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HealthCare.gov Back-End Status: See You In September
theodp writes: "The consumer-facing parts of the Obamacare website may now work (most of the time) for people buying insurance, writes Politico, but beneath the surface, HealthCare.gov is still missing massive, critical pieces that are essential for key functions such as accurately paying insurers — and the deadline for finishing them keeps slipping. Without a fully built and operational system, federal officials can't determine how many of the 8 million Obamacare sign-ups announced last week will have actually paid their premiums. The Obama administration earlier this month indicated that insurers will continue to be paid through an 'interim' accounting process — pretty much a spreadsheet and some informed estimates — until at least September, when what is being called 'the mother of all reconciliations' will be conducted, which some fear could reveal the need for a massive correction and rate adjustments. Still, Oregon decided Friday to switch to Healthcare.gov from its own nothing-wrong-that-$78-million-couldn't-fix Cover Oregon online healthcare exchange."
At this point, what difference does it make?"
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
But despite all of it, what the crack team of unsung IT gurus did in Nov 2013 is nothing less than heroic. How long did it take for the comparable services like Amazon, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, gmail, eBay etc to create 3 million accounts? OK, that is an earlier generation. Take the current generation of Twitter, WhatsApp, SnapChat, FaceBook, how long did they take to ramp up to 3 million accounts?
Helathcare.gov is something like eBay for health insurance. How long did it take eBay to refer 32 billion dollars worth of business? (8 million accounts, 4 K a year premium per person). No body had done in two quarters. Even banking and mutual fund sites like Schwab, Vanguard, Fidelity do not do 32 billion dollars a year. Even if the do, they did not ramp up in 2 quarters.
They bungled the roll out. They probably squandered tons and tons of money to get it done. But despite all that, no body has ever created a web site that did what Healthcare.gov has done. It is easy to criticize and do Monday morning quarterbacking. But the task they failed to well was not some simple task any hack could do or something others have done before.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
True, clueless politicians made last minutes changes like, "don't show them raw premium, sticker shock, make them do subsidy calculation first" a week before roll out. True, dimwitted bureaucrats gave out contracts with idiotic levels of fragmentation and blame-dodgeability. Obama raised expectations insanely by saying "as easy as buying books in Amazon..".
Of course, these are the reasons government-run health care will be so much better: politicians can control it and tell you how much better off you are.
you missed the memo where administration claims 8 million plus subscribers, supposedly 2.7 million appeared out of nowhere after March to give us this 8M total
And apparently you both missed the memo where those weren't paid subscribers, either, but supposedly the number who applied.
So... Obama has decided to bypass even more of the law he helped shove down our throats and is now ignoring on a massive scale?
Hint, Mr. President: you aren't a King. When you sidestep laws passed by Congress, you're a criminal. Even if it's your own pet law.
(Or he would be, if the law were Constitutional in the first place. SCOTUS says it's a "tax"? Well, tax laws have to originate in the House. Obamacare didn't.)
The administration has no idea :
1. how many have insurance now that did not a year ago
2. how many do not have insurance now that did a year ago
3. how many that have insurance through the federal exchange have paid for it
4. how many that have insurance through the federal exchange have a significantly higher rate and/or deductible than before
As a Libertarian, I am going to have to side with the republicans on this one. The ACA is complete and utter crap. The fact that the backend of the website doesn't work is just the tip of the iceberg. But by all means, go ahead and continue to follow your elites and their welfare state agenda.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
It doesn't really matter if the sign ups are people who otherwise lost insurance from some other means- even if it is due to obamacare. The number of people signed up or enrolled in the exchanges were never about the number of people uninsured who are now insured.
The point of needing a number of people was in order to make the exchange profitable for the insurance companies so the government wouldn't need to bail them out (which is built into the law if for some reason the insurance market place becomes a loss to the insurance companies for participating). If the participation pool wasn't large enough to absorb the costs of the sick we knew would use it, then the policies offered are unsustainable. So even if the pool ends up being 2 people who didn't have insurance plus 7 million who lost their coverage, it would still be a success as it would be self sustainable.
The government could pass a law saying that everyone making under $100k a year had to use the exchanges and the number would still not matter as long as the pool of insured is large enough. That is why the number of enrolled verses the number who purchased insurance is so important. It's like slashdot that has user id numbers in the millions but less the 20,000 comments by probably 10,000 people a day (I pulled that off my ass considering that most stories get less than 500 comments and believe it to be high). So a lot of people created accounts but don't actually participate often outside of viewing maybe. Or maybe a twitter analogy might be better, 10,000 followers means exactly what when they don't run out and purchase whatever you are promoting or vote the way you would like them to. There was something about paid followers a while back where companies employed drones and clone accounts in order to up their numbers. And yet they don't purchase or vote (that we know of). So right now, all we know is that people made accounts. We don't know how many purchased a product that would make the exchanges sustainable. Well, someone might know, but they will not tell us who ultimately flips the bill with taxation.
