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"War Room" Notes Describe IT Chaos At Healthcare.gov
dcblogs writes "U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has released 175 pages of "War Room" notes — a collection of notes by federal officials dealing with the problems at Healthcare.gov. They start Oct. 1, the launch day. The War Room notes catalog IT problems — dashboards weren't showing data, servers didn't have the right production data, third party systems weren't connecting to verify data, a key contractor had trouble logging on, and there wasn't enough server capacity to handle the traffic, or enough people on the help desks to answer calls. To top it off, some personnel needed for the effort were furloughed because of the shutdown. Volunteers were needed to work weekends, but there were bureaucratic complications."
Add something meaningful. This wasn't because of Republicans. This entire fiasco is Government Bureaucracy screwing things up. It's that same kind of bureaucracy that just needs to go away. You can have regulations without bureaucracy.
Wasn't it just a few weeks ago democrats were hitching on to the idea that republicans were misguided because even under a government shutdown, healthcare is considered essential and would not lose funding? Pick a stance, guys.
That'll come as a shock to many Americans who think the globe is divided into 'America' and 'Them'.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
"War Room" Notes Describe IT Chaos At Healthcare.gov
"Third World characteristics describe War Room deliberations at Healthcare.gov."
After all, had this happened in some far away land, we'd be congratulating ourselves for "not being them", right? And how we, being the "first world", are better at implementation, with "checks" and "balances" at every step.
But ends up costing multiple times more in the end.
Add something meaningful.
Go-live fiascos like this are quite common in the private sector. Large corporate bureaucracies can be just as bad, if not worse, than government. The difference is that this particular SNAFU is getting dissected in the press. It's a great opportunity to learn about the complexities involved when deploying large, complex, federated systems. I guarantee you there are people in the private sector pushing these articles to their corp. IT as a way to shame CIOs and CEOs into cutting the red tape, procurement hurdles, fiefdoms, and archaic development methodologies in their own organizations. If you want something meaningful from this event, learn from it rather than pointing fingers at "The Government." These are problems in most large organizations.
Vietnam, Iraq, the postal service, the NSA Utah data center, the response to hurricane Katrina, prohibition, no child left behind, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, shuttle Columbia, the great society, Japanese internment camps, Guantanamo, the F35 program, the war on terror, Fannie Mae, Amtrak, Railhead, Teton dam, Fair Housing act, TIDE, Social Security, the Bay of Pigs, Olmsted dam, Mariner 1, Iran-Iraq war, Solyndra, and IRS modernization...
...they were bound to get healthcare.gov right.
Who feels confident that cyber-security protocols can be effectively managed under these conditions?
You guys are so funny. If a Republican gets into office, and wants to expand government programs because he's a "compassionate conservative", you slam him for spending too much money. Afterall, conservatives can't bash big spending Democrats when "Republicans do it too".
So now a faction of the Republican party gains a few seats, and you bash them for being the example of small-government, budget-conscience conservatives you keep claiming you are looking for in a "loyal opposition party".
So, what is the truth? Do you want Republicans that spend like liberal Democrats, or do you want Republicans that spend like conservative Republicans?
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 takes two to tango, and the Democrats were saying no to Republican proposals with equal vigor.
The childlike games played just to prevent spending cuts is embarrassing and shameful.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"The government employs too many people. We borrow money from China to employ them."
In the 1990s you didn't. You simply had a high enough tax rate to cover the bills and run a bit of a surplus that could be used to pay down the accumulated debt. Then the tax rate was cut on the theory that this would stimulate the entire economy. Instead it seems to have spectacularly enhanced incomes at the upper end. Although an unpopular solution, letting those tax cuts expire is one way to solve the budget problem.
The deficit problem you describe exists largely because the political decision was made to take in less revenue and spend more on programs, because "deficits don't matter", in the hopes that starving government of funds will eventually lead to lower costs, somehow. Unfortunately the people making these decisions have the will to cut revenue, but apparently not the corresponding expenses. The results are predictable. It is an artificial crisis that has been created by doing one thing and not doing the complement to it. The solution is to follow through with cuts that should have been made a decade ago or to reverse the revenue decline.
