You mean eight hour waits in ambulances to game national healthcare system metrics, going to the US for treatment to avoid waits, and crackdowns on treatment for immigrants? Americans don't want the first, the second is redundant, and Obamacare will probably rule out the third.
You dont know much about the UK.
I wasn't asking.
If you did, you wouldn't rely on the Daily Tele(graph) for accurate information.
In the UK, they wont send you home to die simply because your employer doesn't have insurance, or enough insurance. This is what people in the US want. Basic care in the UK or Australia isn't glamorous, but it's far cheaper than the most basic care in the US. In fact top hospital cover in Australia is far cheaper than the most basic care in the US.
People want to know they can go to a hospital with serious problem and not have to worry if they have the cash to pay for it. This is the assurance you have in Canada, the UK or Australia.
Also, you'll find the vast majority of people travelling overseas (out of the country) will be for elective surgery which is usually not covered or not covered completely and optional.
Finally, am I the only one who sees the notion of your employer providing health care akin to indentured servitude? Preventing you from changing employers at will or even taking time off (a sabbatical)?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Wow that's absolutely ridiculous. How is it that a site can be rolled out THIS unfinished?
Amazon and eBay seem to have worked with what I imagine is a similar to greater load. All while managing to avoid any highly publicized information leaks (at least I think, correct me if I'm wrong), and having pretty good uptime.
Could you imagine finding lorem ipsum text or just completely broken scripts on either of those sites? The people responsible would be gone long before the project saw the light of day. You want to know what the price tag on the site is...634...MILLION dollars.
Dafuq.
THANKS OBAMA.
> Obama didn't want "Obamacare" either. I think the ideal would have been a single-payer system.
That's a bunch of crap. He did not end up with a single republican vote, so what exactly was the point of making the bill anything other than what he wanted ?
Obama has always loudly proclaimed he is a centrist. Somehow progressives are still trying to persuade themselves he would be more left wing if only those pesky republicans would let him. Democrats are as dependent on donations from wealthy corporations as the republicans so their focus was on doing things that would leave them popular with those corporations rather than trying to actually serve the population.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
The corporation you speak of is going to sell the data off for marketing analytics.
Healthcare is THE big business, and there is no way all that valuable data is going to go to waste.
If you think even 5 years will pass without this happening you are deluded.
You really should read more about what's going on in "other nations". The problems they complain of are insignificant compared to the issues going on in the US's healthcare system. The spiralling costs are nowhere near approaching how much the US spends as percentage of the GDP, the healthcare rationing is a spectre dragged out by the scare media when it is nowhere near as common as is made out to be (and also happens in the US, as every healthcare system is finite, and so rationing will have to happen at some point), and the long waiting lines are for people who are not in serious danger, as they are made to wait for people who actually are in serious danger. If you could bring the healthcare systems you are so scared of into the US, split the country in half and compare the two, you'd see the upset people in other countries are happier with their "failing" systems than they would be with the joke that is the US system.
Oh, and in those other countries not a single person has to go bankrupt because they have the sheer, unbridled tenacity to get ill. The horror.
Save your breath. As long as unfounded or sensationalised complaints against the NHS exist, the sheer fact that the NHS operates far better than the US system for the vast majority of people will go unnoticed. You might not have noticed, but Cold Fjord doesn't really rely on reality to make judgements or arguments, just what the loudest newspaper article or prettiest talking head spouts. If it disagrees with his/her opinion, it's clearly nonsensical gibberish and is promptly ignored.
If/when you develop diabetics, cancer, what have you, then you can sign up for healthcare coverage since it will be illegal to deny anyone coverage because of a pre-existing condition.
Ken
Nope, all Harry Reid.
Based on what? For most people their two weeks into their efforts into completing the account creation process and once they are able to sign-up the coverage doesn't kick in until Jan. 1, 2014.
When my family lost employer-subsidized coverage due to job change last year, it took less than a week to secure coverage (from submitting paperwork to having insurance cards in-hand). One year later, we're told our coverage will run out at the end of the year, since it doesn't comply with ACA minimums. Since my state opted to let the Federal Gov't set up our exchange, we use that 'cluster-mistake' of a website and I have been unable to create a user account on the site yet.
Ken
"Obviously you don't have a clue as to how much it can cost to treat a serious illness. Very few of us have the means to set aside cash for that kind of event."
Obviously you live like a typical American. I have twice my yearly salary stored away, and it wasn't very hard.
Drink tea, water, and coffee. Learn how to fix your computer, car, and anything in your house you feel you can tackle. Later on you can tackle more and more. Budget, and do not deviate from the budget. Have a diet you follow (even if it's not a particularly low calorie diet), so you can calculate out food costs.
It literally takes 3-4 hours a month to plan things out so that you have more money than you started at the end of the month. If you're making over $20k and don't have kids you don't have any excuse for a net loss at the end of the month the majority of months. At least in Texas...which has cheaper property, but you have to drive everywhere.
At the end of the day I did it at $20k, and now at just under 50. I'm not particularly intelligent, I'm not particularly organized, I have no common sense (I've walked into traffic by accident a few times), and I don't have a ton of willpower. If I can you can.
The fraud, abuse and waste within the Medicare system is legendary, and expanding that coverage to all Americans would destroy our economy in no time.
The fact that people like getting health coverage they pay no direct premiums for (in most cases) and that covers expenses without question is not surprising. Neither is the fact that many/most doctors are refusing to take on new Medicare patients because of the dwindling reimbursement levels for medical procedures that, in most cases, fails to even approach covering the real cost of providing the service covered.
Ken
I heard that cigarette taxes fund lung cancer treatment.
Bridges for sale ... bridges for sale.
You apparently forgot about the stories if hospital patients drinking water out of the potted plants to survive, the stories of sick patients left for hours in idling ambulances at the emergency room entrance because the hospitals won't let them in until a doctor is available, or how hard it is to find a doctor in one country. Those problems are in the UK, UK, and Canada - and we feel we need that level of service here in America?
No thanks.
And before you argue that your politicians want to try and fix it to avoid those problems from happening here, why do you assume politicians in those other countries failed to prevent them? The problems are the natural outcome of a single-payer system.
