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About 25% of HealthCare.gov Applications Have Errors
itwbennett writes "An estimated one in four user applications sent from HealthCare.gov to insurance providers have errors introduced by the website, an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said during a press briefing Friday. The errors include missing forms, duplicate forms and incorrect information in the applications, such as wrong information about an applicant's marital status, said Julie Bataille, communications director for HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). While the software bugs leading to the errors have largely been fixed, as many as 10 percent of insurance applications may still have errors and consumers who have used HealthCare.gov to buy insurance and have concerns that their applications haven't been processed or have errors should contact their insurers, Bataille said."
An internal investigation into the magical healthcare.gov form errors ended when they noticed several changes attributed to "Yiuf, Crazy".
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Well, the numbers are meaningless without context. What is the percentage of normal insurance forms that have errors on them?
You can keep your errors.
Period.
An estimated one in four user applications sent from HealthCare.gov to insurance providers have errors introduced by the website
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's my understanding that this is happening with no user error at all. It's as if they load all the information into a database then when you select a plan, it retrieves the information and places what it thinks it needs on the forms it thinks it needs and that is where the errors are occurring. So it would actually be the website's problem as it attempts to collect the information and place it into the application forms as needed and failing there.
I don't think users can make the system to send duplicate form pages.
problem is with the way it sends the info to the insurers.. it's like faxing them over email.
oh and a fairy simple fix would have been while at it to overhaul the whole system. why? so that it doesn't matter to the "basic care for everyone rates" at all what your marital status is or if you were born in compton. for extra insurances you could then visit the insurers.. but hey,if it's worth being proud of a country where it matters into which family you were born then fuck it I suppose - because that's what private healthcare does.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Strange, TFA as well as the summary seem to imply that the users are entering faulty information into the forms or failing to enter any information into some forms, and that is what is causing the problems.
By this point, I think people generally understand that Healthcare.gov is to be avoided if at all possible. This system of systems is a monster (reportedly 500 million lines of code at 60-70% completion), and it's probably too big to test -- testing might take longer than it took to write, i.e., the QA death spiral.
The only reason to use the exchange is to get a subsidy. If you are a normal taxpayer who won't qualify for one, go off-exchange.
Or, join a religious health care pool, which are medical cost-sharing plans that are exempt from the law.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Is this after correcting against how many would have errors if they were filed directly? I'm willing to bet that direct applications contain a similar number of inaccuracies, so what's the news here?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Introduced by the website seems to imply they are because of the website. Both the article and summery say that.
Now from what I have been told, you don't fill out specific forms. You enter specific information into the website and it fills the forms out for you based on the plans you pick. It is supposed to stop you from filling forms out incorrectly or getting confused on wording and so on. It also allows you to do direct comparisons without having to fill 20 forms out for 10 different providers offering 2 plans each.
Oh, my mistake then. I was under the impression that the end users filled out forms on the website, and were missing some or incorrectly filling them out, leading to an error.
Better them than me. Talk about an ugly technical job.
Strange, TFA as well as the summary seem to imply that the users are entering faulty information into the forms or failing to enter any information into some forms, and that is what is causing the problems.
Failed reading comprehension in elementary/primary school didn't you? The summary and article both state the erroers have been caused by the Healthcare.gov system not the health insurance applicants.
Oh, my mistake then.
"If you like your mistake, you can keep it."
Obamacare was rushed out, without any testing, and it's a new application for them. Of course it will have all the hallmarks of a version 1.0 release . . . like plenty of errors. Most wise IT folks always wait for the second or third release of a product before using it.
Except with Obamacare, it's the law that you have to use the 1.0 buggy release.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's not even v1.0 yet. It's still in alpha stage at best!
Life is not for the lazy.
I can picture the big white banner right now as we speak - "Mission Accomplished - Affordable Healthcare is Now Online".
Yeah, sure only a few billion down the toilet on a web site and kickbacks to key supporters, but its the same idea.
The only difference is that no liberal think tank is going to keep a tally on the impact of this debacle of a law.
By this point, I think people generally understand that Healthcare.gov is to be avoided if at all possible. This system of systems is a monster (reportedly 500 million lines of code at 60-70% completion), and it's probably too big to test -- testing might take longer than it took to write, i.e., the QA death spiral.
