Up until 1980 Barry was in fact a name he commonly went by. It was also a nickname his father adopted in 1959 when first coming to the US so calls of racism is hardly accurate. Just like it's not racist to refer to G.W.B. as Dubya. For good or bad it's merely a nickname.
As for leadership, getting caught in the act and then taking half a year to react is hardly leadership, it's a PR response, nothing more.
The average wait from an Obama nomination to appointment is about 240 days, it was 277 under Bush (that was from Politifact). His appointment do spend more time on the floor for debate but much less time in committee. The big issue is he is 44% slower in even bothering to nominate anyone (compared to Clinton and Bush) which, when added to retirements and other planned/unplanned vacancies had led to a large increase in open appointment slots. That in turn is used to make the Senate approval process look completely out of whack with his recent predecessors, when in fact it's not all that unusual with the baseline set during Bush 2s time in office.
The best analysis is on judicial appointees, and as of his first term Obama had a 80.5% (173 out of 215) confirmation rate while Bush had a 77.4% rate (192 out of 248). Those numbers are from the Congressional Research Service.
The original 30+ million uninsured included Medicaid, Medicare and Chip eligible persons who were not enrolled, but still technically covered if anything happened. There were also a very large number of financially secure people who chose not to ensure. The actual number of involuntary uninsured was somewhere in the teens to low 20's (though some put that number even lower).
The predictions for the rate of uninsured, after the ACA, by the CBO itself, is almost identical, 30million plus.
The Medicare, Medicaid and Chip users should now be registered but the people who choose not to buy are still likely not to (the fine is unenforceable and a pittance compared to most yearly plan rates). But now you can add the relative poor, who even with subsidies cannot afford the increased plan prices.
There is also a new group, those who were insured but can now play the insurance lotto. Since they cannot be denied coverage when needed, if they're willing to pay out of pocket for the waiting period between enrollment and coverage, they can simply cancel their plans and wait to see if anything catastrophic happens, then enroll. And by catastrophic I mean cancer not broken bone (which can often cost less to pay cash for than going through insurance anyway). So this person can save thousands a year and if something unforeseeable happens, pay their medical expenses for a couple months until their new policy takes affect. If they put even half of their normal premiums into a savings account, in most cases this would be a financial win for them.
What free market exists when the government dictates by fiat what must be included in every product sold? Companies are free to add extra benefits (although that can lead to the gold-plated tax) but the base level has been raised for EVERYONE regardless of whether or not those benefits are of any use.
And how do you price your policy for males when you're not legally allowed to separate the sexes in your pricing policy? The same policy has to be available to both sexes. In fact, since more of the added benefits are geared towards women their new policies, while also going up relative to their old ones, are increasing significantly less than an equal aged mans.
The main difference in pricing comes from network, deductible and co-pay options, which directly impact out of pocket expenses.
So if you were paying $200 a month prior, now that everyone's been tossed in the same pool and additional benefits have been forced, you're either going to pay more (national average increase is 41% according to Forbes) or take drastic hits to available hospitals and a massive increase in deductibles and co-pays.
The majority of pre-ACA plans cannot be grandfathered according the the very tight restrictions placed on the grandfather clause. Almost any change, even including adjustments for inflation or age, automatically invalidate the plan and make it a violation of the ACA.
This was not an accident and is mentioned in discussion within the administration from the beginning.
Trenkle refused to sign off on the security of the website so they were over his head and got his boss to say everything was fine, regardless of reports showing there are still several major holes.
News reports are now saying he refused to sign off on the websites security.
When he wouldn't sign off on the website they went over his head to get a temporary security authorization from his boss, who, despite several warnings about holes throughout the system, didn't seem to have an issue signing off.
So as it turns out he may have been the only competent person there.
So if a 34 year old single male's plan doesn't currently cover maternity costs and birth control pills but covers everything else with a good network, low deductibles and manageable co-pays he be say thank you for a bill that now covers his birth control pills but will have much more restrictive networks, higher deductibles and higher co-pays because... well.... just because.
There are millions of plans that work quite well and are very comprehensive that do not meet the random requirements of the ACA. The Lead to Aluminum fallacy is just what people like you try to sell yourselves.
Nothing in the ACA controls health care costs, in fact it almost universally pushes up costs. The average rate increase due to implementation of ACA regulations according to Forbes is 41%.