Ken
Obamacare turned a healthcare 'issue' into a healthcare coverage issue! with the assumption that if enough people have coverage the care will be available... The options for folks enrolled in ObamaCare will be very limited, rendering their coverage near useless in most cases.
What good is free birth control if the local pharmacy won't fill the prescription because they don't accept your insurance policy's low reimbursement levels?
What good is free birth control if no local OB/GYN will see you to write the prescription because they don't accept Obamacare patients?
Ken
How is Obamacare a derogatory term? I hear hardcore left-wing friends of mine use that term fairly often...is it like the N word and only they can say it? Have I made a faux pas?
ObamaCare requires every American to buy healthcare coverage, typically from a private carrier, and guarantees those private carriers a 15% overhead/profit on their insurance premiums.
Exactly how is this anything but a big wet kiss for the private health insurance carriers?
Insurance companies get to keep 15% of the inflated, pre-subsidy premiums, not the subsidized premium rate, BTW.
Ken
I don't need to read about it, I have actually been insured in several European systems over the years.
In short, you're speaking from ignorance and you're full of sh*t, as usual.
Please describe the involvement of Republicans in the passage of ObamaCare/ACA? Explain the support the bill received from the GOP in both the House and the Senate...
The compromised nature of the ACA is a result of Dems bargaining with other Dems, and a nation-wide single-payer system hurt the Dems much more than you may understand. Would such a system earn Dems the support of those now unemployed that used to be part of the health insurance industry? Would it earn Dems the support of doctors and nurses who would essentially become federal employees? Etc. Anecdotal stories from every country with a single-payer system are what made such a move so unpopular with most Americans.
Ken
The cost of the treatment PLUS overhead, set at 15% of premiums and guaranteed by ACA/Obamacare.
Ken
Obama turned a healthcare problem into a healthcare coverage problem! hoping that by stuffing insurance cards in more people's hands they could somehow cause more people to get better health care. All it really did was force them to pay premiums that MAY give them the opportunity to see a healthcare provider - maybe - but they will have to keep on paying their premiums regardless.
Ken
Every advantage offered by ACA (kid until 26, loss of per-existing condition exclusion, elimination of annual/lifetime caps) could have been added to your healthcare plan before Obama ever took office, but no one wanted to pay the insane premiums to cover such programs. The private insurance market allowed anyone to offer anything their customers wanted. Problem was, most american's insurance was designed by their employer, not themselves, and their employers were interested in cost-effective coverage, not comprehensive coverage.
Ken
"and are endowed by their creators with certain unalienable rights: life...."
Right: a moral or legal entitlement to have or obtain something or to act in a certain way.
Grammatically 2 interpretations make sense:
We have a moral entitlement to life.
We have a legal entitlement to life.
You could theoretically create an interp using the word "act," and say you have the right to act in the pursuit of living, but that would be invalid for 2 reasons:
A) It specifies the pursuit of happiness not happiness. This implicity states that you do not have a right to be happy, simply to pursue it. This lends much more emphasis to the fact that no such modifier on the first 2 terms; they are absolute.
B) For the interpretation to work you would have to essentially fill in words. So this interp is already flawed, because this is not necessary to interpret it the other way. Logically, most statements are meant to be interpreted literally, and literally is simply taking something on it's most basic terms.
If something is actually a right...particularly an unalienable right..granted by the government/social contract then that entity has an absolute duty to protect it. As it is "unalienable" as stated by the entity itself, maximizing that right should be weighed infinitely heavy against any other standard to evaluate whether an action was "good" or "bad." So the government actually has a duty to fulfill that right above all else, so long as it doesn't impact anyone else's unalienable right(s). So it actually has a duty to go beyond reason to the (literal) best of it's abilities.
It sounds to me like they themselves say it's their responsibility.
To be honest I don't buy that interpretation (and if you have a good counter interpretation I'd be interested), and I think obamacare/AHA/ACA/Othernamesit'sknownby is a horrible idea. The government can make even the most simple of processes food for insanity. If they can't get my driving record/information correct most of the time, how are they going to be able to get something far more unwieldly correct?
I've dealt with "free money" processes before with the FAFSA, and helping a friend with TANF. It took me over a year to actually get FAFSA funding due to an unfortunate situation that should have taken a phone call to resolve. Am I going to die at home, due to something preventable, because I filled out form 38-L-3 wrong?
I think we need to go straight for the throat in all honesty: create socialized CARE facilities, and let those who can afford insurance/out-of-pocket go to for-profit hospitals. Sure it sucks that one group gets superior medical care, but some people getting superior care is better than everyone getting shitty care isn't it?
You say that, but right now some chinese 14 year old is probably bruting your SSN from the recovery form...
It is a patently ridiculous suggestion that you can get people to eat a decent diet by taxing things they shouldn't eat.
I decide myself by the coverage I choose and the sacrifices I make in order to buy that coverage.
But people shouldn't be "on equal payments"; you may have an irrational trust in the power of medicine and want millions in useless coverage, but I shouldn't have to pay for that nonsense. I want $100k lifetime coverage and when that's used up, I want to die. Period.
(Of course, ironically, that's the kind of limit people in the UK get. It's just that in the US, with its greater ability to pay, costs spiral out of control more.)
Oh, I hope so: a wealthy, free third world country.
Why should people have to volunteer to fix something that we (taxpayers) paid a 9-digit sum of money to generate to begin with?
I'm pretty sure that somewhere in that contract, there was some language that said the end product needed to actually function. It's not on us to fix it - it's on the Government to hold the contractor accountable, or tear them apart piece by piece for breach of contract.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Thanks for the clarification, but the anecdote still doesn't prove anything. There's lots of bad code out there in any sector.
I do not think it means what you think it means. Insurance is for people with assets they want to protect from loss. You have life insurance to help protect your family from the loss of your income if you die. You have car insurance to protect the loss if your car if you have an accident or protect your personal assets if you are liable. Same with homeowners insurance.
Healthcare should not require insurance. Health insurance should only be needed to protect your assets in case you run up lots of expenses. If you have no assets you don't need insurance. If you don't have assets and you run up bills who cares? Don't pay them!
