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Oregon Signs Up Just 44 People For Obamacare Despite Spending $300 Million
cold fjord writes "The Washington Examiner reports, 'Oregon ... signed up just 44 people for insurance through November, despite spending more than $300 million on its state-based exchange. The state's exchange had the fewest sign-ups in the nation, according to a new report today by the Department of Health and Human Services. The weak number of sign-ups undercuts two major defenses of Obamacare from its supporters. One defense was that state-based exchanges were performing a lot better than the federal healthcare.gov website servicing 36 states. But Oregon's website problems have forced the state to rely on paper applications to sign up participants. Another defense of the Obama administration has attributed the troubled rollout of Obamacare to the obstruction of Republican governors who wanted to see the law fail as well as a lack of funding. But Oregon is a Democratic state that embraced Obamacare early and enthusiastically.'"
Does this really belong on /.? Seriously?
In the tiered form of American government, states cannot merely be told to do something by the federal government in most cases. This is why highway money is tied to specific road laws (seatbelts, etc), because the federal government has to financially coerce states into action (or losing tax dollars). How the Affordable Care Act doesn't have this coercion, I can only guess.
When you say "One defense was that state-based exchanges were performing a lot better than the federal healthcare.gov website servicing 36 states." and then follow it up with "But Oregon's website problems have forced the state to rely on paper applications to sign up participants." are you actually trying to use one state-run exchange's technical failure to undermine the other states whose exchanges are working just fine?
I ask, because if that IS what you did (and it does appear you did) you need to take a remedial course on logic.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/18/the-other-side-of-obamacares-oregon-success-no-one-has-bought-private-insurance/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/20/oregon-obamacare-website_n_4308629.html
The number is so dismal because the Oregon website was worse then the National website. Not because people dont want it as the linked article implies.
Nearly 25,000 individuals and families have so far submitted hard-copy applications, Cox said, with nearly two-thirds of those applicants eligible for Medicaid, a federal-state healthcare plan for the needy.
But none of those applicants has actually been enrolled, with manual processing of the paperwork slowing the process dramatically.
Separately, about 70,000 residents have signed up for Medicaid by responding to letters sent by the state to more than 200,000 people deemed eligible for the program by virtue of their receiving food stamps, Cox said.
Oh wait look who submitted it, cold fjord our resident republi-troll. Hey Cold Fjord... Fuck Off.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Yup.
One might wish to take a look at the political affiliation of the Oracle management.
It's a web site. This stuff just isn't that hard to make effective and useful. But if you wanted to kill an idea and program that might (properly) cover and protect the less privileged, what could be more effective and useful?
But, it's not a widespread commendation of the ACA law. In fact, as noted, there are significant enrollments by paper.
Also, there is a huge crunch on the backend to automate the purchasing process. Surprise, most health insurers are not set up to make it easy for people to purchase health plans online, much less handle large numbers of enrollments. Also, there is a lot of work around the small group marketplaces. The article and summary make it sound like 300 million was spent just on the web site. It's not even close. Granted the web site is just broken and heads are starting to roll.
Oh, and the main contractor for the project was Oracle, so, well, if anybody can make that much disappear they can.
What a pathetic day, when political trolling, with not even a hit of actual technical content, is published as as story on Slashdot. Isn't someone paid to moderate this stuff for substance and relevance?
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
California residents lost 5.5 million policies. The law in California being that in order for insurance companies to sell policies in California they MUST go through the state exchange, which lead to the massive cancellations of policies. Has California had even 2 million sign up? I don't think so.
So in your opinion, over 5 million people losing their health insurance and only a tiny fraction of that signing back up through the exchange is a success. I'm beginning to see why left-right arguments happen. The left, like you, see a single data point that "might" be interpreted as good and stick you head in the sand with all other available data. The right, like me, try to see the whole picture and see nothing but complete failure at every possible level and try to point it out to people like you who don't give a damn about how many cancer patients just got a death warrant signed by Obamacare because they dare not admit the truth to anyone.
