October, 2013, Obama Care Disaster Update, Part 3: Higher Costs, Imploding Data Systems, and Americans Dying Sooner

This is the third post in this month’s series on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. There is a lot to cover this month since October 1 marked the first day that Obama Care health insurance exchanges were open for business. Or not open for business, given what a disaster they were for the most part. And this was only a part of what we are learning about the worst piece of legislation ever passed by the Washington political class.

The first two posts in this series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update_7011.html

1) Six days after the health insurance exchanges started operating, CNBC reported that its insurance industry sources were reporting that as few as 1 in 100 applications on the Federal exchange contains enough information to enroll the applicant in a plan. Some of the problems involve:

• How the exchange’s software collects and verifies an applicant’s data.
• Some of the insurance companies involved with the exchanges are stating they are receiving incomplete data from the government’s website or that the files are corrupted and unreadable in some way.
• That means the people in every batch who haven’t provided enough or correct information must be contacted for additional data to ensure they qualify for the insurance they want to buy, all this despite the fact that the Federal government has already spent over $600 million on this website effort.
• Even worse, many people might think that they actually have competed the process and are secure in assuming they are covered for health problems when in fact their registration process never got finalized and they are, in reality, uninsured.

An industry expert summed up the problems in a very succinct way: “It is extraordinary that these systems weren’t ready,” said Sumit Nijhawan, CEO of Infogix, which handles data integrity issues for major insurers including WellPoint and Cigna, as well as multiple Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates.

Extraordinary, unbelievable, disgusting would all be correct adjectives for a Washington effort that took three years and $600 million dollars to not work as promised.  A 1% success rate, I could have done better even with my limited technical ability and done better for far less money.

2) Consider the following analysis of Obama Care health care costs that was done by the Americans For Prosperity organization using official Federal government press release data, keeping in mind that President Obama promised that Obama Care would save the typical American family about $2,500 a year in health insurance costs:

• According to the analysis and data from the Health and Human Services organization of the Federal government, health insurance rates for younger American men will increase by an average of a whopping 97% in 2014.
• The health insurance rates  for American women won’t increase as dramatically, but will still increase by a still whopping 55 to 62%. 
• In the worst possible cases, premiums will increase as much as 279% next year.
• However, these numbers are nowhere on the website. In fact, HHS and Secretary Sebelius are praising Obama Care saying these premiums are actually less. How could that be?
• Following in the footsteps of the crazy budgeting process in DC, HHS is actually using baseline health insurance premium analysis. Premiums are less than what  the Congressional Budget Office originally predicted, so ObamaCare “saved” Americans money. Tell that to the individuals who will be paying more for insurance next year.
• Worse yet, supporters of ObamaCare argue that the premium increases don’t matter because individuals aren’t really paying these premiums. They’ll receive tax credits that offset the costs. That’s true…for some people. Individuals between 100 and 400% of the Federal poverty level will received tax credits to assist with the purchasing of insurance. But 400% of the federal poverty level is only $46,000 a year in income for an individual.
• That isn’t much comfort for a 27 year old that has to pay for these increased premiums yet doesn’t qualify for a tax credit. In Indiana, premiums will increase 53% for a 27 year old male and thousands of them won’t qualify for the subsidies. Only 44% of those between 21-30 years of age in Indiana even qualify for subsidies. In Arkansas, it’s even worse. Premiums are up 247 percent and 53 percent won’t qualify for a subsidy.

So much for Obama’s promise that an average family will see its annual health care costs go down by about $2,500. Not even close.

3) One of the very serious accusations of this whole Obama Care process is that it will be a paradise for identify thieves. Well, it looks like that fear might becoming a reality already. 

A Minnesota insurance broker told the Star Tribune  that he had recently received an email that contained a load of confidential information on more than 2,400 insurance agents, including info like names, Social Security numbers and business addresses.
The source of this identify theft bonanza? An unnamed staffer at MNsure, Minnesota’s new Obama Care health exchange online marketplace. 

The MNsure employee had accidentally sent the email to the wrong person. Which is bad enough but why is such information being sent out on the Internet in an unencrypted format, even if it was sent to the right person? 

The Star Tribune reported:

An official at MNsure, the state’s new online health insurance exchange, acknowledged it had mishandled private data. A MNsure security manager called the broker, Jim Koester, and walked him and his assistant through a process of deleting the file from their computer hard drives.

Koester said he willingly complied, but was unnerved.

“The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” he said. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”

Good question, how can anyone in America be sure their personal information is safe given that the minions in Washington have faulty computer systems up and not running that can be easily hacked for identify thieves’ easy usage and abuse?

4) 10,535 pages of final Obama Care regulations have so far been published in the Federal Register/ 10,535 pages. Does anyone think that 1) any sitting member of Congress read any of these pages, never mind all of them, 2) would have even understood them if they had read them, and 3) have any idea what negatively dramatic impact over 10,000 pages of Federal regulatory gibberish has on Americans and American businesses? 

Before you answer these questions, keep in mind that two of the most important pieces of legislation passed by Washington in the past fifty years, were less than 34 pages long. The Voters’ Right Act was about two pages long and the Civil Rights Act was about 34 pages long but each had far more positive impacts than 10,000 pages of Obama Care regulations can even dream of having. 

“Try to pare things down. Very few moves do a lot.”  Over 10,000 pages of regulations is not paring things down and will accomplish very little. 

5) The Washington Examiner recently ran an article that covered the results from a recent survey of 200 leading health professionals. In its national  2013 Health Care Survey of top health care professionals, Coupa Software (The company provides cloud-based finance applications for many of the nation’s health care providers and is especially focused on waste in the health care system) found that health care professionals are worried about a number of setbacks that the health law could result in. Asked to list the “negative impacts,” of which they could pick several, here’s what Coupa found:

– “Quality of health insurance policies will suffer.” - 53%
– “Quality of care will go down.” - %51
– “The law is overly complicated.” - 49%
–  “Insurance exchanges will be poorly managed.” - 42%
– “The law still allows insurance companies to be the middleman.” - 37%
– “Too complex for businesses.” - 32%
– “Americans will die earlier.” - 19%

Other findings include both good and bad anticipated outcomes from Obama Care, with the bad severely outweighing the good:

• Their survey found that the health care professionals expect that many inefficiencies, such as unnecessary emergency room visits, will be fixed under Obama Care.
• While 93% of the professionals in the survey cited negative impacts, 74% also found positive outcomes from the law, the biggest being the availability of health insurance to those who don’t have it.
• Any specific support for the law is offset by the overall view of the law by the health care community since the poll found that 56% oppose most or all of  Obama Care’s provisions, only 6% favor all of the law, and 38% favor most of it.

Overall, a bad omen when top health professionals see far more downside than upside on average, especially when a whopping one in five think that more Americans will die earlier as a result of Obama Care, the exact opposite of what the legislation intended. But unintended consequences has been a specialty of the Washington political class for a very long time.

A sign-up process that might not be fixable despite spending over $600 million on its development, higher premiums, high identify theft risk, 10,000 pages of probably non-decipherable regulations, and at least some doctors that think the legislation will kill Americans sooner rather than later. You cannot make this stuff up unless you are a Washington politician. More unbelievable fallout tomorrow.

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