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The lowest tier plans along with subsidies should work as intended to promote preventive care and health partnerships instead of bankrupting folks going to emergency rooms
Until health care costs grow enough to make that unattractive even with subsidies. And who is paying for these subsidies anyway?
how about the easy fix? make it no longer required that hospitals treat you if you can't pay. Sounds like it would fix a large portion of issues you have with it.
anyways, you are screwed with cancer. You aren't paying more in that case, as the hospital just won't give you any treatment for it. car wreck, on the other hand, is a good example.
Probably just feeding the trolls here, but: Seriously? That's the best argument you can come up with? Just because something wasn't done before the modern era means that we shouldn't do it now? So we shouldn't have advanced medical care at all? We shouldn't have enfranchised women? Ended slavery? Have the Internet? I could go on, and on.
There really is no valid argument as to why "Society" shouldn't (to some extend) be "Socialist" -- since that's the whole *point* or society, and for that matter, civilization.
"Removing incentives" is a bullshit argument. Most Human beings have plenty of incentive to be meaningfully productive members of a society, it's called a conscience, and a full set of operating emotions. Unfortunately the people paid to come up with the memes like that one seem to be in the group of humans that lack both.
Yes there are people who abuse the trust of others. Some of them get foodstamps, but they don't really do much harm, they maybe add a few pennies a day to your taxes whereas the people truly causing harm are a small number of vampires sucking the life out of most of the world's population, and at the same time pitting those people they are abusing against each other so they lack the time and observational powers to notice what's really happening.
If we want to go ahead and be all "I've got mine Jack" and "Don't tread on me" and "Every man for himself" then we might as well go back to being stone-age nomadic hunter gatherers, so we can learn what "society" means again, and what it's for.
All that said, "Obamacare" probably isn't the best idea, but not because it's "socialism" -- BECAUSE IT'S NOT! It's a fucking insurance exchange where private insurers compete for the dollars of the uninsured, and soon-to-be uninsured with an allotment to subsidize those earning below 150% of the poverty level. The insurance companies LOBBIED FOR THE BILL.
The rest of the "civilized" world has fully socialized medicine (some places for almost a century), but Noooo, we can't have that, that would be *baaaad*.
*facepalm*
MCI broke the 'Bells back in the early 1980s, Apple broke the 'traditional' mini-computer industry, FOX broke CNN, Internet pr0n killed the nudie mags and DVDs, Netflix/Hulu/etc is now threatening to kill the physical disc-based (DVD/Blu-Ray) movie industry, Apple's iPhone rose up and slammed the cozy BlackBerry/Palm/Nokia/Carrier relationships, and so on, and so on...
Remember that the GP's point was this: "when in reality the natural state of business is collusion and consolidation."
The markets you mention currently aren't exactly the best counterexamples for 'consolidation'. They're more or less all dominated by about two entities.
As for collusion: any rational being can see that collusion is just an arbitrary (legal) relabeling of cooperation. Considering that natural selection has shown us that cooperation is a highly effective strategy, it is borderline idiotic to argue that collusion is incidental, or caused by anything other than being inherently highly effective.
This line of thinking is at the core of understanding why 'governmental intervention' is absolutely essential in a lot of cases (it has to be done right, though). In a completely free market, the players in that market will inevitably find everything worth finding. That is both the power and the danger of a free market. Players will find awesome new products and innovative services. They will also find collusion/cooperation, outsourcing, slave labor, child labor, murderous working conditions, misleading financial products, false advertising, lies about ingredients, etc.
If you believe such can be avoided by improving individual morality, then you don't really understand how evolution works.
I keep myself healthy but still like to bake cakes or cookies or make pancakes in the morning for my family. Why should I pay more so the actual fat slob can get cheap insurance while not taking care of his health?
That is ridiculous. But that is what we have come to. At the end of the day, medicine is complicated, and there are things that you can't control (and most societies decide to cover) and those you can. I prefer what a friend was told in Japan when he went complaining about knee and lower back pain "When you lose enough weight to get to a healthy level and we can figure out if it's more than you being fat, come back and we will look at what else we can do. Until then, deal with it"
Not all Democrats are equal, just as not all Republicans are equal (though they have much less of a spread). The votes of several conservative Democrats were needed to pass ACA. They did not support single payer, and Obama knew this from the start.
The tyranny, the identity theft, you name it: all unintended consequences.
What idiot told you that? And why on earth are you repeating it? No successful government ever pursues just one goal. Everything must serve multiple purposes. Those are all very much intended consequences. The fact is that profit is also an intended consequence, not the only one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On the contrary, most companies I have worked with consider government contracts to have a high probability of losing money for them, which combined with open bidding means the government gets higher costs and/or lower quality contractors.
YMMV. I work on a lot of government projects, as a consulting engineer in construction. Granted, they are mostly state & local projects, though they often have federal $ and the consequent federal requirements.
>
At what level of coverage? Does everybody get the latest stem cell therapy? Cancer treatments that have a 1:10 chance of working? Robotic replacement limbs? Who decides who gets what? Why should I be forced to pay for insurance that I neither want nor need? Why shouldn't you be forced to pay extra if you are obese or smoke?
In Australia we tax cigarettes and alcohol steeply, and there's moves to tax high sugar products for exactly this reason.
And you do realize that "who decides" is currently decided by your insurance company? Which, with a single payer system, will still exist but needs to offer a lot more service then they do currently to compete. In Australia, private insurers advertise on the basis of being able to cut your waiting time for an elective procedure, get a nicer hospital bed, or coverage for things which are assessed as untenable or unproven by the public system (our big blindspot is dental, and you can usually get a better selection of optics under coverage).
Funnily enough, if something severe happens to you though, you usually want to go into the public system anyway since the surgeons and doctors get more experience treating complicated cases then people who are solely private (also just more experience overall).
Of course the other thing is, notably, our public system does frequently pay for cutting-edge treatments for people who need them - the research is publicly funded, the patients have to be very specifically chosen, and usually viable candidates need to relocated to somewhere it can happen. The latest stem cell therapy isn't something you can usually buy anyway, and you specifically definitely can't afford it.