I agree that the government employs too many people for current revenue, but if you actually want to make cuts that matter, you should be looking at big-ticket government employment, such as spending more than any other country in the world on the military. Sad as it is, these federal employees and the gear they use are pretty expensive too. Perhaps fewer aircraft carriers would be worthwhile to consider, for example.
As a former DoD software developer, let's review your comments.
According to the best source of info I could easily find, federal salaries made up just 13.8% of the federal budget as of 2005.
You also neglect some important questions:
Expensive compared to what? If they don't have to show a profit, etc., then can you objectively demonstrate that they're getting less done than a (potentially) lower-priced contractor?
Also, you fail to mention that there's a very open debate about if / when contractors are a better deal for the government than are civil servants. Partisan thinktanks have no problem making sweeping statements, but organizations specifically charged with reporting truthfully find that there's not enough data.
I hope you're also not going to compare the average salary of all public sector works vs. all private sector workers. Because for the most part, the government doesn't hire people to do low-skilled work. For example, at the military sites that I've been at, things like building cleaning, etc. was mostly done by private contractors.
As opposed to what contractors do? Good grief man, have you ever seen what private sector contractors do? I've seen plenty of silliness and inefficiency in civil servants, but I've seen countless times contractors milking / drawing out contracts, while often getting less done than the civil servants with whom they collaborate.
I suspect you have two basic problems. (1) You're so frustrated with the negative examples you've seen of civil servants, that you simply assume the private sector is more efficient. And (2), you're confusing your complaints regarding the breadth and intrusiveness of the government's self-granted scope, with the quality of work being done by civil servants.
Add something meaningful.
Go-live fiascos like this are quite common in the private sector. Large corporate bureaucracies can be just as bad, if not worse, than government. The difference is that this particular SNAFU is getting dissected in the press. It's a great opportunity to learn about the complexities involved when deploying large, complex, federated systems. I guarantee you there are people in the private sector pushing these articles to their corp. IT as a way to shame CIOs and CEOs into cutting the red tape, procurement hurdles, fiefdoms, and archaic development methodologies in their own organizations. If you want something meaningful from this event, learn from it rather than pointing fingers at "The Government." These are problems in most large organizations.
This times a million. How many Oracle rollouts went disastrously wrong in private industry that it was obvious even to the casual observer (despite corporate NDAs) and yet here we have a bigger project than most, that was actually live on the date that it was supposed to be (despite capacity issues and some lingering bugs) but of course the fact that it wasn't perfect is proof that the government can't do anything right. If this same project were corporate, it would have gone live in 2015, still had only half the features it was supposed to, and bonuses would still be rained upon the CEO/CIO's heads. There's your "free market efficiency".
You mean the party that kept sending bills to the senate while the Dems said only "NO, NO, NO! We'd rather have a mandated shutdown!"?
You mean
That party you mean???
This is not to say the Dems are blameless, but for fuck's sake, stop saying the GOP is the party that keeps sending bills to the senate. That's fucking bullshit, and you know it.
Truly yours, a life-long Republican tired of seeing a sea of stupid beasts more interested in destruction, confederate-flag waving, secession, creationism, birtherism, social-medieval conservatism-barbarism and just blatant mental anachronisms than on making things work with the other half of the population who does not agree with everything they say...
All I know is that this furloughed worker debate is meaningless in the context of this article unless someone actually believes that the website would have worked properly if they had those 3 more weeks.
To be fair, healthcare.gov was clearly behind schedule and they released what they had. I don't think the government shutdown caused the problem. It may have made it worse because they had a few less people working on it.
Server capacity issues mean they didn't perform load testing or underestimated demand. Of course, the code wasn't done so it's hard to test.
A small team could have written that website in the time allotted without issues provided the specs didn't change. The cost of the site and the number of people involved is insane and demonstrates the consultants took them for a ride.
I bet it was cheap, inexperienced developers who had no clue how to build a scalable site.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
So ... I repeat my wife's question: do you REALLY want these people in charge of your healthcare? I don't.