It is a FACT, admitted by the Obama admin in testimony under oath before congress that [1] the backend of the website is not yet written, [2] the Obama administration has no solid numbers on how many people have paid (heck, they even said under oath that they did not have a count of people who'd "signed up" about a month before the deadline) and [3] that they are using estimates to pay insurers for now and will need to "settle-up" at some point. It's also true that insurance companies have started issuing warnings to congress, the administration, and some employers that they forsee a large rate increase for next year.
So, given these facts..... what insane act of childish Obama meatpuppet rage causes you to claim this is "republican propaganda" "by the in house radical conservative trolls"? Are you saying that the Obama administration is part of some "vast right-wing conspiracy" to help Republican trolls with their talking points? I am simply mystified by the sheer incomprehensible mental flatulence that must be occurring in your locale. Are you truly claiming that reality is, in itself, a Republican troll talking point? Wow..... just sayin' .... that's really - out there.
Wikipedia is an authoritative source? Seriously?
The bill that passed in the house was an completely re-written bill that originated in the Senate and passed to the House for a reconciliation vote quick before Scott Brown was sworn into office. See, there wasn't enough time to properly pass a House bill though the Senate before Brown took office and messed up their party-line vote.
But hey, what do I know - I just paid attention while this train wreck occurred - it's not like I read it on Wikipedia.
Ken
The Democrats lost their super-majority in the Senate before they could ram-through Pelosi's house bill as the "Affordable Care Act" and since they were absolutely determined that no Republican input would be tolerated they needed a scheme to solve their dilemma. Harry Reid (Nevada Democrat who runs the Senate) used a tactic of taking another bill, stripping out all its content and then injecting in whatever language he wanted; Harry inserted the ACA language we ended-up (which could not perfectly match Nancy's language for complex legal reasons) into the hollow shell of a bill that had previously worked its way partially through the senate (the bill Harry used as a shell had already cleared the 60 vote "cloture" hurdle) and then THAT mess was handed over to Nancy Pelosi in the House where it should have had to go through reconcilliation (but couldn't because the resulting "reconciled" bill would have needed another Senate vote WITH that pesky 60 vote cloture) . Nancy's team however, could not pass it properly "as-is" because the Senate version had language some of her House democrats did not want to be held accountable for..... so she worked out a scheme to pass a separate resolution in the house that would "deem" the ACA to have passed rather than actually passing it, and that whole ball of wax was what Obama ultimately signed. The "affordable care act" written by the U.S. House of Representatives never actually went anywhere (no matter what a lazy wikipage editor may claim) ..... the Senate's verson is what went through (and, incidentally, this is one of the major reasons it is such a mess - all the normal committee work to unify house and senate bills into a joint bill, which usually cleans-up conflicts between sepearate parts of complex bills written by various interests, never happened).... all those shenanigans were done just to block any Republican input that WOULD have been enabled by the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat. Scott Brown campaigned to be the vote to stop the supermajority from passing the ACA, and he won that election, but Harry and Nancy simply manipulated the process to block the new Senator from interfering in their plans for a pure-Democrat health law.
When the Supreme Court took up the ACA in that big case Republicans believed they'd win and which Democrats still crow about to this day, they ruled that the thing could NOT be implemented using the "Commerce Clause" and with "penalties" but COULD stand if it was all really just a big tax scheme - so they declared it a big tax scheme and let it stand as Constitutional (shocking conservatives, who now see John Roberts as a traitor) ........ which brings us to the lawsuit "Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services" which points out that the Constitution specifically and explicitly forbids any tax law from originating in the Senate, and given that the SCOTUS has already certified that this is exactly what Obamacare is..... the SCOTUS will be a pack of hypocrits if they let it win this suit. Oral arguments are scheduled for May 8, 2014.
We also know that this bill won't increase the deficit by one thing dime... President Obama said he would never sign a bill that added one thin dime to our deficit in the next decade.
Ken
Someone might be naturally healthy, but the dumbass who ran the guy over with their humvee sadly wasn't informed of that. The scaffolding that fell on them wasn't informed either. The guy who prepared your hamburger with the same unwashed fingers he just wiped his ass with wasn't either, Mr. Healthy Guy.
Your problem is that you have no sense of your own mortality. The "I'm bulletproof" argument is one only put forth by idiots. You have no idea what will happen next. None whatsoever. It's all a matter of odds and happenstance. Your idea that the young and healthy people are going to pay for everyone else... our kids are paying a lot less money for a lot more insurance than we're getting... it just isn't so. In some states, young people can get by with just catastrophic. So please, drop the pretense.
And despite your presumption that you are "naturally healthy", eventually, the odds are very high that something will happen, and at that time you'll be expecting the rest of us to pay for it. We will. But you will too. Live with it. It's not really a bad thing, once you take reality into account.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Strictly speaking, they may know some of those things, but the 'most transparent presidency of all time' is not telling us. I really wish Obama had kept his campaign promise to be more transparent, but at this point at least he hasn't started any multi-year wars.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
My lab tests are covered, as are my prescriptions. My copay is less, too -- $5 if they're in our group, and $10 if not -- Sounds to me like you simply picked the wrong policy. Make sure you look into equivalent meds, too. For instance, my insurance won't pay for Ventolin HFA, but they will pay for PROAIR HFA. Either one addresses the asthma just fine. I pay less than 10% of my income. I consider that a great bargain.