It also does very little to actually increase the number of insured. Even their own numbers expect very similar rates of pre-ACA and post-ACA insured since most of those counted as uninsured pre-ACA were in fact eligible for government healthcare anyway and just weren't officially registered but who would have been as soon as they visited any medical office.
They did, but as they could not legally force individual states to pay for those exchanges the Supreme Court said it was in fact optional.
As for the "Every state that has it's own exchange has been fine" line, that's patently untrue. Many states are experiencing the same problems as the federal site, some because they have to hit the Federal site to get information, and for some that are not, that is because they are primarily handling Medicare enrollment and not actual insurance.
Then there are actual technical problems like Hawaii, which was delayed by 2 weeks and I believe is still refusing to report any numbers from their site, and Oregon, where the Governor has told people to just mail in their applications.
Obama has a higher percentage of appointments pass confirmation then Bush did. He has however, attempted to make fewer appointments than either Bush or Clinton which leave a lot of voluntary vacancies.
The shutdown happened the same day as the launch so had no impact on the website at all. Also the shutdown came down to a single bill, that was held up by senate DEMOCRATS that would have fully funded the government, including further aspects of the ACA, if only the individual mandate was pushed back for 1 year (there were previous proposals by the House prior to the shutdown but that was the final one that was offered that the Dems refused to even allow for a vote).
If you haven't been paying attention, that's the same proposal now coming from several Democrats.
A couple problems with that line of thought. First the penalties, even at full swing, are significantly less than many of the plans people can apply for. Second, because of the way the ACA was written their is no real enforcement process for people who skip buying insurance. The IRS can withhold your tax return for payment but not much else. So if your taxes balance they will not get 1 cent from you.
And because of the way it is all set up it would still be cheaper for a lot of people to pay for the standard medical issues out of pocket (ER, broken bones, checkups, etc) and only apply if something catastrophic happens (cancer). Sure there will be a small waiting period where they will be responsible for the initial care costs after the catastrophic diagnosis, but since the odds are in their favor, that could still save them thousands in the long run.
Sadly, you're one of the lucky ones. The average increase to premiums, according to Forbes, is 41%. The only states with reductions are ones where the state government already had set extremely tight controls over their health care markets so the ACA actually adds fewer burdens on their systems.
Under some plans a rate change of less than $6 from one year to another was enough to exclude it from the grandfathering clause in the ACA. As the GP wrote this was know in advance and was by design. There are several news sites with the internal WH documents and other agency papers that discuss this very thing.
There was even debate amongst Obama's speech writers because it was known during the campaign that this promise had no chance of being kept.
The simple fact is the ACA cannot survive without an influx of younger healthy individual buys ACA approved plans and pre-ACA plans had to be eliminated, no matter how well they worked, because if people were able to maintain their cheaper plans then the cost of the new ACA plans would necessarily have to skyrocket to make up for the influx of the pool of unhealthy taking advantage of them.
So you'd rather your company change your plan, without consulting you, to now include additional requirements that in most cases mean significant cost increases, coverage shrinkage and possible deductible changes? And that is somehow better than them notifying you in advance that because of these new requirements your plan is no longer available and you must choose a new plan.
But no matter which option your company chooses the end result is the same, you are forced to change your current plan (either actively or passively) and the main catalyst for that change is the ACA, not the insurance company.
And by repeatedly invited you actually mean, invited on TV but never actually allowed into the meetings. In fact few legislators of either side were actually involved in writing this law (except for inserting special exemptions) as it was mostly written by healthcare company insiders and lobbyists.
Even years later most politicians have no idea what is or is not part of the ACA.
The compromise was between far left Democrats and center left Democrats, the Republicans never entered into it. At no point were the Dems who were pushing for this courting or expecting Republican votes, hence the procedural trickery they did in the Senate to pass it, but they did require the blue dogs and other center left Dems.
As for the Republican alternative, it was not to pass an omnibus bill which almost never leads to good results, but to pass separate bills to correct flaws in the system in a more piecemeal and less painful way; a method that would make it easier to make corrections as they arose as well as ensure a better understanding of each individual bill and it's impacts.
They wanted to remove restrictions on cross border insurance purchases (to allow for more competition), they proposed allowing individuals to claim the same deductions as businesses to try and break the employer based system, there was also support for legislation to remove lifetime limits and help people with preexisting conditions and even for leaving your adult kids on your family plan (under certain conditions). Their main issue was that because these were separate proposal and not a blanket catch all bill, people like you either through ignorance (which could be due to the lack of media coverage of these proposals) or simple denial, continually state they had no alternative.