I fail to see what a large codebase has to do with end users using or not using it.
The only reason to use the exchange is to get a subsidy. If you are a normal taxpayer who won't qualify for one, go off-exchange.
Why wouldn't somebody want to compare plans and prices available off-exchange with those in the exchange, exactly?
I don't respond to AC's.
We don't have to excuse them, we can demand they anticipate these things and provide for it. They seems to have an idea of these issues, with their plans to create a cadre of "navigators" to help people with internet access and web site help. But the plan and law was heavily politicized, 36 states refused to set up their own exchanges and dumped all of them on the federal exchange. Millions of people who would have gone to medicaid are dumped into exchanges because they refused to expand medicaid.
No doubt there were self inflicted wounds. Politicians scared of people getting sticker shock, insisted on disabling the window shop and see full price option at roll out, That was the root cause of disaster. The first thing the "tech surge" did was to enable window shopping. It was enabled as early as Oct 15, I tested it then, They could not have done it that soon if it was fresh code. Window shopping was the original code, They just disabled the meddling by the politicians and went on the original code path.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I tried to get coverage using the Healthcare.gov website. My state (NH) doesn't have its own site and I found a good on-market plan. I was about to submit my completed application, but noticed an error - the start and end dates were one day off, with it saying to start on 12/31/2013 and end 12/30/2014. Worrying about it, I called the healthcare.gov website help line, they refused to help saying I needed to talk to the insurance company. I tried calling the healthcare company and they confirmed it to be a mistake. I finally called up the healthcare.gov helpline saying I'd like the "advance team" to delete my application, assuming it might be something that could be fixed on a new application, something I now see as a big mistake. I'm now no longer able to login, with it not even giving me an error, just won't login.
Delta. Remember, there's an entire back end that hasn't even hit testing.
what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. ~
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
This post is the best example of an apologist with no logic or facts for backup.
No. They awarded a known incompetent company with a record of bad projects with a non-compete contract. Then they paid them ONE HALF OF A BILLION DOLLARS for a shitty website and aren't asking for a fucking refund.
Part of the 25% error rate is apparently the Feds double-sending a form. That's not a good thing, but it's not like the insurer can't do it's job just because it has two identical copies of one of your forms. If the forms are different, and include important info, the double-copies could be a huge problem, but the article doesn't give us any way to tell how many of these 25% error are actually errors vs. how many are conservatives in the insurance industry bitching that their guy got whipped in November of 2012.
More importantly the data is old. There were 834 errors in forms sent prior to the big relaunch, which works out to a 25% error rate, and indicates that roughly 3,336 actually managed to get the website to tell them it worked in October/November; but pretty much the entire reason we had a relaunch was that the site sucked. The current error rate in the article is 0.77%. It's probable that number will go up, as most of that actual humans who've used the site haven't sen the copies of the forms sent to the insurance companies yet, maybe by an order of magnitude (ie: 8% error rate), but so far the relaunched website seems to be doing OK.
It seems like you are conflating the website with the law. You do have to get insurance, but you do not have to use the website.
I waited until the last minute because 'fuck the government' right? But when I did call, I got a really nice lady that walked me through the whole process in less than 30 minutes. They basically ask you the questions from the forms (the forms are also available to fill out yourself and mail in. Forms link, and instructions link)
I have a family of 4 and we'll end up paying $74.00 per month for Blue Cross Silver plan. It's better than what I have right now through Blue Cross, and I've been paying $400 a month for it.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
That is true.
Unfortunately for those bitching about the website the error-rate the article's talking about is entirely from the pre-relaunch period. The data they have on the post-relaunch website is a 0.77% error rate.
I was thinking of changing my Major Medical plan, because it is getting expensive. It has literally doubled in price in the last three years. I went to ehealthinsurance.com, which is where I normally shop for insurance. I found that the cheapest premium is about the same as I am paying now, meaning that insurance rates really have gone up by 100% in the last three years. Probably due to some sort of new legislation.
Even worse, I was comparing if my plan started now. If I started a new plan in 2014, the lowest cost plan is 50% MORE than I am paying now. That would mean that insurance rates have tripled in three years.