John Green (of Crash Course fame) did a pretty good video on this.
Have you ever worked on a health care project?
HIPPA regulations and the contracts between the government and the contractors would most certainly prevent anyone that is not directly involved in the project from touching the code.
Dude, this isn't open source, its a federal government project with all the rules and regs that apply.
Besides, I doubt they would listen even if suggestions came forth. Inside some of the larger corporations and consulting companies, I think the attitude that open source = Hackers/Anarchism still prevails.
There's an old saying in software that the first 90% takes 90% of the time to develop, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
So if they are saying they are at 70% rather than 90%, then yeah, it looks like it will be quite a while.
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
It shows the inability of the government to properly manage private sector services. They probably hired the coding firm based on campaign contributions rather than qualifications. I bet they don't even have any guarantees in the contract. The coders are probably making more money fixing the thing than if it worked.
A shining example of mismanagement.
This is only a good plan until you hit the wall when too few people can afford the rates, then you have completed the spiral and you are out of business. There is some evidence that insurance companies were very close to this wall.
I see some people don't get the point of a market. A market isn't to be nice to insurance companies, it is to create and compete for the best product and markets. Those businesses that fail make room for those that can succeed. This aspect of Obamacare was a bailout for insurance companies that should have failed.
And given how badly the US federal government screwed this up (actually making fundamental problems like high health care costs worse) why should they be trusted with single payer or some similar scheme?
Insurance is just that, insurance. As Chris Rock put it, it should be called "in case shit". Here is how I envision a solution to your dilemma. People can choose to exempt themselves and their family from purchasing health insurance. If you require treatment you pay for it before you receive it. Don't have the money? Well, sorry bud, come back after you secure financing. You've had a cheap existence, health-care wise. Others haven't been so lucky. Maybe you will continue to be lucky, maybe you won't. Are you willing to sign that paper requiring prepayment for medical services?
Because the system was designed to fail, the website is doing exactly what it was planned to do. When 0bamacare doesn't work, then the government (both parties) can claim that only a single-payer system can possibly work.
There's no going back to the way things used to be -- that's why 0bamacare was rolled out in stages over a period of years. We can't go back now. The Supreme Court was our last, best hope and they failed us royally.
Once government runs all of our health care system, anything they want to outlaw will be done through the health care system. Like to snowboard? If you're injured, you won't be covered. Own a gun? That's too dangerous; you'll have to give it up. Skydive? You're kidding me, right? Like fast food? Now try to find it. Yes, you can say I'm exaggerating, but that's what happens when bureaucrats get hold of legislation. They justify their jobs by coming up with more and more regulations, and they know they can't be held accountable. Imagine Bloomberg times infinity.
If I live long enough (I'm 60), I'll come back just to say I told you so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act#Employer_mandate_and_part-time_working_hours
The employer mandate is a penalty that will be incurred by employers with more than 50 employees, if they do not offer health insurance to their full-time workers.
However, because a company will not face the penalty if it has less than 50 full-time employees, many are concerned that the employer mandate creates a perverse incentive for business to employ people part-time instead of full-time. Several businesses and the State of Virginia have clarified the contracts of their part-time employees by adding a 29-hour a week cap,[262][unreliable source?][263][unreliable source?] to reflect the 30-hour threshold for full-time hours, as defined by the law.
Regardless of the rationale for maintaining existing insurance arrangements for those happy with them, most policy analysts (on both the right and left) are critical of the employer mandate provision on the policy merits.[260][268] They argue that the perverse incentives regarding part-time hours, even if they do not change many existing insurance plans, are real and harmful;[270][271] that the raised marginal cost of the 50th worker for businesses could limit companies’ growth;[272] that the costs of reporting and administration—the paperwork for businesses and the state enforcement—are not worth the trade-off of incentivizing the maintenance of current employer plans;[270][271] and note that the employer mandate, unlike the individual mandate, is a non-essential part of the law.
The effects of the provision have also generated vocal opposition from several business and unions.[271][275]
On July 2, 2013, the Obama Administration announced on the Treasury Department’s website that it would delay the implementation of the employer mandate for one year, until 2015.
Translation, you're retarded.
Developers know the first 90% of the project takes the first 90% of the projected time and the last 10% of the project takes an additional 90% of the projected time.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I wonder who "Pod 6" is? //$('#signUpButton').hide(); pod 6 doesn't want this hidden
It could be a Sealab 2021 reference? Captain Murphy is always complaining about "The jerks in pod 6". Maybe a pet name for some group the dev doesn't like?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Probably just feeding the trolls here, but: Seriously? That's the best argument you can come up with?
I was just responding to your claim that any society that doesnt provide medical care isnt a society-- Im assuming here that you arent prepared to discount all civilizations outside of the last 200 years as "not societies".
There really is no valid argument as to why "Society" shouldn't (to some extend) be "Socialist
Find me a socialist-run country in the last 100 years that hasnt been an absolute disaster.
Most Human beings have plenty of incentive to be meaningfully productive members of a society, it's called a conscience, and a full set of operating emotions
In the context of dealing with alcoholism, have you ever heard of the term "enabling"? Same concept.
Unfortunately the people paid to come up with the memes like that one seem to be in the group of humans that lack both.
Are you sure we live in the same world with the same race? Everything ive seen indicates that the number of people who might concievably make communism work is utterly drowned out by the number who ensure it will never work.
What?
Perhaps you don't understand how this works - the Republicans shut down the government with their little hostage scenario, meaning everything not classified as essential *must* be shut down by law. Yes, that results in some stupid things like parks being shut down and patrolled at a cost greater than operating them, but that is what the law requires. Doing anything else requires Congress to change the law, and as you may have noticed they haven't been at their best lately. Obama has little to do with it unless and until a bill reaches his desk.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
My health insurance that wouldn't bankrupt me cost $78 a month for myself and my 6 year old daughter. It went up to $100 for the October billing cycle. I'm hoping it's because it's grandfathered in. I've had the same plan for at least a couple years now and it's a plan Blue Cross Blue Shield has offered for a very long time.