Isn't it an opt-in system? So don't opt-in. I thought the point was that there are a lot of people who can't afford any healthcare. Those are the people that Obamacare is aimed at. Slightly chaotic healthcare is better than no healthcare.
which is totally what she said
CBO estimated ACA would require $10B. Congress approved $1B. http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-not-take-victory-lap-on-obamacare.html?m=1
The US Government can simply take more money from taxpayers, then borrow 40 cents from China for every dollar, and they will make ACA succeed by brute-force.
Uh, isn't that basically just socialism, plus the fact that people want more than what they can afford? They could just spend less on healthcare and get the same result without the borrowing. However, the whole point of socialism is to take money from people who have money and to spend it on people who don't. If you don't like that then the solution is to just let people who can't afford insurance die, which most would not consider an acceptable solution.
The problem with healthcare is that everybody wants to paint it like some black-and-white simple problem with a simple solution, when in reality it is about 500 problems lumped into one big mess. There are lots of issues that drive up costs. There are lots of issues that discourage preventative care. There are lots of issues with who gets cared for. There are lots of administrative issues with paying a fair price for the work that gets done. There are lots of issues with trying to figure out what the best way to take care of a sick person actually is.
Everybody like to just pick one thing and point out a simple solution to it. Just let ERs turn away the indigent and now hospitals are solvent (just be sure to budget more money for the morgue, both for those who can't afford care and also for those who left their wallets at home when they keeled over). Just set the reimbursement rate for a particular treatment at $10 and now it doesn't cost much to pay for it (ignore the fact that nobody will provide the treatment any longer). Let the market freely set prices (and ignore the fact that consumers have little ability to shop around while unconscious). Every complicated problem has a simple solution that won't work...
Although these problems are bound to occur in any large organization, their impact is disproportionately large when a monopolist power screws up. In areas where there is competition, people at least have alternatives (even if they aren't ideal). When Apple launched a broken maps app, people used Google maps on safari until Google released their own app. Windows 8 sucks? Buy a Mac, an iPad, or Galaxy Tab. But for a federal government fail, the alternative is to, what, move to Canada?
But both conservatives and liberals can take away valid arguments from this; liberals can say that in order to get government to do all the things that we (for certain definitions of "we") want then we have to be willing to spend the money to do it right, and conservatives can say that having the government run (for certain definitions of "run") something creates a single point of failure and should therefore be avoided.
That's all fluff and deflecting the real problem. They hired idiot contractors who suck at their job and were just there to make everything overpriced and make a fortune for the company owner. THAT is the real problem.
The thing is that things are now working the way they should be. That is were now criticizing the web site, the process, the contracts and learning lessons. This is how government is supposed to work. The republicans are going to town with criticizing the many faults of the website - which is perfectly fair and what they should have done to begin with. The Republicans never should have held the American public hostage to try and kill the ACA and they did tremendous damage to the economy by shutting down the government.
The Democrats meanwhile should be held accountable for an absolutely atrocious website and project that never would have passed even the most basic of reviews in the private world. The Republican criticisms of the website are pretty much well founded from what I have seen. If the Democrats had reached out to the private sector instead of designing the thing by political committee it could have been built to a much higher standard.
I'm not taking sides on this argument, what I am doing is saying that all government across the political spectrum should be held to this level of scrutiny and accountability. The long standing methods of bidding out government work have led to nothing but rampant fraud and inefficiencies that could never work anywhere except the federal government. Reform is needed, and if this website finally causes reform of government bidding and projects than it will have done more good than it ever meant too.
do you REALLY want these people in charge of your healthcare? I don't.
Congrats you baited me. The Government is not in charge of your healthcare any more than the SEC is in charge of your stock portfolio. ACA created a regulated market for private insurance. The person deciding whether or not you get surgery is a medical director at a *private* insurance company. Not a government official. If anything, ACA made it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage for certain types of care. This Republican talking point is way over-played and not based on facts.
Does your wife really think that insurance companies don't make errors with billing, coding or paying the bills?