My company just switched insurance plans to a much more expensive plan for the full family option. It is more than $1,300 a month. I won't be participating, of course, since much cheaper plans are available individually. I wonder if my employer gets their kickback per individual, or is it just for signing up the company? If it is per individual, I will probably expect some retribution for not using the plan.
Anyway, I question how some of the lower paid full timers can afford this. After the cost of the insurance plan, dental and FICA, they are probably only going to be taking home a few hundred dollars a month at best.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
After FINALLY completely the application after deleting and restarting again and again I finally got to the point where I was given some quotes.
And they were off the wall. The prices per month for what I had were more than $200-$400 a MONTH MORE than what I was paying and
with the hidden costs of deductions, formularies, etc. I just won't have any insurance.
The root cause of the problem is that Republicans dominate very small states with very large percentage of poor people. For example South Carolina had about 150K people already eligible for medicaid but were unaware of it. Even though the Republicans refused to expand medicare, the medicare rolls are expected to swell by 150K, because they are just finding out that they are actually eligible, and if they don't enroll for free healthcare, they would end up paying a fine! There are another 350K people who would know that they are within 400% of the poverty level, eligible for subsidies, and the Governor refused to give them access to that money. The hospitals and providers are going to lose about a billion dollars of federal money. Romney won that state by a margin of 2.2%. NC has 4.7 million registered voters, Romney's margin in raw votes is just 100K. If the potential loss of medical coverage or the possibility of getting subsidy impels a fraction of this 500K who are not already voting Democrat to register to vote, or actually show up to vote or switch from R to D, that would be disastrous to the Republicans.
If a dilettante like me crunches numbers like this, the politicians have at least semi or deci Nate Silvers in their pay roll. They know what is coming down the pike. Sure you could decry it as a simple vote getting ploy by the Democrats. And you could rail about the unfunded expansion and the effect it is going to have in the deficits etc etc. You could shout till cow comes home, "if people vote themselves benefits without worrying about the costs, Democracy will die". But if Republicans do not find a way to pacify that section of the population, none of these intellectual arguments are going to sway the people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The problem with the article isn't that the error rate it mentions wasn't a huge problem, it's that it's a huge problem Obama's apparently fixed. To quote the article on the post-relaunch website:
The site performed well this week, Bataille said. The site had no unscheduled down time and its page error rate was .77%, about the same as the past few weeks. Page load times were below one second.
There's no info in the article saying Bataille is lying, and you'd think if 10% of insurance applications were missing forms/had duplicates/etc. somebody would mention it.
One of the things I hate about America is that the pols never actually do anything terribly controversial. In 2008 US Health system had the British NHS for veterans, a typical Northern European system for Federal employees and Massachusetts residents, Canadian medicare for seniors (and yes, they're both called Medicare), and multiple purely American private health insurance systems (a small group market, a large group market, an individual market, hi-rick pools, and 50 slightly different state versions of each). Given that finance people run most of these systems, and finance people's major life-goal is revenue maximization, you had a whole lot of administrative costs (aka: finance people), virtually no cost controls, and nobody who thought about the situation for more then two seconds was surprised that a) the Federal government spent more per capita on healthcare then governments that actually cover everyone, b) many people were not covered (or had shitty coverage), and c) costs were increasing at ridiculous rates. Firing finance people and making Doctors the key decision-makers wouldn't help much because Doctors are convinced that everyone in their sector should make as much as a comparatively educated finance weenie on Wall Street, which means they don;t say know when the ridiculously overpaid specialist demands a $50k raise. To fix the mess you'd either need to remove most of the sources of finance people, or replace the finance people entirely with government bureaucrats who think that nobody should break $200k in base salary because the CEO (ie: President Obama) only make $400k and the Board of Directors (aka Congress) only make $174k.
