There is so much news to cover that we will not go into as much detail of the fiascos as we might usually do, that would take weeks to get through. We will hit the highlights/lowlights to give a sense of why this atrocious piece of legislation needs to be either repealed or massively overhauled.
1) 34 states were so scared of Obama Care that they opted out of creating their own so-called health care exchanges, as allowed by the law, and passed that responsibility along to the Federal government. Unfortunately, as we and many others predicted, the Federal government has not been able to build as simple, functioning website to execute one function, allow people to sign up for health care insurance.
According to news reports, the Federal website fails to load drop-down menus and other critical elements for users that successfully gain entrance, often does not confirm if a person has actually successfully completed the sign up process, and generally prevents uninsured Americans in the states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates. For this basically nonfunctioning website, the American taxpayer has already paid over $634 million for basically nothing.
And as with all government contracts, it has managed to overrun its budget at $634 million, by an amazing factor of seven. When the company who won the contract to build the Obama Care Federal exchange website was identified back in 2011, the contract stipulated that the cost of development could be as high as $94.7 million. Thus, the Federal government has already spent seven times what the original cost estimate was and STILL does not have a working website. Disgraceful.
Consider two benchmarks of success against which we measure the failure of the Obama Care Federal exchange website. Facebook received its first investment in June 2004 and operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in expenses in June 2010. Twitter was created in 2006, and spent only $360.17 million over the next five years until a $400 million investor boost in 2011.
These two complicated web efforts spent far less in more years than the Federal government has already spent with the distinction being that they were fully functional sooner and for far less money. But to say the political class can run government functions that are fully functional for far less money are words that have never been uttered.
2) But maybe the supporters and implementers of Obama Care should have known this was likely to happen all along, given how badly the main company who built the Obama Care Federal exchange failed in Canada, according to an October 10, 2013 story from the Washington Examiner.
That story reported that Canadian health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obama Care health exchange websites, for nonperformance and missed deadlines. CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s online medical registry.
The online registry was supposed to be up and running by June 2011 but more than a year later was still not in operation. Other companies were eventually hired who were able to fix what this Obama Care data systems provider could not.
Three troubling issues here. Did someone in the Federal government procurement process know how incompetent this company was and still went ahead and awarded them the contract? The Federal government had three years to put this process and computer system in place, why did it fail so miserably on the first day and continues to fail? And finally, why did we send hundreds of millions of dollars to a foreign company? Were there no American companies that could have done the job? The whole episode smells of incompetence and shadiness.
3) We have previously reported on how many Americans are seeing the costs of their current health care insurance skyrocket as a result of Obama Care. The Heritage Foundation documented three recent examples of just how much those insurance costs are going up for Americans:
- George Schwab of North Carolina was recently notified in a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield on September 23 that his current health insurance plan doesn’t meet Obama Care’s benefit requirements and would have to be terminated at the end of the year. While Blue Cross did suggest a comparable plan, it was $980 more than what he now pays.
“The President told the American people numerous times that ‘If you like your current coverage, you can keep it,’” Schwab told The Charlotte Observer. “How can we keep it if it has been eliminated? How can we keep it if the premium has been increased 430 percent in one year?”
- Michael Yount and his wife, a retired couple in North Carolina, buy their individual insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield and pay about $380 a month with an $11,000 deductible.
But they were recently informed that their new insurance plan will be THREE times the price, costing them $1,124.50 a month, The Christian Science Monitor reported. The couple said they plan to drop out of formal health insurance, pay the penalty, and “self-insure.”
- Cindy Vinson in California “will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy,” reports the San Jose Mercury News. She is an Obama voter who was surprised by the personal impact of Obama Care. “Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”
Who did she think was going to pay for it? Given that Obama Care does not resolve the underlying root causes of our high health care costs, all it does is move existing costs in an unworkable Rube Goldberg manner so that everyone pays more but the underlying problem and related costs never get resolved.
Losing a current policy, paying much more for a replacement policy, and going self insured, three things that any health care reform effort should not do but what Obama Care is doing.
4) According to a recent Washington Post story:
Major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies repeatedly warned the Obama administration in recent months that the new federal health-insurance exchange had significant problems, according to people familiar with the conversations. Despite those warnings and intense criticism from Republicans, the White House proceeded with an Oct. 1 launch…Robert Laszewski, a health-care consultant with clients in the insurance industry, said insurers were complaining loudly that the site, www.healthcare.gov, was not working smoothly during frequent teleconferences with officials at the Department of Health and Human Services before the exchange’s launch and afterward. “People were pulling out their hair,” he said.
Which raises the question that if just about everyone knew this rollout was going to bomb, why did the Obama administration go ahead with a rollout that actually bombed? Could it be politics overrode common sense? If this aspect of Obama Care had also been delayed like many, many other aspects of the legislation that have already been delayed or terminated, it would have been a political nightmare for Obama. It would have provided further proof that the Federal government was unable to manage such a complicated, and unnecessary, process and that the associated legislation needed to be scrapped.
Thus, rather than do the right thing, the administration rolled out a disaster on a wing and a prayer, neither of which held up. Now the American taxpayer is probably paying big bucks for overtime, crisis fueled data programming resources in order to fix what never should have gone live. Americans who might actually have wanted to sign up for insurance may decide it is not worth the hassle even if the system is adequately fixed in the future since their first attempt to sign up was a frustrating failure. When politics overrides common sense there is never a good outcome.
Given all of the hassles, how many people have successfully signed up for Obama Care through the Federal process? No one knows and/or no one is telling. You can bet if this process was successful, the Federal government and Obama would be touting its victory. However, no touting has to mean no victory, for either the government, the American taxpayer, and the unresolved problem of high health care costs in this country.
We are just getting started, more to come on the following days on the unfolding Obama Care disaster.
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