Next time you're in your doctor's office, ask them how much effort it is to work with the various insurance companies. Should you be in a hospital, ask the doctor how much time is lost in disputing the necessity of treatment with insurance companies, or how many patients opt for less than optimal treatment because an insurance company bureaucrat interprets a rule differently from other staff at the very same firm.
Just like most large scale web deployments where there is instant user base of millions...
The problem with your analysis is that you have the facts wrong.
If you look at a chart of revenue and spending in constant dollars, you'll see that after the 1998 tax cuts, revenue increased until the dot.com bust in 2000. Revenue was down until the 2001 & 2003 Bush tax cuts, after which it increased until the housing bubble burst in 2007/08. Tha major tax cuts in the era you're talking about weren't followed by revenue decreases in the years right after they took effect. Revenue right now is about average for the last 15 years, down a bit because it follows the state of the economy and the economy overall is still down. Minor changes in tax rates don't affect revenue that much. Annual revenue is UP about a trillion dollars since 1980, so it's not like we've suddenly had less revenue than ever before.
Spending is the the obvious issue. Since 1980, spending is up $1.8 Trillion (still constant, i.e. inflation adjusted dollars). Since 2000, it's up over a Trillion dollars.
Bottom line, revenue is way up. Spending is just way, way more up. Revenue has gone in the desired direction. The issue is that Spending has gone in the wrong direction if we want to solve anything related to debt and deficits.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
healthcare.gov was opened to the public Oct 1st, the gov't shutdown started Oct 1st... anyone blaming furloughs for its problems is being disingenuous at best... and the gov't had 3 YEARS to get the site up and running
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I work at a major bank. This sort of non-sense has peaked in recent years at big organizations. One would have thought the business side would have become more IT savvy in the past couple of decades. Instead, they still think a magic wand can be waved in the USA or India which will cause a computer system to emerge. Perhaps the business side users are peddled such fantasy by Infosys, Tata, EDS, CGI, CSC, etc. But more likely it's business users who refuse to work collaboratively with IT. They think because they got a bunch of low cost Indian or American programmers, usually with one dimensional skills sets, whacking away at the keyboard that a quality system will emerge. Instead, they get crap. It's like a parade ground crowed with marchers who have no coordinated direction. There's no orchestration, no appreciation for logistics, and not sense of engineering. If an engineer tells the business side something cannot get done, then they replace the engineer with someone who'll tell what they want to hear. The best analogy is Hitler working with his generals in WWII. He thought flags on the battle maps could be moved around like a paste-it board, not concept of logistics. And when a general told Hitler his plans were imbecilic, then the general was shot. Thankfully for humanity Hitler's idiocy destroyed the Third Reich. What else will the business users destroy?
Happened to me.
In 1981 I received SSI benefits because my father was disabled.
In 2012 I received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying they had overpaid me in 1981 and I owed them money.
After over 30 years!
I sent letter after letter, with the appropriate appeal form. They ignored all of them.
Just kept sending increasingly threatening letters. By the way, they were sending the letters to an address I ahve not lived at for over 30 years. Even though they have my current address.
I called, they could not help. Eventually someone was able to change the address.
They then sent a wage garnishment to my employer.
I called, reached a person who said 'fine, we'll reverse this'. But they didn't actually tell anyone.
So my employer deducted it from my wages. How embarrassing is that? They said I had to work it out with SSA.
And after that, the IRS deducted it from my tax refund. They too said I had to work it out with SSA.
Then I get a letter from the SSA saying 'we have recalculated your benefits and we owe you money'.
They sent me a check for over double what the had garnished from me.
No doubt i will get another letter in the future telling me I owe them money
You mean the party that kept sending bills to the senate ...
...without making any attempt whatsoever to make those bills something that could pass in said senate?
Yeah, them.
Note that the Senate during this time also sent a bill to the house. By all accounts, it was a bill that would have passed in the house with flying colors, and the POTUS would have signed. It would also have represented a tremendous victory for Republicans, cutting food stamps by 4 billion dollars, and all sorts of other assorted (IHMO evil) cuts to the poor that Republicans were wanting. In the Bush era a Republican house would have jumped right on this.