If you want the same health insurance I have, it now costs hundreds of dollars a month.
Obama has officially attained celebrity status: his fans are happy to pay excessive amounts for merchandise simply because it has his name on it.
Work Safe Porn
Are you f*cking serious? Do you actually think that the obesity epidemic in Australia is going to be addressed by "taxing high sugar products"?
I do. In particular, I decide to get limited coverage at a low price.
But you want to force me to buy coverage I neither want nor need in order to subsidize your personal desire for excessive medical spending.
I have given this a bit of thought, if I get tired of the nonsense I will simply quit working and join the other half of the nation.
Got Code?
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gee... shouldn't that same doctor be helping him to lose the weight? Hit the road, fatty! Sounds just like government "health care" to me.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This is only the case because the entity forcing the insurance providers to fill out a bunch of paperwork-- the government-- is waiving that bureaucracy for themselves.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
and how do you expect the doctor to do that? gastric bypass on the public dime?
I'm thinking that the irony of your statement is lost on you.
I did a search for the word test. My thought was that surely they would remove the test code now that it's in production. Apparently I'm mistaken.
signIn : function() { var passwordStatus = "expired";//for testing purposes if(passwordStatus === 'expired')
Is anyone else infering from the above that password authentication on this site might be lacking ?
"It's one thing to talk about the poetry of machines. Quite another to listen to it for yourself."
Get used to it. Those of us who have been carrying health insurance for years have been required to pay for you dumb fucks who don't carry health insurance because you "never get sick" and now just got cancer or ran your car into a tree.
Every once in a while, I think "insightful" should go to +6!
"Thanks for the clarification, but the anecdote still doesn't prove anything. There's lots of bad code out there in any sector."
My anecdote was not intended to prove anything. But I gave you a link, and that DOES prove something. That is javascript CURRENTLY ON the healthcare.gov website -- so you know I'm not pulling a fast one -- and it is chock full of errors.
That's called proof. And the errors are so elementary, that I literally mean that they are "You actually got paid to write this sh*t???" quality.
" There's lots of bad code out there in any sector."
Not this bad. Literally. THIS is a first-day-in-class javascript student level error, from the linked file, for just one hilarious error out of MANY:
resources['ffe.ee.myAccount.resetPassword.password.instructions'] = 'Your password must contain 8-20 characters. There must be at least 1 upper case letter, 1 lower case letter, and 1 number. It must be different from your last 6 passwords. It can't contain your username or any of these characters = ? ( ) â " / \ &';
Note that this string value begins and ends with a single quote: '. But it also CONTAINS a single quote. It's telling you that it can't accept a single quote (among other things), but a single-quoted string cannot contain "unescaped" single quotes! What happens is the interpreter sees the first single quote, then chops the whole string off at the second... the one in the list of non-allowed characters. The remainder that is left dangling is a syntax error.
This is really, truly, grossly, elementary-school BAD code. It isn't worthy of a first-term javascript class. This code doesn't work.
I particularly like all of the "TODO" comments in production code.
It's part of the test plan.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Ahah. In this particular case, it looks like they used a unicode equivalent to the single-quote, inside the string (because it did not come out as a single quote on Slashdot, which does not support unicode, or much of anything standard for that matter).
BUT that wasn't the case the other day. So they have indeed fixed some of these errors over the last couple of days. But as of yesterday, those errors WERE as I described, and they were NOT simple coding errors, they were egregious, INCREDIBLY DUMB errors that nobody should expect to get paid for.
Are you kidding me? My company could have built this thing for 1/100th of what the Government paid and still make a huge profit.
The problem isn't "the private sector" it is how government procurement works in ever more corrupt administrations. It's called a bribe in every other country in the world. For the last five years, the Democrats have shown themselves to be the most greedy, most corrupt, most thug-like politicians we have ever seen, ever. For them, government procurement is a bribe to get money back into the party. They make so called evil corporations look like saints.
You really want to see where this leads, spend some serious time studying the City of Detroit, or Chicago, where the Democratic Party Political Machine has more in common with the mafia than any political party. Seriously. In Detroit, after 40 years of one party rule, the difference between the mafia and the Democratic party is impossible to tell. That's why many find Democratic members of the last administration are serving time.
Murphy was an optimist
What's ridiculous is inventing success stories using OFA plants to cover up the malfeasance.
Murphy was an optimist
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
Nor does it pay to code it till it's designed, and debug it till it's tested.
Hey, I make a living on cleaning up people's ass backwards code pal!
Relax, you are in a growth industry, in a booming business cycle.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Better than the Indian firm that the code development was outsourced to? Yes, even "government employee programmers, who probably belong to a union and cannot be fired for anything less than murdering the boss" would do a better job.
Forgetting to mention those are huge expensive boondoggles with very poor outcomes in the case of the VA.
So let me get this straight - if you and your entire family were offered lifetime VA healthcare with zero co-payment charges, for less cost to you than your existing healthcare plan, you would refuse it ?
Do you honestly believe they honored HIPPA? I'd bet you every person who signs up is automatically included in the Democratic Party and OFA's massive database of vote prospects, and that is the only part that actually works. Maxine Waters already spilled the beans on this, several weeks ago when she bragged that the Obama Administration is creating the most massive list of potential Democratic voters EVER, and that when he leaves office it will be "a gift" to all Democrats, forever and ever. You can't make this stuff up.
Some administrations (Nixon, Obama) believe the government is above the laws they create...
Murphy was an optimist
Name anything the government actually manages WELL... There is zero incentive to manage well, zero.
Murphy was an optimist
An amazing story considering not one single person outside of the OFA has said Obamacare is cheaper than traditional insurance.
Murphy was an optimist
I just now downloaded the file again, and it is apparent that they have been working on it. The example I gave just above has been fixed. But others haven't, and there are now new errors. For example, the file now has a comment on the first "line", but has no line breaks for quite a while, which means EVERYTHING up to the first line break is commented out. That would not be such a big deal if it were not about 80k+ characters of apparently important code.
But if you format the code correctly, right there on line 47 is this gem:
This is exactly how it appears in the file. Note that the single-quoted string contains not just one, but several single quotes. And they are not escaped. This code simply cannot function.