So Obama had a fairly huge problem to solve. People who needed and wanted insurance weren't getting it, sometimes because they were poor but not always (only a fool agrees to insure someone whose breast cancer is in remission for the sticker price), many of the ones who were getting it were getting shitty insurance, and the finance weenies running the various systems were bleeding the country dry. But he can't get rid of most of the system because this is America. The VA, and Medicare are untouchable (unless they want more money). Large group policies from big employers are untouchable because the majority of the country uses them and would totally freak out if they changed even a smidgen. So Obama decided to rationalize the small group and individual markets, which guts the majority of income for finance weenies (prior to Obamacare it was possible for non-medical costs in those plans to be 40%, that means finance weenies got 40% of your premiums, now that's capped at 20%). But to do that he had to eliminate the existing markets, and to eliminate the breast-cancer-survivor problem he had to make insurance mandatory.
As a result we've got health cost increases in the relatively reasonable sub-10% range, the website has an error rate of under 1% so by this time next year almost everyone will have reasonably priced comprehensive insurance, and pretty much the only thing Obama had to give up for it was his current image.
This also would have given a lot of supporters with subsidy eligibility certificate in hand, willing to contact their senators and representatives asking them to support ACA. This is a grave and stupid political mistake by the Democrats. And they are paying the price for it.
But in the long run, people already having medical coverage through employer or through medicare would not change their vote because of ACA. Democrats would continue to support it, probably bemoaning not implementing single payer or public option. Republicans won't gain too many votes from that group. But from the 40 million people without health care, people eligible for medicare and people below 400% of poverty level (that is nearly 90K AGI for a family of four) eligible for subsidies, there is going to be solid vote gain for Democrats. And most of it will happen in solidly red states because they have the largest percentage of poor people.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They're not actually talking about human data entry errors. The problem is with the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) documents used to communicate between sysmems. "834" is an EDI document type related to the health care industry. My current gig (no, not health care) has me dealing with EDI quite frequently. It's difficult to get right. Even getting your hands on the standards for a particular documentation type, vendors rarely follow the standards, and commercial libraries for mapping data in and out of EDI format mostly suck.
I cannot complete the online application. I even tried deleting the incomplete application and created a new one. I still receive an error before I input my household income. Ugg.
Who cares....??? Healthcare.gov is like Katty Perry or Britney spears...... sheeple feedings
It's bad management. Not a software story.
The 25% error rate in so-called 834 transmissions is a "preliminary" estimate of the website's performance between its launch Oct. 1 and Nov. 30
0.77% is just for the past week.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It seems like you are conflating the website with the law. You do have to get insurance, but you do not have to use the website.
If you are entitled to a subsidy, the website is the only way to get it. Direct applications to insurers won't receive one.
The problem with a) Checks and Balances, b) powerful individual congressman, and c) a massively diverse country is that major overhauls of entire policy areas are virtually impossible.
For example let's say you just want to get Federal per capita health spending below Canada's, because the federal government in Canada is the only spending on healthcare which should be (in theory) a lot cheaper then the various systems our Federal government uses to insure less then half of the country. That probably requires giving people on the VA system the same insurance options as over-65s. But if you do that a lot of veterans are gonna worry that their care will get worse because VA-System enrollees are happier then medicare enrollees. Some over-65s will freak out because at that age group there is a very vocal cohort of People Who Hate Change On Principle. Which means some Congressman will bring up questions, because it is pretty much his entire job to bring up questions like that, and the rest of Congress will go along with him because a) Seniors always vote, and b) no politician wants to be the guy accused of screwing veterans. Cue Congressional Check of Presidential proposal.
If you overhauled the private insurance system it would be even worse because most Americans a) receive health insurance from their employers, and are b) convinced that it is not only above-average when compared to other employer plans, it is also better then all other possible options. When Clinton tried that shit it didn't even get past Committee.
Thus you have Obamacare, which tries to merge several disparate insurance markets (Congressional healthcare, the Individual Market, and Hi-Risk Pools) nobody was particularly attached to. It could in the future include several markets that some users (but under half) like -- Medicaid, the Small Group market -- with an option that people like but is basically already Obamacare (Federal Employees already use Exchanges similar to to healthcare.gov).