The house's Republican leadership wouldn't bring it up for a vote. In fact, they changed their own rules specifically to prevent anyone from being able to bring this passable bill up on the House floor. Why not take a big legislative victory? Because the Republicans in the House don't care about legislative victories. They wanted to shut the government down. Simple as that.
I don't have a problem with someone posting a small comment as an AC to preserve modding in general articles.
But I will agree that the AC had a long post with "insider knowledge" that is beyond appropriate.
If you have detailed knowledge of a story, choose to either mod or comment.
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.
Does your wife really think that insurance companies don't make errors with billing, coding or paying the bills?
Next time you're in your doctor's office, ask them how much effort it is to work with the various insurance companies.
Ask them which is worse - the insurance companies or Medicare?
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.
Simple solution: Just say, "My username is _____, I'm just posting as AC to preserve mod points."
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
So ... I repeat my wife's question: do you REALLY want these people in charge of your healthcare? I don't.
They're not in charge of your healthcare. They're in charge of making sure you get healthcare from a qualified insurance company and have the ability to discuss your medical needs with a qualified doctor.
Do you mean taxes, or potential lack of health care?
Having to pay more taxes is a fair enough point I suppose, though I consider it quite a selfish one. If your government cut back to less than a trillion dollars of military spending per year (that might sound like an exaggerated joke number, but it's not..) then you could potentially have lower taxes as well as nice things like national healthcare. Maybe you consider that military spending an investment in the future of the oil market, I don't know..
If the penalty is potentially having no healthcare.. then like I said, it's no worse than definitely having no health care.
which is totally what she said
My son turned 1 year old 2 weeks ago. We're STILL dealing with incorrect billing issues from his birth.
Please try again. This time plot revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP. I'll save you some time, go here to see it.
You are correct that spending is up, even as a percentage of GDP. The budget should be reviewed, as some of the causes are cyclical (the recession) and will "self solve" as the economy improves, while others are structural issues, like devoting an ever larger chunk of the budget to military and war expenditures over the past decade.
But it's just as important to realize that as a percentage of GDP revenue is down. Those tax cuts mean the government is taking in a smaller percentage of economic output. So when inflation drives up the cost of guns/tanks/healthcare/office space/contractors for the government there isn't a corresponding increase in revenue to off set it, because we've chosen to end taxes on a number of things that get inflated (like the wealthiest 1%'s salaries).
Your bottom line is wrong. Revenue is up in dollar amount, but down as a percentage of the economy. Spending is up by both measures. Revenue has not kept pace with economic growth. To solve the debt and deficits we must both lower spending and raise tax revenue, ideally by closing loopholes and credits, rather than raising the marginal rates.
All that reads like pretty standard War Room activities for a launch of this size. There is a reason they chose the name "War Room" for these things. It is just a central location where issues are triaged, and it can be chaotic after a launch. This is an example of the press trying to make a big story out of something that isn't news by reporting on something that most people don't understand.
I would be more concerned by the lack of a war room than from war room chaos.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Who the fuck cares?
Mod points aren't actual things.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Did you actually read the CBO document? I have read it and it says the exact opposite of what you believe it to say. As an example, you said:
...Because for the most part, the government doesn't hire people to do low-skilled work. For example, at the military sites that I've been at, things like building cleaning, etc. was mostly done by private contractors.
The CBOs data suggests you are just flat out wrong concerning this statement.
The CBO report says, and I quote: "Both high and low wages tend to be less prevalent in the federal government than in the private sector, so the range between those wages—the dispersion of wages— tends to be narrower for federal employees." The report that you reference also states that employees with less than a high school diploma are overpaid compared to their private counterparts by 21%, while doctoral-level employees are underpaid by 23%.
Translation: The government cut taxes and relied on the capital gains windfalls from speculative bubbles to fund itself. This went about as well as you would expect.
May the Maths Be with you!