So in a world where no Republican vote was required or given and republicans held no position of authority over the implementation or testing, it's all their fault?
And for the record, their changes to the ACA prior to the votes was to buy Democrat votes, not Republican.
At no point did a Republican have any ability to stop or impede the implementation of the ACA. Some States exercised their rights NOT to be billed for Federal health care laws but that was it.
I believe the Republican counter to the ACA included several proposals to get rid of the employer based health care system, or at least weaken it. One of the biggest was to allow individuals to claim the same health care deductions as businesses as well as some form of bargaining groups for individuals.
Their biggest problem is that they proposed several bills which could be evaluated and adjusted separately on their own instead of creating a monster of a bill that no one could read in it's entirety so they were accused of not have an alternative plan.
Except the story doesn't actually tie the Kochs to anything. There are references to Koch controlled groups (which even the author admits they have no direct control over) and donations (which even the author admits there is absolutely no proof they made and one of the supposed donations was to a side they openly opposed) but except for some very indirect links this has nothing to do with the Koch brothers.
It's basically a political hatchet job where the writer found a boring political contribution story and tried to tie it to the Koch brothers to make it sexy without even bothering to try and find a shred of evidence. When it comes to the Koch brothers, most progressives don't care for evidence of wrong doing they just assume guilt, and then when the next story pops up they point back to the previous unfounded stories as their proof that this is a pattern.
And yet every report shows the TSA does a terrible job of stopping anything except nail clippers and small pocket knives from passing through security (items not even banned by international airports).
Not that hijackings were ever that commonplace but most recent potential hijackings were stopped by passengers AFTER screening or by other federal agencies BEFORE the potential hijacker ever arrived at the airport. The few airports that still retain private security screeners, through special waivers, generally have much cheaper and better screening than that provided by the TSA.
Slashdot Mirror
Up until 1980 Barry was in fact a name he commonly went by. It was also a nickname his father adopted in 1959 when first coming to the US so calls of racism is hardly accurate. Just like it's not racist to refer to G.W.B. as Dubya. For good or bad it's merely a nickname.
As for leadership, getting caught in the act and then taking half a year to react is hardly leadership, it's a PR response, nothing more.
The average wait from an Obama nomination to appointment is about 240 days, it was 277 under Bush (that was from Politifact). His appointment do spend more time on the floor for debate but much less time in committee. The big issue is he is 44% slower in even bothering to nominate anyone (compared to Clinton and Bush) which, when added to retirements and other planned/unplanned vacancies had led to a large increase in open appointment slots. That in turn is used to make the Senate approval process look completely out of whack with his recent predecessors, when in fact it's not all that unusual with the baseline set during Bush 2s time in office.
The best analysis is on judicial appointees, and as of his first term Obama had a 80.5% (173 out of 215) confirmation rate while Bush had a 77.4% rate (192 out of 248). Those numbers are from the Congressional Research Service.
The original 30+ million uninsured included Medicaid, Medicare and Chip eligible persons who were not enrolled, but still technically covered if anything happened. There were also a very large number of financially secure people who chose not to ensure. The actual number of involuntary uninsured was somewhere in the teens to low 20's (though some put that number even lower).
The predictions for the rate of uninsured, after the ACA, by the CBO itself, is almost identical, 30million plus.
The Medicare, Medicaid and Chip users should now be registered but the people who choose not to buy are still likely not to (the fine is unenforceable and a pittance compared to most yearly plan rates). But now you can add the relative poor, who even with subsidies cannot afford the increased plan prices.
There is also a new group, those who were insured but can now play the insurance lotto. Since they cannot be denied coverage when needed, if they're willing to pay out of pocket for the waiting period between enrollment and coverage, they can simply cancel their plans and wait to see if anything catastrophic happens, then enroll. And by catastrophic I mean cancer not broken bone (which can often cost less to pay cash for than going through insurance anyway). So this person can save thousands a year and if something unforeseeable happens, pay their medical expenses for a couple months until their new policy takes affect. If they put even half of their normal premiums into a savings account, in most cases this would be a financial win for them.