It *IS* apparent that they have been working to fix things. But even their fixes appear to be as though they are just thrashing about in the dark.
ONE medicare fraud case two years ago created a loss equal to the ENTIRE PROFIT OF THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY FOR A YEAR.
So saying "there is some fraud" is an astounding mis-statement of fact.
Murphy was an optimist
"Why didn't your state setup their own exchange like my own, New York? It worked great. The fed site redirected me right to new york's site."
That's completely off-topic. Regardless of how good or bad your state exchange is, that has no bearing on the fact that they spent $634 Million of our tax money for THIS mess.
And remember that even the state exchanges are ultimately dependent on the Federal infrastructure.
The $40 Asprin came as a result of stupid government regulations. So did many of the ridiculous practices that we now have. The truth is that the government has done more to drive up the cost of healthcare than any other party.
Insurance companies want the same every other company does. Happy customers, happy employees, and happy investors. What government wants is more and more power, and more money in the pockets of the politicians, who get richer and richer.
The fantasy that large groups of people in corporations are by definition EVIL and large groups of people working in government are by definition benevolent is incredibly naive and misguided. The truth is that large groups of people working in government are the most evil of all.
Murphy was an optimist
That explains why the conservatives were completely shut out of the bill authoring process, why the bill passed without a single Republican vote, and why the Senate passed it using a procedural trick that enabled a simple up/down vote. No large social engineering project has ever been rammed down our throats in this manner, ever.
But remember folks, the Democratic party, they are the party of the "Big Tent" and want everyone to talk. What a crock.
Murphy was an optimist
Thank you, Stenvar. I am so tired of "The Narrative" where every other country has such a grand system, and our country is so screwed up, if we would just be more like them - - from people who have never been to these other countries!! How many Americans would happily fork over 50% of their income plus a 20% VAT for crappy doctors and long waits? Not many!!
Murphy was an optimist
Please move to a society you approve. I hear Eastern Europe is real nice.
Murphy was an optimist
Yes, the networks will be limited. That's a feature of private health insurance that exists because it means the insurance company can cut their rates. Private insurers used limited networks of doctors long before Obamacare came along. Will it be worse under Obamacare? Nobody knows yet, but it's ridiculous to claim that it will definitely make their coverage "near useless in most cases". That level of certainty when the data doesn't exist is normally a sign that someone is seeing what they want to see.
Meanwhile in Brooklyn someone waits four hours for an ambulance. I suppose four hours is better than eight, although the reason he stopped waiting appears to be that he had died.
This isn't a feature of one health system or another - every system has problems like that; it's a result of living in the real world, without limitless resources. A system that had enough resources to avoid disruption at peak demand would be ludicrously over-provisioned 99% of the time. The perfect is the enemy of the good - try to build a system that never has capacity problems and you won't be able to afford even basic care.
Yup. If the government did it, it'd be single-payer, and cut out 50% of the overhead. But no, conservative Obama instead pushed the ACA, which is a subsidy to the insurance industry, run poorly by the government and poorly by the private sector. The worst of both worlds. The easiest way for the US to get efficient health care is to apologize to the UK and surrender, asking to be a colony again, to be known as West Ireland.
Learn to love Alaska
SS, as an unmanaged investment fund that *only* buys T-Bills, is much much cheaper than private companies offering a similar service. The IRS is much much cheaper than what ADP would charge for the same amount of billing/collection. And the IRS does much much more than ADP would do for 10 to 100 times the cost.
Learn to love Alaska
Nurses are doctor-replacements. There are too few doctors, and no plans to add more, so when you have an issue, you see a nurse. The doctor will skim a chart, confirm the diagnosis and treatment specified by the nurse, and move on for the nurses to administer the treatment by themselves.
Learn to love Alaska
So you object to Death Panels if those are run by government employees (who have no incentive to kill you), but like them when the Death Panels are run by for-profit companies who gauge your future payments against the cost of the treatment (thus may end up with a fiscal motive to kill you)?
Learn to love Alaska
Nobody can reasonably argue with shared risk, but the IRS coerced nature of *this* law, coupled with the rather skewed premium pricing (laying a heavy burden on the young "invincibles" to push down premiums for the old, fat, smokers, and the chronically ill) leaves a lot of room for debate.
Calling them "dumb fucks" is juvenile and only closes their minds further against your position.
Genuine health reform will not happen until legal reform happens first. By adopting a European model of loser-pays in civil litigation, the caseload will drop with malpractice premiums to sane levels.
SS, sure. The IRS, I am not so sure...
Murphy was an optimist
Let's all use esoteric abbreviations.
Look at the cost of the IRS and the amount of money they handle in and out. Then get a quote from ADP or some other payroll processor for some multiple of that number and compare them. I've worked with ADP, and they would be many many times more expensive for the same function, and no, I didn't pick them because I think they are one of the worst/best, but they are one of the biggest, and one I have experience with, I have no idea where they sit in the scale of costs.
All the IRS "inefficiency" complained about is the cost pushed to the people and companies for compliance.
Learn to love Alaska
I am not saying they should, but it is more likely that what comes next is not a Signapore style open free market, but rather, single payer. Which the rest of the western world has in some form or another.
I suppose so. I guess I'm upset because I see Obamacare as a subversion of the insurance system, whether deliberate or not, It seems to me that it'll be cheaper and far less painful to simply enable a working insurance system. Then when single payer comes in, I have an abiding suspicion that it'll be greatly screwed up in some way that even strong advocates of single payer will wash their hands of it. I'd just rather avoid the decades long train wreck.
One of the problems we are having with healthcare costs is the everything is covered idea. When I was young, in the 50s, my parents had Blue Cross Blue Shield. I had a calcium deficiency and had several broken arms and legs as a child. When I was sick, flu, cold infection, we went to the family doctor and paid cash. When I broke a limb, we went to the hospital and my Mom plunked the Blue Cross card on the counter. Health insurance was for major medical not colds.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
I've worked on healthcare projects. It's not a big deal. And the law is HIPAA, by the way. Not "HIPPA".