You lefties make me sick. How many thousands of people are going to die before you admit you were wrong? It took Mao 40 million before he would admit he was wrong, will it take you more?
I get your drift... but two points: Obamacare actually saves money while insuring more people. (Congressional Budget Office analysis). That's because the current system of treating the poor in emergency rooms is outrageously inefficient. And secondly, doctors are not really rich. They may make more than your or me, but in the overall scheme of things it's hospital administrators, pharmaceutical company CEOs, insurance company owners, and bankers who are really really rich.
The biggest political success for Republicans in the last 30 years was convincing the middle and lower middle class to be afraid of the poor. They should instead be very very afraid of the rich.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The real idiots are the ones who lump together all levels and branches of government for no rational reason other than they're forms of government.
That makes about as much sense as saying "What do you really expect from the EU, given the way the Chinese government tramples on human rights. Just be glad they didn't ship you off to a concentration camp."
Once again the abject failure of private companies is blamed on the government, because there are people who are too ideologically head-up-ass to look at the reality of the situation. If privatization was such a boon, all the exchanges would be working incredibly well, and they wouldn't have cost near as much.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Why are you so hurt in the butt when obama basically pushed through the republican alternative to hillarycare in 1993????
The interesting thing is that the real test of ObamaCare will not be in this website.
Yes, I suppose anti-ObamaCare people can say they couldn't even get the website right. The rest of it must be a disaster.
On the other hand, we have pro-ObamaCare people cheering when the website gets fixed or more people sign up.
I dare say, all this website stuff will be worked out eventually. It's all rather irreleevant. The real test of ObamaCare will be in its costs, subsidies, who it affects business/people, payments to medical providers, how it impacts MediCare, how it impacts innovation, how it impacts rationing, how it affects current insurance plans, how it distorts the labor market, how it reduces costs, how it provides better healthcare...
You know, all the important stuff.
Seriously, the summary is even laughably over-spun. They are blaming this on the Obama administration while simultaneously admitting that Oregon set up a state exchange, meaning they did not require interaction from the federal website or the federal government for anything beyond certifying that people bought qualified plans. Yet we go and blame the low enrollment on Obama.
Of course, here on slashdot, anything and everything wrong in the world can be blamed on Obama and Monica Lewinsky, personally.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Your complaints about Obamacare are valid. Welcome to the only healthcare system in the world that relies primarily on for-profit insurance companies. You want to return to the status quo ante Obamacare? Well, that left tens of millions without health insurance. It would also leave you without health insurance if you had any serious medical problems. So how to address all these concerns? I've got it - copy Canada's system. Nah, too simple, too well proven, we've got to think of some brilliant approach instead.
...because politicians don't run businesses, they run a branch of government, and governments ARE NOT and SHOULD NOT BE businesslike.
Also, a "supermajority of the people in the U.S." don't want the Affordable Care Act, eh? I think you need to take a trip back to reality, where facts are king, and simply inventing "facts" like you're doing is generally frowned upon.
The real "nerd angle" on this story has nothing to do with who's president, but rather that it's another one of Oracle's embarrassing failures. You'd have to be pretty desperate to blame anyone in D.C. for this.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Also, a "supermajority of the people in the U.S." don't want the Affordable Care Act, eh? I think you need to take a trip back to reality, where facts are king, and simply inventing "facts" like you're doing is generally frowned upon.
Nope, I've seen the poll results. "would you rather have the government set up death panels and dictate your health care options (ACA), or let the free market work it out?" And "Would you rather have it be a crime to not buy private insurance (ACA), or have a cheap single-payer system with better care for a lower price?"
People will pick the non-ACA answer when you make the question loaded, then the people that think the ACA didn't go far enough will be counted as opponents, even if they'd rather have the ACA than the previous system.