What free market exists when the government dictates by fiat what must be included in every product sold? Companies are free to add extra benefits (although that can lead to the gold-plated tax) but the base level has been raised for EVERYONE regardless of whether or not those benefits are of any use.
And how do you price your policy for males when you're not legally allowed to separate the sexes in your pricing policy? The same policy has to be available to both sexes. In fact, since more of the added benefits are geared towards women their new policies, while also going up relative to their old ones, are increasing significantly less than an equal aged mans.
The main difference in pricing comes from network, deductible and co-pay options, which directly impact out of pocket expenses.
So if you were paying $200 a month prior, now that everyone's been tossed in the same pool and additional benefits have been forced, you're either going to pay more (national average increase is 41% according to Forbes) or take drastic hits to available hospitals and a massive increase in deductibles and co-pays.
The majority of pre-ACA plans cannot be grandfathered according the the very tight restrictions placed on the grandfather clause. Almost any change, even including adjustments for inflation or age, automatically invalidate the plan and make it a violation of the ACA.
This was not an accident and is mentioned in discussion within the administration from the beginning.
That seems to fit this situation to a tee.
Trenkle refused to sign off on the security of the website so they were over his head and got his boss to say everything was fine, regardless of reports showing there are still several major holes.
News reports are now saying he refused to sign off on the websites security.
When he wouldn't sign off on the website they went over his head to get a temporary security authorization from his boss, who, despite several warnings about holes throughout the system, didn't seem to have an issue signing off.
So as it turns out he may have been the only competent person there.
So if a 34 year old single male's plan doesn't currently cover maternity costs and birth control pills but covers everything else with a good network, low deductibles and manageable co-pays he be say thank you for a bill that now covers his birth control pills but will have much more restrictive networks, higher deductibles and higher co-pays because... well .... just because.
There are millions of plans that work quite well and are very comprehensive that do not meet the random requirements of the ACA. The Lead to Aluminum fallacy is just what people like you try to sell yourselves.
Nothing in the ACA controls health care costs, in fact it almost universally pushes up costs. The average rate increase due to implementation of ACA regulations according to Forbes is 41%.
It also does very little to actually increase the number of insured. Even their own numbers expect very similar rates of pre-ACA and post-ACA insured since most of those counted as uninsured pre-ACA were in fact eligible for government healthcare anyway and just weren't officially registered but who would have been as soon as they visited any medical office.
They also didn't bother to figure out who was going to subsidize the ACA like the Federal Government actually subsidize Romneycare.
It seems like very few congresscritters can do math and in this case, none of those few that can had anything to do with the ACA.
They did, but as they could not legally force individual states to pay for those exchanges the Supreme Court said it was in fact optional.
As for the "Every state that has it's own exchange has been fine" line, that's patently untrue. Many states are experiencing the same problems as the federal site, some because they have to hit the Federal site to get information, and for some that are not, that is because they are primarily handling Medicare enrollment and not actual insurance.
Then there are actual technical problems like Hawaii, which was delayed by 2 weeks and I believe is still refusing to report any numbers from their site, and Oregon, where the Governor has told people to just mail in their applications.
Obama has a higher percentage of appointments pass confirmation then Bush did. He has however, attempted to make fewer appointments than either Bush or Clinton which leave a lot of voluntary vacancies.
The shutdown happened the same day as the launch so had no impact on the website at all. Also the shutdown came down to a single bill, that was held up by senate DEMOCRATS that would have fully funded the government, including further aspects of the ACA, if only the individual mandate was pushed back for 1 year (there were previous proposals by the House prior to the shutdown but that was the final one that was offered that the Dems refused to even allow for a vote).
If you haven't been paying attention, that's the same proposal now coming from several Democrats.
A couple problems with that line of thought. First the penalties, even at full swing, are significantly less than many of the plans people can apply for. Second, because of the way the ACA was written their is no real enforcement process for people who skip buying insurance. The IRS can withhold your tax return for payment but not much else. So if your taxes balance they will not get 1 cent from you.
And because of the way it is all set up it would still be cheaper for a lot of people to pay for the standard medical issues out of pocket (ER, broken bones, checkups, etc) and only apply if something catastrophic happens (cancer). Sure there will be a small waiting period where they will be responsible for the initial care costs after the catastrophic diagnosis, but since the odds are in their favor, that could still save them thousands in the long run.
