http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.htm
From there you can read the sordid tales of woe, hardship, and failure in subsequent posts that Obama care is forcing down the nation’s collective throat. And those tales of failure continue below:
1) As expected, since the Obama administration did not require its Obama Care’s “navigators” or advisors to be run though a criminal background check, many knowledgeable people have called the whole Obama Care sign up process an identity thief’s paradise since criminally inclined navigators will have easy access to a person’s private information.
The first documented case of that happening was described by an article in the Laurence, Nebraska Laurence World Journal. Rosilyn Wells — the Director of Outreach and Enrollment for the Heartland Community Health-care Center (HCHC) – is “the only full-time Affordable Care Act navigator in Lawrence,” despite the fact that:
- Her financial history includes a bankruptcy in 200
- In 2007, there was a civil charge against her from a local check cashing business called Midwest Checkrite for writing a bad check.
- She is more than $1700 behind on her state tax bill,
- She has an outstanding arrest warrant in a neighboring Kansas county.
This is the person that will have access to local residents’ names, addresses. birthdates, social security numbers, and other personal and financial information. To add insult to injury, her employer, Heartland Community Healthcare Center, is an approved Obama Care health provider which means there is a severe conflict of interest that could lead to her sub optimizing people’s health care choice by steering them to her employer rather than another provider that is better suited.
Major conflict of interest, owes back taxes, and has an outstanding arrest warrant but still serves as an Obama Care navigator. Very scary.
2) The Heritage Foundation is running a program where people can communicate their experiences that Obama Care is having on their own family’s insurance situation by sending in emails, Tweets, photos, etc. to the Foundation. A sample of their responses so far include the following, unscientific sample (note: a lot of the responses including computer screen shots of what they were currently paying and what they will pay under Obama care to prove that they were not making the numbers up):
- Wendie Sanders sent in a screen shot that shows her insurance going from $1008 a month to $1,980 a month, about a 98% increase.
- Kristalyn N. showed a photo depicting the fact that her health insurance is going from $255 a month to $536 a month.
- Michelle R. sent in a screen shot that showed her monthly cost going from $553 to $639, an almost 16% increase. However, what is even worse, her deductible amounts went from $750 to $2,000 for each individual and from $2,300 to $4,000 for the family.
- Janney Warren’s family insurance costs went up a whopping $690 a month.
- Andrew Herdon’s computer screen shot shows his family insurance costs going from $270 a month to $810 a month in 2014.
- Teresa Bryan’s insurance company dropped her policy as a result of Obama Care and her replacement policy through Obama Care will cost her $495 a month, up from the current $214 a month.
- Zeemuse reported that her sister’s monthly insurance cost for her and her daughter is going from $200 to $600 a month, her doctor visit copay is going from $30 to $60 and her hospital copay is going from $100 to $500. The sister is going to go without insurance and take her chances since she cannot afford the increases. By not paying a whopping $7,200 a year she can easily afford the penalty. The $7,200 is about 19% of her PRE-TAX income so it is no wonder why she would drop out.
- A number of respondents sent in a picture of a form letter they had all received from Human which showed a side-by-side comparison of their current plan, that runs about $406 a month, and what the plan will morph into under Obama Care whose monthly cost will jump to $808 a month. This is an annual increase in cost of almost $5,000.
You get the idea. Just these people above we see that their annual increases range from $1.032 for Michelle R. to almost $6,000 for the Herdon family. And in many cases the monthly cash outlay is just part of the Obama Care pain since the levels of their policy deductibles have also gone up substantially.
Yes, maybe some of these people will get an Obama Care subsidy. But many, if not most, will not qualify or will not come close to getting enough of a subsidy to offset these substantially higher costs. Thus, rather than reducing the average American family’s annual health insurance cost by $2,500 as promised by Obama, these Americans will be lucky if they can keep the increases under control, never mind paying $2,500 less.