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Are you f*cking serious? Do you actually think that the obesity epidemic in Australia is going to be addressed by "taxing high sugar products"?
No I think it will bring in revenue which can be used to offset costs to the healthcare system incurred from obesity.
To your other point, you listed a whole bunch of enormously expensive procedures and then said "but who decides!?" Well apparently it was decided by your own personal finances, since your limited coverage definitely won't pay for any of those things - if it pays for anything at all, since the insurance company's first action when you make a claim is going to be to try and deny and drop you.
Isn't it ironic that the one thing the government does well is take our money?
OFA - Organizing for America. Obama's Army of Citizen Volunteers.
These are the internet trolls who you find spreading glorious stories of the grand successes of Dear Leader's great leaps forward. It is an entirely new political phenomenon in America that we have never seen before.
The person the administration trotted out as the "First Person to Sign up for Obamacare" was, in fact, an OFA worker, who did not actually sign up.
This is a tactic the Obama Administration has used many times in the past. Sandra Fluke, for example, was presented as an average college student, nothing special, blah blah blah - In fact, she was very politically active, a member of Obama's Citizen Army, and had been specifically groomed for the grand stunt in front of congress. The media, of course, sucked it right up. It's called state sponsored propaganda in other countries... but in Amerika it's simply not covered as such.
So if they have to have state sponsored staged events showing success - it is more than a glitch, it's a dismal and complete failure.
A few months from now we'll find out that less than 10 people signed up the first week, and everything else we were told was a lie. Back when I was young and passionate we had a president named Nixon who did far less than Obama, and the nation was horrified beyond belief that President could do such things.
Murphy was an optimist
>belong to a union and cannot be fired for anything less than murdering the boss, would have done better?
I love straw-men arguments! :D
MABASPLOOM!
Ever hear of a nutritionist? In socialist medicine, the government is 100% responsible for every subj^H^H^H^H citizen's health. No excuses.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Yes, that is correct. When it's a government death panel, I don't have a choice. When it is a for-profit death panel, I and everybody else gets to choose their death panel, which is infinitely preferable.
No, you still don't understand. I'm not worried about whether I can afford those expensive procedures, I simply do not want them. I think many of them are useless; they are overpriced solutions pushed by the medical profession for problems that are much easier and cheaper to prevent in the first place. Yet, under a single payer system, I am forced to pay for them and to support a system that ultimately makes people sicker than they need to be.
So the vision for your country is that of a huge population of obese people kept alive through an expensive medical system. Well, I do not want that. What I want is a country in which people stay healthy. Staying healthy takes a lot of effort, and unless you make the cost of not staying healthy very high, people simply won't bother. The only way I know of doing that is to give people three options: (1) stay healthy, (2) pay a lot of money, or (3) die early. A single payer health care system, by design, removes most of the incentives for people to stay healthy.
That's something that really needs to be addressed by law, but it doesn't require a single payer health system.
"what idiot told you that?"
You projecting again, Democrat-Fascist-Party-Cheerleader-Boy? I'm saying that any tyranny or identity theft or any other negative consequence is not intended. In fact, it seems dubious that healthcare reform is anything other than a "voiced" objective. I'm saying the real objective is blowing lots of money, with the expected incidental benefit that some will land in the pockets of the well-connected. The whole thing is articulated to appear as a just and noble endeavor. This helps enlist foolish nanny-state-government-cheerleaders such as yourself to cheer the whole thing on whilst heaping condescending vitriol upon anyone who dares to point out the obvious....
And the cost of Blackwater for the same security is higher than when the military does it. And many other things. On the whole, the government is more efficient than the private sector. Even schools are cheaper, the problem with those numbers is that the per student costs are often calculated very differently, depending on the school, so the comparisons usually show public schools to be inefficient, but that's mainly because of overheads, not teaching expenses, but teaching expenses, not overheads get the cut.
Learn to love Alaska
What choice? I have a very limited number of health care providers to choose from, and they are in overt collusion (they have representatives on the state board that oversees themselves), so I have a single choice of terms, and no visibility as to what their choice would be, should I be facing a death panel.
Learn to love Alaska
Schools are run by the individual states, not the federal government. Even so, just because the numbers are calculated differently doesn't mean anything. If you look at a high enough level, you will see that privately run schools very often are lower cost to run.
There are many programs that in only makes sense for the federal government to run. They might do a good job at some. But in general, large federal programs have a history of waste and fraud involved at a much higher rate that private industry, which has much greater incentive to be efficient. In fact fraud in big government programs is almost expected, as we all expect to see it increase with O-care.
How's that old Post Office doing as compared to Fed-ex or UPS? Not too good.
If you look at a high enough level, you will see that privately run schools very often are lower cost to run.
And the land used to run a private school is usually "free" to the school, and often the buildings are as well. For public schools, they'll do stupid stuff like interest-only bonds to pay lots for the school land and buildings, and continue to pay that for a very long time. When you look at a high enough level, you get politician stupidity, not "government inefficiency". But for the amount it costs to provide a teacher and materials in a classroom, the cost for public school is almost always cheaper.
Learn to love Alaska
Cheaper is not always more cost effective.
really? tell that to my downstairs neighbor who is half blind, it could be fixed for a cheap lasik surgery but can't get it from the NHS simply because he is too old (I live in the UK, I suppose the NHS qualifies as socialist). In socialist medicine, the government does not take responsibility for your health.
In socialist medicine, the middle class gets steamrolled because taxes are far too high too afford your own care when the government doesn't feel you qualify for it. If you are poor, you take what you get because you pay for nothing anyways and the rich are still rich, and get the care they want.
that is basically the only benefit of fully socialized medicine, compared to certain government limitations in the medical market (usually quasi-price controls).
Yes, you have correctly identified a major problem with our current system. So, if you recognize this as the current problem, why do you want to make it worse by reducing choice even further and giving even more control to corruptible state and federal boards and regulators? If the power that these organizations have is already being abused, how is giving more power to them going to improve things?
A better choice would be to deregulate the insurance industry and create more choice. The only area where we need more regulation is to prohibit insurers from the current practice of dropping the seriously ill or raising their rates.