Sadly, you're one of the lucky ones. The average increase to premiums, according to Forbes, is 41%. The only states with reductions are ones where the state government already had set extremely tight controls over their health care markets so the ACA actually adds fewer burdens on their systems.
Under some plans a rate change of less than $6 from one year to another was enough to exclude it from the grandfathering clause in the ACA. As the GP wrote this was know in advance and was by design. There are several news sites with the internal WH documents and other agency papers that discuss this very thing.
There was even debate amongst Obama's speech writers because it was known during the campaign that this promise had no chance of being kept.
The simple fact is the ACA cannot survive without an influx of younger healthy individual buys ACA approved plans and pre-ACA plans had to be eliminated, no matter how well they worked, because if people were able to maintain their cheaper plans then the cost of the new ACA plans would necessarily have to skyrocket to make up for the influx of the pool of unhealthy taking advantage of them.
So you'd rather your company change your plan, without consulting you, to now include additional requirements that in most cases mean significant cost increases, coverage shrinkage and possible deductible changes? And that is somehow better than them notifying you in advance that because of these new requirements your plan is no longer available and you must choose a new plan.
But no matter which option your company chooses the end result is the same, you are forced to change your current plan (either actively or passively) and the main catalyst for that change is the ACA, not the insurance company.
And by repeatedly invited you actually mean, invited on TV but never actually allowed into the meetings. In fact few legislators of either side were actually involved in writing this law (except for inserting special exemptions) as it was mostly written by healthcare company insiders and lobbyists.
Even years later most politicians have no idea what is or is not part of the ACA.
The compromise was between far left Democrats and center left Democrats, the Republicans never entered into it. At no point were the Dems who were pushing for this courting or expecting Republican votes, hence the procedural trickery they did in the Senate to pass it, but they did require the blue dogs and other center left Dems.
As for the Republican alternative, it was not to pass an omnibus bill which almost never leads to good results, but to pass separate bills to correct flaws in the system in a more piecemeal and less painful way; a method that would make it easier to make corrections as they arose as well as ensure a better understanding of each individual bill and it's impacts.
They wanted to remove restrictions on cross border insurance purchases (to allow for more competition), they proposed allowing individuals to claim the same deductions as businesses to try and break the employer based system, there was also support for legislation to remove lifetime limits and help people with preexisting conditions and even for leaving your adult kids on your family plan (under certain conditions). Their main issue was that because these were separate proposal and not a blanket catch all bill, people like you either through ignorance (which could be due to the lack of media coverage of these proposals) or simple denial, continually state they had no alternative.
Ace, I didn't know you read slashdot.
So in a world where no Republican vote was required or given and republicans held no position of authority over the implementation or testing, it's all their fault?
And for the record, their changes to the ACA prior to the votes was to buy Democrat votes, not Republican.
At no point did a Republican have any ability to stop or impede the implementation of the ACA. Some States exercised their rights NOT to be billed for Federal health care laws but that was it.
I believe the Republican counter to the ACA included several proposals to get rid of the employer based health care system, or at least weaken it. One of the biggest was to allow individuals to claim the same health care deductions as businesses as well as some form of bargaining groups for individuals.
Their biggest problem is that they proposed several bills which could be evaluated and adjusted separately on their own instead of creating a monster of a bill that no one could read in it's entirety so they were accused of not have an alternative plan.
Except the story doesn't actually tie the Kochs to anything. There are references to Koch controlled groups (which even the author admits they have no direct control over) and donations (which even the author admits there is absolutely no proof they made and one of the supposed donations was to a side they openly opposed) but except for some very indirect links this has nothing to do with the Koch brothers.
It's basically a political hatchet job where the writer found a boring political contribution story and tried to tie it to the Koch brothers to make it sexy without even bothering to try and find a shred of evidence. When it comes to the Koch brothers, most progressives don't care for evidence of wrong doing they just assume guilt, and then when the next story pops up they point back to the previous unfounded stories as their proof that this is a pattern.
Funniest comment of the day!
And yet every report shows the TSA does a terrible job of stopping anything except nail clippers and small pocket knives from passing through security (items not even banned by international airports).
Not that hijackings were ever that commonplace but most recent potential hijackings were stopped by passengers AFTER screening or by other federal agencies BEFORE the potential hijacker ever arrived at the airport. The few airports that still retain private security screeners, through special waivers, generally have much cheaper and better screening than that provided by the TSA.