"put it to you this way: you've seen how things work here. Do you really want the same people deciding whether or not your mother can have surgery?"
Oh if only everything was a simple as the private sector!
"Have they paid us lots of money in the past? Can they afford to give us a lot of money now? No? No surgery for mother then. Next case!"
The Government is not in charge of your healthcare any more than the SEC is in charge of your stock portfolio.
Oh really? So, the SEC will fine me for not being invested in a minimum government approved set of funds, that I may or may not need? Will the SEC shut down funds that are not diversified in the manner in which the government has determined must be put in place in order to further finance other investors that don't have as much to invest?
ACA created a regulated market for private insurance
All private insurance was already heavily regulated! All the ACA did was create thousands of new government jobs and rake in half a billion dollars in new lobbying by the insurance companies... that you had best be buying a product from or have the IRS forcibly take those funds from you. Hooray freedom!
If anything, ACA made it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage for certain types of care.
That could have been handled in a 10 page bill. If this had anything at all to do with actually taking care of people, a bill focused on chronic illness would have seen bipartisan support, and cost a wee bit less than the additional trillion a year this beast is putting on to our debt.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
That is true, but in this instance, this was a no-bid contract. And for hundreds of millions of dollars (do you realize how many programmer hours that buys?!) this is a fiasco. Just wait until it starts working and healthy working people realize how much they're going to have to spend to subsidize all the lower-income and non-workers. This is going to be a spectacular disaster.
And it just might be even more complicated than both of you think. Yes, the insurance company is a private corporation, but it is following book loads of rules promulgated by the Federal Government. Yes, for all practical purposes, the Government is in charge of your healthcare.
Yes, the ACA made it harder for the insurance companies to do some things, like drop you for pre existing conditions, but the insurance companies recieved lots of carrots for that particular stick. The big failing of the ACA, IMHO, is that it did not come down hard enough on the insurance companies - they are the big winners in all of this.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So in other words you don't realize that as a healthy person you already subsidize the uninsured. Hospitals have to charge insured people so much in part because they have to cover the costs of all the people that have to treat who don't have insurance. So imagine if those people did have insurance! Of course you're going to have to help them pay for their insurance since the net affect is probably pretty minimal on a healthy person with insurance.
Dunno but good comeback. Win.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
working people realize how much they're going to have to spend to subsidize all the lower-income and non-workers.
you mean, like retired people, those who were laid off and due to outsourcing, can't find jobs?
how about those that have been going to emergency rooms for treatment since there was no other way for them?
we have always been supporting those that can't support themselves.
but I guess that, to you, its ONLY about those that 'refuse' to support themselves.
go ahead and tell me about 'bootstappiness'. I bet you want to bring that up, don't you?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So, the SEC will fine me for not being invested in a minimum government approved set of funds,
OMG, you have to pay a fine for not being insured!!! I guess that fine will go towards the actuarial cost you are incurring to society for just existing, and expecting not to die on the side of the street if you fall over an break your leg.
So which is it? Should the government scrap you off the side of the road in case misfortune visits you. If so, should someone else pay, or should you? If you can't afford to pay, shouldn't you be forced to insurance yourself.
What's that zen mantra of conservationism again? "Personal responsibility". Only an ideologue can look at a black wall and say it is white.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The American people paid $88 million for what one can get done via CraigsList at about $50 an hour
1) post personal medical information to Craigslist
2) ???
3) Affordable health insurance!
Do you want Republicans that spend like liberal Democrats,
If you go by history, democrats know how to balance the budget and bring deficits down. Conservatives have their own "economics" that says that tax cuts are free, and then are disconnected from their largess anyway, so the budget gets fscked up.
The problem with the tea party isn't that they want small government, but that they want to cut the parts of the government they don't want, which don't cost much anyway. The three biggest chunks of government are: military, social security, and medicare. Most of the tea-party supports the military largess, and they are on social security and medicare. So reform is a non-starter.