If you want a government system that runs like an engineer would want a government to run you probably need to steal the Westminster System used by the UK, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, etc. There's one guy. He's Prime Minister. He's in charge or he isn't. If he disagrees with you, tough. Your choices are a) convince Parliament to fire him and force new elections, or b) wait for new elections. This whole Obama-spends-15-months-minorly-reforming-healthcare-then-spends-40-arguing-with-Republicans-about-it just doesn't happen. There's no bribes to be extracted in the vote-to-call-the question in the Senate. There's no filibuster. There's no endless committee hearings where powerful people posture for the camera. There's no such thing as a Westminster-system pol who supports part of the PM's program and votes against the rest.
Hell, in Canada Parliament is even less of a check on the government then I've implied. You can't run for election as an MP unless your party leader signs your nomination papers, and if you're in government that's the Prime Minister.
You'd have to be a complete doofus to use that site. Don't give your personal and private information to a site that has zero security.
The relaunch was on Saturday November 30th. It's Saturday December 7th. The entire post-relaunch period is last week.
This article is like bitching about how terrible Windows 3.11 was the week after MS launched Windows 95. No shit 8 days ago Windows sucked, that's why they re-did the damn thing.
Yes, I see the data flowing between a plan and the .gov site. .gov they were providing new certs and end points. Just in time infrastructure provisioning was in full force.
The web services fail hundreds of times a day to this site. We now ignore the errors from the site and consider the broken.
I believe that the applications coming through with errors are greater than 33%, probably closer to 35%. Some might be user entry issues not the vast majority.
The weekend before go live for
While Dave Kennedy might be a bit of a media whore, he is a respected security consultant. If he says it is vulnerable then it is probably chock full of holes. Passing a CMS audit is a freaking nightmare, figure 30 plus full time resources to pass a 912 audit for just the infrastructure and non externally facing websites. CMS would never have let this go live for a private firm.
The website is just the first hurdle on this long journey to transform the current private health insurance model.
Yes, I posted as AC because I like my job!
Now you know that's not true. The article and summary specifically make it clear that bad information is being input by users
You are welcome on my lawn.
no refund for them to snag.
Uhh...you do realize that "them" is the IRS, right? You seriously don't think that the ability for the IRS to extract money from you is limited to what you overpay in taxes, do you?
Ah! I misread your "pre-relaunch" as "pre-launch." Apologies.
Replacing "have" with "had" in the summary and title does put a rather different spin on things.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
We're just dying to try out version 2.0. Preferably 2.0.1 where they have the bugs worked out.
From what i understand, a lot of that cost was infrastructure, not code. That can be reused even if the application was burnt to the ground and started fresh.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hey, we're just trying to emulate South Africa - and doing a damn good job of it, too!
That sounds like a great deal if you live clean anyway. If you don't drink much, don't plan on getting pregnant, and don't care for routine examinations it's a great deal - just like the cheaper health insurance plans that are now illegal.
As for the "scare" from your link, it was one case where the company decided it could not legally provide insurance in the state where the people lived - unfortunate but not really a company issue. And an arbitration panel agreed with that assessment when challenged, You prefer to believe the state that claimed it never blocked them from providing coverage, even though the state as just as mud a PR interest in looking good as the company.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For the Obamacare fine it's specifically limited to clawback on refunds.
Opt out of Obamacare entirely. Don't apply for it and don't pay the fine and set up your taxation such that there's no refund for them to snag.
I don't suppose you're ever actually going to realize that you don't apply for "ObamaCare" at healthcare.gov. You apply for... shoot, what was that phrase, now I can't remember...
Oh, yeah. It's called "health insurance".
It's the same goddamn magical PRIVATE SECTOR health insurance we had before. The only real difference being that now, due to the law called the Affordable Care Act, the insurance companies aren't allowed to refuse to provide health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. Pre-existing conditions such as the horribly expensive "disease" we refer to as "being a female human who is pregnant or plans to become pregnant in the next twelve months".
The "gubmint" hasn't taken over the health care system. There is no "ObamaCare" that we are all being forced to sign up for. Get a grip. If you choose not to get health insurance coverage, well, that's your choice. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act. But don't act like you're some kind of hero for "fighting the tyranny of ObamaCare". Because that doesn't exist.
The government is taxing you for being alive. All the credits for not meeting the bureaucrats' current definition of "poor" are irrelevant. Before the ACA, one could choose to get no insurance for no cost; basically buying nothing for nothing. Now we're supposed to pay a fee simply for buying nothing? Fuck that. In the end it's a money grab for government and the massive insurance companies that funnel money to them one way or another. The American people largely took it in the ass on this one.