Learn to love Alaska
I am 28 and presently uninsured. I delayed getting individual insurance because I knew my plan would be canceled at the end of this year (anybody who actually spoke with the insurance companies has known for a long time that "you can keep your plan" was a lie), so I figured I might as well wait for the Obamacare compliant plans.
Well, the Obamacare compliant plans cost literally over four times as much per month to get comparable insurance. People who went ahead and got the noncompliant plans have now got a reprieve by executive fiat; they can keep the cheap plans another year. All of the effects of this bill have been effectively canceled per dictatorial fiat except for socking it to me and others in similar conditions.
Depending on what happens with school and work, my income may be low enough that I don't need to pay the fine for being uninsured, but even if it isn't, it's better to pay the $95 fine and gamble on my health being OK than to pay $2400 for a crappy insurance plan.
The whole situation is insane. Health insurance should be like home insurance. The expected costs of home maintenance are paid out of pocket; your insurer doesn't pay your heating bill or pay to have your gutters cleaned out. Insurance is there to mitigate catastrophic risks, not to take care of your regular expected expenses for you. We do need robust assistance for those who can't pay their expected health costs, but that has nothing to do with insurance, and conflating the two won't make care more affordable. Not being able to pay your health costs is just another form of poverty; it's important to provide a safety net but this is a terrifically thickheaded way to try to go about it.
A few decades ago most people paid most of their health costs out of pocket and the country was better for it. Having employer insurance take care of everything is basically a modern tax avoidance racket. It's less efficient, the costs balloon, people without employer-provided insurance end up in more and more trouble, and the lost government revenue brings program cuts, higher deficits, or more economically disruptive ways of getting tax revenue. Insurance plans and health savings accounts should be taxed exactly like normal income and savings.
Upon a computer geek/nerd basis the interesting part of the story is that due to computer software contractor failures they are having to process the applications manually. The system was built so that either it completely worked or it completely failed, with no in between.
So it seems with large complex systems it makes somewhat illogical to design it to functional completely manually and then automate the various elements. Thus should any element fail it can be handled manually whilst the rest of the system continues to function. Otherwise one bug can result in total failure, which is pretty stupid for an essential system.
So this introduces a new geek/nerd design idea, should a manual system be designed first to simulate the eventual digital outcome. This provides a hands on, readily realisable system with established protocols that all operators and users can see and readily understand. It might take up a lot of space and take a lot of skilled design and hand crafting to achieve but it could be a more logical method of representing what needs to be achieved and provides manual backup for all automated elements.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
...Oregon is a Democratic state...
LOL! The author obviously knows nothing about Oregon. Oregon is not a Democratic state. Portland is a city with a high population density of lefties surrounded by a sparsely populated state of Teabaggers.
Stinky poo.... was news for nerds.
If a state government trolled out a web site for c.40 people to the
tune of 300 million dollars something is astoundingly wrong.
Do the math against the population of Oregon in 2013, approximately 3,899,353.
Some that read News for Nerds recall the bubble where Dot/Bomb companies
left an economic wasteland behind them. I cannot convince myself that these funds
were spent in Oregon and I cannot convince myself that Oregon has not been
assaulted by financial thugs...
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
An example of the effects of propaganda: People in Kentucky who have been signing up on Kentucky's state-run exchange have been reported saying things like "This is so much better than Obamacare, thank goodness that Kentucky set up their own program!" This is of course idiocy, since Kentucky's state-run exchange is simply a part of precisely what is being derisively referred to as "Obamacare".
But yes, Frank Luntz in particular is very very good at getting poll numbers that say whatever he wants them to say.
I am officially gone from
ACA is closer to corporate welfare than social welfare. It mandates that people do business with corporations. That's a corporatist's wet dream.
The car analogy is some people pushing for public transit (a single-payer system) and then "compromising" by requiring everybody to buy a car (ACA). The whole thing is one big non sequitur. I can't believe the D's are claiming this as some sort of success. It looks more like something the R's would get behind.