Again, your choice of policy is not the fault of the ACA. This is very much a situation where consumer choice is part of the process.
My daughter in law chose a different policy than the one my son chose. This was because she takes (expensive) Victoza shots, so she needed to choose a policy that met her needs, which were quite different from my son's. Thanks to the ACA, you can research and choose something that best meets your needs. But you still have to *do* it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The CBO's current estimate is that Obamacare has reduced the net number of uninsured persons by 12 million just this year, and is on track to get another 14 million insured within a couple more years. I would have preferred single payer, but Obamacare is a LOT better than what we had before, and it's the best we could have gotten in the face of Republican obstruction.
You can call it "complete and utter crap" all day, but we all know that that's just because you want it to fail. You already admitted you're a libertarian -- you're philosophically opposed to the very thing that Obamacare sets out to accomplish.
No, I'm pretty sure you haven't. You've most likely confused me with someone else. Not a problem.
Well. I am required to pay for highways that I never drive upon. I am required to pay for fire extinguishing services and I have never had a house fire. I am required to pay for public schools, even though I never sent a child there. I am required to pay for corporate subsidies, even though I am not in favor of these. I am required to pay for various war efforts, even though I am not only not in favor, but vehemently opposed to same. The idea that I might have to pay to improve someone else's health strikes me a a breath of fresh air. In fact, in a purely selfish way, I don't want to have people, far sicker than they need to be, running around and sharing the bounty of their personal microbial crops with me and mine. Nor am I in favor of them being out of work for any more time than required.
Time for a little anecdote. Fairly recently, the lady and I went to McDonald's for a salad and some coffee. They took our order via the miked menu outside, then our money at window #1, and so we pulled up to window #2, where the food was to arrive. When they opened the window, those poor bastards (uninsured in any sense worth really talking about) collectively managed to do a marvelous impression of a final stage tuberculosis ward. I rolled up the winddow and we drove off without our food.
When you talk about "now" having to subsidize the medical costs of others, let me just point out to you that when these uninsured types zip right down to the emergency room and consume medical services at a premium, while not getting actual decent care but instead, just getting stabilized, you pay for that just as directly via increased costs to the hospital that were "covered" by government grants, increases in the cost of our own medical needs, and higher insurance premiums to pay those higher medical costs, which in turn, you (and I, and everyone else) pay for. There's no free lunch. When people are sick or injured, it's going to cost. It's expensive and it is unevenly distributed, and it is best done in a manner that works to control the costs (prophilactic care, etc.) by pooling our resources and then expending them on a per issue basis, and preventative ones, and in the context of completely addressing problems with an appropriate course of therapy instead of just doing the minimum, or nothing.
When you want to bitch about paying for everyone else's healthcare, to whatever extent that may be so, just remember, the better health the population is in, the better health you -- and yours, and the economy -- are are likely to be able to maintain. It's a fact, and there's no way around it.
Do you not understand that if you fall and break your leg, or catch something horrible, or develop chronic asthma, or cancer, or manage to detach a retina, or get burned really badly, that without insurance, your capital and wealth will evaporate like smoke on the windiest day you can imagine? I think you do, since you tell me you had insurance previously. Now I ask you: Would you want to have that happen to someone else? Seriously? When just by putting your shoulder to the same wheel the rest of us are trying to roll around, you can prevent it to some useful extent?
Ok. Delighted you're being forthcoming. Let's work it. If your new insurance is being delivered under the aegis of the ACA, then at $455/mo for your premium, you're paying $5460/year, and your income (after business deductions, if you're taking those) should be (at least) $54600, because under the ACA, no one has to pay more than 10% of their income unless t
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Just as an off-topic aside, this topic (not just my threads) is the most amusing peak event of "moderation as agree/disagree" that I've seen in my years here. Up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.
Slashdot moderation. lol. Just lol.
Note to the powers that be: If you EVER thought anonymous moderation was a good idea, this topic alone should serve as the poster child come to completely disabuse you of that notion. Unless, of course, you're one of the ones abusing the moderation system, in which case, well, there you go. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Holy shit, 10% of your income, for health insurance? Madness.
p>In my case, more like 15% before taxes, and with the new 10% floor for deduction of medical expenses, the deductible portion comes out less than the standard deduction. So the effective amount is 15% of gross and 20% of net. That is a lot of money. Medical insurance is my largest budget item. And this is for retiree's insurance, with my former employer paying about a third of the cost!
What kills me is the supporters of this epically stupid law is that people don't see that problem is the fact that
A colonoscopy -- a half hour, non surgical procedure involving light anesthesia -- with NO problematic results -- is seven grand.
The problem is not that insurance is/was unaffordable, its that the actual care costs to much.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
and I find it morally reprehensible that no one believes in personal responsibility and personal freedom any longer.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
A colonoscopy is paid for by "insurance." Laser eye surgery for BOTH EYES can be had for under $1000, or $4k on average for both eyes and all post-op care.
That's half a much as the number you're reporting for colonoscopy. The problem has always been that the way the industry is structured provides insufficient pressure to reduce prices and costs.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!