Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
Are you saying that the Obama administration is part of some "vast right-wing conspiracy" to help Republican trolls with their talking points?
To be fair, that would explain a lot of things...
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.
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.