Given the selection biases, it's impossible to compare the quality of education between the two.
Learn to love Alaska
Because, in practice, a single death panel for the national plan works out much better than the current US system. I'm looking at the US, Australia and NZ systems. All better and cheaper than the US system.
Learn to love Alaska
You can find comparable demos if you had the resources.
Regardless, schools are state run, not federal. A big difference. There is a lot of variance between states and even counties in quality of management. Some states are much better managing their finances than others. Some have nearly balanced budgets while others are deep in the red. So I'd agree there are some examples where public schools do better, but its nowhere near across the board.
And public schools don't often reflect land cost in their operating budgets either. Furthermore, if a private school saves cost in creative ways such as re-purposing an existing facility, more power to them.
Based on my contacts with them, I wouldn't want to trade my current insurance for them. Have you actually been insured in any of those systems? Many people in those nations get secondary private insurance to make up for the deficiencies of the public system.
Furthermore, even if those systems were a nice as you think they are, just because something works in another nation doesn't mean it works in the US. We have different demographics, a different culture, and different politics. NZ is a country of 4M people, smaller than some US cities.
Looking at the UK, Australia, and NZ is insufficient evidence.
Have you actually been insured in any of those systems? Many people in those nations get secondary private insurance to make up for the deficiencies of the public system.
Yes, and "many" is a subjective number. Is 1% "many" 99% "many"? A quick search indicates "less than 8%" private insurance in the UK. I wouldn't consider 8% "many" but you may count it differently.
Learn to love Alaska
More than a quarter of New Zealanders have supplementary private insurance. The number is small not because of lack of desire but because of lack of affordability.
I will fight tooth and nail against a UK-like system. I think it is a disaster and I do not want my insurance to be affected by it. I'm glad Republicans are also trying to get rid of Obamacare. Health care in the US needs to be reformed, but it needs to be done right.
I ran my health insurance like that for almost fifteen years: while I lived in Asia and could get good (but not great) health care for pennies (yes, literally pennies). We had a baby, operations, High-tech scanning (CT, sono, MRI) and nothing even pushed the card over $1000. Now, what would happen here in the US if we tried to get by on a $5000 credit card to cover a family of 5?
HAHAHAHAHA! we'd be screwed.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
What you say about cost shifting is somewhat mistaken. What I see is that the "part-timers" who were working 40-60 hours a week under a "part-time contract" are now going to be held to a 30 hour max week so they will have to have 2 jobs to pay the bills instead of the one. While that is hard on them, the political cost to the employers (being treated like dirt because they are screwing their employees who will cheat them big-time because of it: so that everyone loses from this is what is stupid. And the large orgs and edus that are doing this are just making themselves look shabby.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
I didn't think the costs of private insurance in NZ is high. People pass on it because it isn't needed. The only people who "need" it are the ones who demand to have their convenience medical care be taken care of like it was a heart attack. "What do you mean you can't take my corns off today? I'm supposed to walk like this for a week before you get me in for surgery?" Those are the types that need (And get) insurance. Generally people have high faith in the health system in NZ.
Learn to love Alaska
If you don't think the govt doesn't have a fiscal motive to "kill you" in that scenario, you haven't been watching the latest deficit showdowns. Government is always looking for a way to save a buck.
New Zealanders also make substantially less money than Americans.
I wouldn't call more than a quarter of people "passing on it".
And I don't like others passing judgment on what my medical needs are, nor do I like paying for other people's excessive consumption of medical services.
So, obviously, you don't realise [sic] that there are people who are responsible enough to manage their money in a way that health insurance IS an option.
And good for them. But if they have enough money to put aside for health issues, it would still make more financial sense for them to buy health insurance and share their risk with others. If they don't, then they're at best idiots or at worst idealogical freaks.
In any case, the fraction of the population that can actually afford to do this is very tiny indeed. To put it another way, I affirm that the "responsible" people you talk about really don't exist. Or if they think they're responsible by having a stash for health care, they're still a heart operation away from bankruptcy. And when they go bust, the rest of us pick up the tab.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
If we had real competition, the overhead would tend toward zero....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
So step one to balancing the budget is to kill all the taxpayers?
Learn to love Alaska
nor do I like paying for other people's excessive consumption of medical services.
So you don't pay for insurance?
Learn to love Alaska
Googled it, will now don my tin foil hat and descend into my concrete bunker. Literally everything I can find on the OFA makes them sound like a propaganda machine. The vague goals, the disguisting level of "positivity" in their quotes, and a thousand other things make it...obvious.
Thanks for telling me about them, I needed to stay up tonight anyways.
Thanks for the response. It is pretty scary stuff.
A long time ago, when the Democrats stood for the rights of the Individual I was solidly in their camp. What this latest crop of Democrats have tried to accomplish is truly terrifying, they have "for real" put serious effort into creating an army of brainwashed drones, the same as Hitler's brown shirts who later became the SS. It's a good thing the Democrats are poor at executing their crazy ideas, or we would be beyond all hope already.
The creation of an enemies list, using Federal agencies to go after political enemies - We have never seen anything like this, ever.
What's truly amazing to me is that we have people defending them, passionately arguing that they are right, buying into the whole demonize the opponent, make them larger than life, refuse to negotiate propaganda that has caused incalculable human suffering over thousands of years. Fomenting hate against amorphous group of people based on their beliefs, their skin color, their income, etc. in order to gain power is the sickest and most disgusting form of human behavior.
Murphy was an optimist
Under Obamacare, I'm forced to pay for coverage I neither want, nor need, nor consider reasonable. And every time a lobby of doctors or disease activists gets together and pushes for coverage for yet another overpriced and useless procedure or tratement, I'm forced to pay for it.
Prior to Obamacare, I had the choice of self-insuring or picking a plan with lifetime or coverage limits. Prior to Obamacare, insurers also had much more leeway for punishing and refusing coverage for people, whereas now I'm forced to pay for the consequences of other people's bad choices.
So, prior to Obamacare, you had no insurance?
Learn to love Alaska
True, but Obamacare does nothing to reduce the cost of health care.
That remains to be seen. But it will reduce the cost of health insurance