Thanks to the ACA, you can do both. Opt out of it, don't apply for it, don't pay the fine, then when you get ill, just buy health insurance. Those evil insurance companies can't deny you coverage for your pre-existing condition. Thanks Affordable Care Act. I can't see anything that could go wrong with this system. Everyone will get a great deal for their insurance when they really need it - when they're ill.
Oh, and the kicker for this is that the supreme court ruled that this is only constitutional because the fine is less than the cost of the health insurance. They're planning to increase the fine over the years to force more people into the system, which will make it less fundamentally broken than it is already, but to remain constitutional it must remain fundamentally broken.
I don't know if that's true or not, but even if it is it's easily changed. Without having read every line of the law I can't imagine any scenario where the IRS is intentionally short-leashed in their ability to obtain every last cent they feel entitled to.
It's not the same health insurance you had before. Apart from the obvious difference of the forced subsidies based on income, there premiums are now not just a function of your risk of illness. Now the highest premiums cannot be more that a multiple of the maximum premiums, meaning a subsidy of the young to the old and the healthy to the unhealthy. Now you must buy things that are obviously not insurance, like contraceptives or regular checkups. Now you have to buy coverage for things you'll obviously never need.
Not the same insurance, just the same companies providing the same three choices. Until the coming death spiral drives them all out of business.
http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Errors-found-in-84-of-SF-mortgages-in-foreclosure-3334954.php
No, the article and summery make it clear the errors they are talking about are introduced by the website. Read the entire sentence being used to discover the meaning of what is being said.
Obama-kun is a condom monger in a sexless market. Ha Ha.
A male is not simultaneously subsidizing women (by paying more for a policy that includes coverage for female issues) and be getting subsidized by women (paying for coronary coverage men are more likely to need). In a subsidy situation, one person overpays so the other person can underpay. What you have done is to simply assert that the man and woman in the example are in a common risk pool sharing the risks (with the "winner" being whoever actually ends up needing the care... which is the case with all insurance including pre-Obamacare).
With traditional insurance, everybody voluntarily participates in a risk pool and each participant is underpaying - getting a better benefit package than he/she could normally afford. That's not what's happening under Obamacare. With Obamacare, government is requiring people to enter one of a limited set of government-designed risk pools where the risks have actually been removed (pre-existing conditions are covered and there are no caps). To make this work, the government has designed the policies to "cover" all sorts of things most people do not need (so they get the illusion of buying a cadillac plan when they overpay) while setting the deductibles and co-pays so high that a typical young buyer will never get any benefit (i.e. a 25 year-old with a "Bronze Plan" will never spend enough on doctors in a single year to reach the point where the plan pays its first dollar for him). If you are young and have a "Bronze Plan" and have less than, say $15K, in the bank then you WILL go bankrupt under Obamacare if you develop the need for major medical services. (So much for the promise that nobody will ever be bankrupted by healthcare costs... well, actually you go bankrupt BEFORE the plan kicks-in rather than while the plan is helping you as with pre-Obamacare...)
For a normal person the proper priority would be to start with honesty; an honest and fiscally-sound plan, honestly offered and promoted... and then IF the honestly-informed public supported it, an honest contract to a competent set of vendors to set things up properly
For progressives, who honestly believe that the ends justify the means, the avalanche of dishonesty in Obamacare is just fine
It does not matter that Obama went all around America promising that "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, Period. Nobody is going to take it away from you" while his advisers knew full well that this was untrue and are on the record having decided not to "cloud the issue" with the truth.
It does not matter that Obama went all around the country promising that "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, Period" even though his team admitted behind closed doors that they knew this was untrue.... Obama and his progressively dishonest supporters accused anybody who warned this was untrue of being .... yup, LIARS
It does not matter that Obama promised that Obamacare would save the typical family $2500 even though his HHS knew this was false.