So the real reason people hate the tea party is that they think black-is-white, are will destroy the country to prove it.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You can't see how this law will exacerbate outsourcing, downsizing, layoffs and massively increase the federal government? Retirees and the poor have had Medicaid and Medicare and still will... but Obamacare has done nothing to reduce the cost of healthcare such as tort reform to reduce malpractice insurance. And yes, Obamacare will make it that much harder to be an independent worker or small business owner.
The difference is that you may not need funds, but you WILL need healthcare. You will, you just never know when. It's inevitable, unless you're somehow immortal.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
but you WILL need healthcare
Yes. And I will need food and water, as well as shelter and clothing. In fact, those things are a far higher priority in my day to day survival than health care.
Is it now the job of the government to provide all things deemed essential?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Yet, under one method my health insurance is good and affordable. Under the other scenario my insurance costs 259% more and has higher deductibles and out of pocket costs.
The fact-checkers have been having a field day playing "gotcha" with the Fox News interviews with people claiming that their insurance will cost more under Obamacare. All they have to do is call the people up and ask them to describe their policy.
There were cheaper policies that didn't cover as much -- they had higher deductibles and out of pocket costs. People would find out, too late, that they had a $20,000 bill that their insurance didn't cover. Those policies won't qualify under Obamacare.
The Obamacare policies will cost more than some of the old policies. But they have lower out of pocket costs than the old policies.
People say, "I like my policy." That's a mistake. You don't know whether that policy is any good until you've gotten some big medical expenses, and you can see what it covers. And most people don't get big medical expenses very often.
Like Nataline Sarkisyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nataline_Sarkisyan
Michael Moore wouldn't be able to make those movies if the insurance companies didn't make it so easy for him.
"Tort Reform" is a red herring foisted by insurance companies. reducing the ability for patients to protect themselves when medical practitioners screw up does nothing to reduce costs and does everything to undercut the little guy.
healthcare costs so much in the U.S. because primary and preventative care are lacking, and the "market" has emphasized high-cost hospital care and pharmaceuticals. in short, capitalistic greed is unchecked. sad, but unsurprising, really.
government is needed to step in and counter this trend. left to their own devices, the healthcare industry and pharmaceutical companies will just continue to jack up prices, while our population does little to increase overall health.
I'm sure your SO feels the same way about your Viagra.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I'm so sorry that, at some point (Reagan,) we made the decision that humans should be taken care of, no matter what. We're not animals, after all. It's a dog-eat-dog world, but for %^@* sake, let's compete for wealth and such, not for basic survival. We mandated that hospitals treat any and all, and then they spread the costs around.
When we did so, and discovered that people in fact aren't all self-reliant future-predicting money-saving accident-preventing weather-controlling disease-resistant beings, and that we were having to cover costs at a later stage and greater expense than really necessary, yeah. We decided to push back a little, and ask people to contribute up-front to their statistically likely healthcare costs, for which we're all (one way or another) on the hook for.
This is, if anything, more of a personal-responsibility push than before, which I would have expected conservatives to favor. We have a safety net (you'll get healthcare no matter what) but by golly, we're tired of moochers. If you can pay, then pay. There are some things you can control about your health -- but there are an awful lot you can't, and for you to claim you know you won't need certain care is fairly ridiculous. Cancer? Car accident? Plague outbreak? You don't have enough data, nor enough of an immediate feedback loop, to plan properly for those eventualities. And unless you're willing to be left to rot and die on the side of the road, I don't accept your claim of self-reliance. It's all fine and good until bad shit happens.
Sure, your policy covers some gender-based services you clearly won't use, for the sake of simplicity, so we can compare plans and make informed decisions. The actual cost to you of having insurance coverage for services you know you won't need is really quite low, because it's spread across everyone, and you're getting benefits that others won't use. This isn't a savings plan, you're not paying into a silo, it's insurance. Same thing with paying taxes to pay, in general, for care for the poor. It's not a silo, it's an insurance plan for all citizens, even you, in the eventuality that your best-laid-plans fail and you wind up on the street.
You're not paying for services you won't need, you're paying to be part of an insurance pool with thousands of other people who will all have different issues, and you're all sharing the cost. It's different.