3) The Obama administration has come under much deserved criticism for every aspect of this horrid law. Despite the criticism, I find it interesting that it has not fought back from a PR perspective along two components:
- First, during the last Presidential election, Obama defended Obama Care by trying to undercut Romney, saying that Obama Care is based on the same health insurance business model that Romney introduced in Massachusetts. If that is the case, why hasn’t Obama paraded out examples from Massachusetts showing how successful that business model was and that is what we can expect from Obama Care? Could it be there are no success stories from the mini-Obama Care experiment in Massachusetts?
- Second, we are being overwhelmed by people’s stories across the country suffering sticker shock from the impact and increases being caused by Obama Care. Why hasn’t Obama and Sebelius paraded out some people who actually saw their health care insurance rates go down by the promised $2,500? Maybe types of these success examples also do not exist?
4) The Washington Examiner on October 14, 2013 had a short summary of more sticker shock trauma on American’s health insurance costs:
- CNNMoney reported that one family “found a bronze-level plan for roughly $357 a month, after their subsidy, which they could swing. But it comes with a $12,600 family deductible.”
- A research group, American Action Forum, found that a 30-year-old male nonsmoker “will see his lowest cost insurance option increase 260%.”
- Some people who already buy their own insurance are receiving cancellation notices and offers for expensive new policies. The Christian Science Monitor reported on a North Carolina family who had been buying Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance for $380-a-month. “BCBS is offering them a new plan for three times the cost, $1,124.50 a month, still with an $11,000 deductible,” reports the paper.
- A California couple said that the Obama Care policy suggested to them included a 40% increase in their doctor's office co-pay. “Our co-pay skyrocketed from 0 percent to 40% and the maximum out-of-pocket increased an additional $2,300,” according to a letter in the Fresno Bee.
- Kaiser Health News found a lack of competition in some pockets of the country. “Eighteen percent of counties have only one insurer offering plans and 33 percent of counties have only two insurers competing.”
More of the same: higher month insurance costs, high rate hikes, higher deductibles, higher co-pays, etc. What a fiasco.
5) Let’s close today not with my opinion but with the opinions of industry experts with regards to the Obama Care exchange sign up processes and systems:
- The House of Representatives Oversight committee sent a letter to HHS head Kathleen Sebelius's reminding her that her staff had assured members of that the Obama Care exchanges were "proceeding on schedule and did not identify any problems like the ones now being experienced on HealthCare.gov."
- Technology experts have viciously panned the Federal government's Obama Care website, which handles 36 state exchanges with anti-virus software creator John McAfee saying the Obama Care website is a "hacker's wet dream."
- "Any modern Web company would be well prepared for a launch of this scale," RackSpace chief technology officer John Engates told the Washington Post. "We’re not talking about hundreds of millions of people and we’re not talking about complex transactions.”
- In an interview with CBS News, online database programmer Luke Chung said that despite him personally supporting Obama Care, he believes the government's website is an embarrassing failure: "It looks like nobody tested it. It's not even ready for beta testing for my book. I would be ashamed and embarrassed if my organization delivered something like that."
- Politico reporters Brett Norman and Jason Millman warned that Obama Care's technical woes are far from over: "The glitch-plagued Obama Care rollout might be just the beginning: A series of potential technology problems could thwart the Obama administration's goal of getting 7 million people enrolled in the new exchanges by the end of March,"
- Tech expert Dan Schuyler helped build the Utah Obama Care exchange. He told Politico that if HHS does not fix the federal healthcare.gov website within three or four weeks, "those at the back of the line will not have coverage."
A hacker’s wet dream, glitch plagued, ashamed, embarrassed, technology problems, etc. Remember, this is a website signup process that cost over $643 million to develop and it is a total disaster. Maybe the fact that HHS did not put this out for competitive bidding may have had something to do with the glitches, Just saying…
In real life, many people would have been fired already for this type of less than shoddy work. Should be interesting to see if that reality exists inside the Beltway and we see someone get their career axed for this incompetence.
Until then, the Obama Care incompetence train wreck review continues tomorrow.
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