It does not matter that a number of Obama's crew went to capitol hill to testify before congress all through 2013 that they had the healthcare website under control and it would be ready to go on Oct 1st. Oh, and they accused anybody who doubted them of being a liar
It does not matter that after they screwed-up the Oct 1st launch, they promised that it would be fixed by Nov 30th even though they knew full-well that the code that handled the back-end and the money would not even be written before December
It does not matter that they constructed a healthcare law that could only get through the Senate on a 60-vote margin, but then lost an election and therefore lost that margin, and ended-up illegitimately jamming-it through using the reconcilliation process (by pretending it was a taxing/spending bill) nor does it matter that the constitution requires that taxing/spending bills originate in the House (there is a legal challenge on this basis working its way through the courts)
Progressives want total control of the population and the best way to get that is to control their lives... which you do when you control their healthcare. That's why controlling healthcare is a top priority of every leftist government... and why they will always excuse ANY action required to get that control. It's all about power and if you have to lie, cheat, steal, etc to get that power then you are justified.
When you lefties try to use the Bible to justify things like armed robbery, you just expose your illiteracy/ignorance
When Jesus said (quoted here from KJV rather than original language which few on Slashdot could read) : "For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." he was speaking of the voluntary acts of compassion and charity of individuals to other individuals and NOT making a case for government pointing a gun at a man and ordering him to hand over his money so the government could keep a cut and distribute the rest as it desires to its selected, preferred recipients (many of whom may not even be needy)
What you do not often notice is that the Christian definition of charity does not involve government, nor compulsion, nor is it a group activity. You also seem to always miss things like the followers of Jesus getting upset when a woman poured some expensive oil on him; they argued that the oil should have been sold and the money spent on the poor (sort of like "tax the rich" to get the money to "help" the poor) and his response: "Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her."
Oh, and then there's those pesky bits where he says things like "Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." ... yeah..... not much support there for lefty ideas like "gay marriage". nor do you often like the bits where Jesus confirms the validity of the old laws (like the ones that say people who choose not to work do not get to eat).
Yeah, it's sort of amusing to see left-wingers who frequently deny Jesus and write-off the Bible as a dusty old work of fiction suddenly dig it up and page through it looking for a few verses to support economic models that are based on violating the most basic principles of the Ten Commandments ("thou Shalt Not Steal" and "Thou shalt Not Covet" come to mind...)
"It's the same goddamn magical PRIVATE SECTOR health insurance we had before."
this part is a lie.... as your very next sentence exposes:
"The only real difference being that now, due to the law called the Affordable Care Act, the insurance companies aren't allowed to refuse to provide health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. Pre-existing conditions such as the horribly expensive "disease" we refer to as "being a female human who is pregnant or plans to become pregnant in the next twelve months".
I know this is difficult for you progressives but: "it's different" is NOT equal to "it's the same"
As for what's "better", in America we used to leave it to the individual to decide what was "better" for him or her as an individual. The new plans with HUGE deductibles and co-pays and much higher premiums suck for everybody who must buy them in order to grossly overpay in order to fund all the subsidies for other people. If the MILLIONS being kicked-off the plans they had really did prefer the new plans then people would not be upset, they'd be happy (as delusional progressives imagine them to be) but Obama and his followers KNOW that this is a giant fraud.... the proof is that they use the force of law to order consumers to buy the product; Nobody needs to be forced to buy things they really want and like. Nobody buys an iPad because Obama passed a law requiring people to buy one.
Oh, and "being female" was never classified as a pre-existing condition.... women were charged more for health insurance because they statistically use far more healthcare. Women go for lots more checkups and procedures than men (who generally have to get dragged, "kicking-and-screaming" to the doctor) therefore they cost more to cover, therefore they were charged more... a problem that generally went away for married women who ended-up on their husband's policies or for working women who ended up in employer group plans. The flip side is that men often payed more for car insurance, and life insurance because they were more-likely to be more expensive to those insurers..... life is not, and never can be, completely "fair"
100% of Software has errors.
Opt out of Obamacare entirely. Don't apply for it and don't pay the fine and set up your taxation such that there's no refund for them to snag.
Right, because you have never used any government services, like roads, schools, defense, social security, huge economic bailouts, law and order, fire departments, traffic enforcement, protection from your neighbors and their guns taking your daughter and raping her, those sorts of things. If you haven't, then go ahead and hide your income.
Fuckwit