The nightmare continues today:
1) A recent example of the negative impacts of Obama Care from the Heritage Foundation perfectly illustrated why Obama Care is failing to reduce health insurance costs. Tom Gialanella recently received a letter from his insurance company explaining that when Obamacare takes effect in 2014 his current health insurance premiums are going to go up 61%: “I went from $891 a month to $1,437 a month.“ Gialanella said.
Even worse, for his family of five, Gialanella’s current deductible would double from $4,000 a year to $8,000 a year. And that doubling is for the least expensive option under Obama Care.”
Gialanella said that in addition to being more expensive, his plan includes maternity and newborn care, which he doesn’t need: “My wife is 58 years old, and our youngest child is soon to be 18. We’ll be having no more children. That’s not a benefit that we would ever purchase nor need or be able to use.” And that kids, is a major failing point of Obama Care. It forces consumers not only to purchase health care insurance it forces them to buy and pay for aspects of health care that they will NEVER use.
This is like forcing a Florida resident to buy snow tires for a new car he will only use in Florida. This is like forcing an apartment dweller to own a lawn mower.
It makes no sense but it illustrates how poorly the political class in Washington thought through this legislation, or did not think through it all. Why should elderly Americans have to buy insurance coverage for maternity needs? Like much of Obama Care, it makes no sense.
2) Consider the sticker shock that two California families recently experienced as a result of Obama Care, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News:
Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.
Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.
Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.
“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.
“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”
Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level — the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn’t realize they would rise so much.
“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.”
Surprises like this are cropping up allover the country as even Obama supporters are beginning to realize that when you start giving something away for free, Obama Care subsidized health care, there really is no free lunch, someone has to pay for the subsidies. And that someone is turning out to be every American family who will be paying more for a solution that has not chance of resolving anything.
3) I have very few computer technical skills. However, I am able to get hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual counts on how many people have accessed this blog. I can find out how many people accessed each individual post. I can find out what country readers came from on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. I can find out what computer operating system they used to access this blog in a whole slew of different ways. I used a canned blog program from Google to get this wealth of information.
However, despite spending well over $600 million on the Federal government Obama Care exchange website, Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathy Sebelius meekly stated this past week that more than a week after the exchange website went live, she was unable to tell the world one simple number: how many people had successfully enrolled in an Obama Care are Federal exchange insurance plan. A truly pathetic return for a $600 million investment.
4) Don’t believe the bad news about Obama Care that we have been discussing and reviewing for the past three years? Consider some main stream news sources and what they are saying about this unfolding disaster:
USA TODAY reports: “Over the first four days the new online health insurance exchanges were open last week, more than 8 million people visited them, according to the Obama administration. At the very least, this casts doubt on the Republican claim that Americans hate Obamacare and want it repealed. It seems millions of people desperately want the coverage the law will allow them to get, regardless of their medical histories. Alas, the administration managed to turn the experience for most of those visitors into a nightmare. Websites crashed, refused to load, or offered bizarre and incomprehensible choices. Even though the system was shut down for repairs over the weekend, Monday’s early reports continued to suggest an epic screw-up. Why have things gone so wrong? President Obama’s chief technology adviser, Todd Park, blames the unexpectedly large numbers of people who flocked to Healthcare.gov and state websites. ‘Take away the volume and it works,’ he told USA TODAY’s Tim Mullaney.”
Bloomberg reports, “Insurers are getting faulty and incomplete data from the new U.S.-run health exchange, which may mean some Americans won’t be covered even after they sign up for an insurance plan. While it’s not clear how widespread the problem is, the reports from industry consultants are the first hint that the technical troubles faced by consumers trying to enroll in health plans under the Affordable Care Act may also be hitting the insurers. The companies are receiving electronic files that can’t open or have so much missing information on new enrollees they’re unusable, the consultants said. Some insurers have been forced to fix entries by hand, said Bob Laszewski, an insurance-industry consultant based in Arlington, Virginia. … Since the exchanges opened on Oct. 1, consumers have struggled to access the online marketplaces, which have been overwhelmed by millions of visitors. While capacity was added this past weekend to a system meant to serve people in 36 states, the federal website continued yesterday to deliver error messages to potential customers trying to create accounts and shop for health plans.”
The Hill reports, “Problems plaguing online enrollment in Obama Care are not just due to high traffic, but are being compounded by structural problems at healthcare.gov, the federal government portal where people can shop for medical insurance. The Obama administration is now scrambling to fix technical troubles that contributed to a bruising debut last week for the new insurance marketplaces. ‘I think there’s growing consensus that it’s not just volume,’ said Caroline Pearson, a vice president at the consulting firm Avalere Health who focuses on the healthcare law. Healthcare.gov — the main portal for consumers in 36 states to compare their coverage options — was taken offline for maintenance over the weekend and was scheduled to come down for repairs again at 1 a.m. Tuesday. In addition to adding capacity to better deal with heavy traffic, the fixes included software upgrades and changes to the type of hardware used for certain functions, the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) said Monday. The initial problems with healthcare.gov mostly prevented users from creating an account — a prerequisite to comparing or buying insurance. That means few people have been able to even begin the process of shopping for coverage.”
“Epic screw up” from the USA Today report seems to be a nice summary of what is going wrong with this process, a process that should have been bug free given that it was three years in the making. This is what $600 million buys you when you allow an inept political class to operate an equally inept Federal government bureaucracy.
And to the best of my knowledge, despite scrambling to fix what is so broken, I have not seen very many reports that the system is any more stable, quicker, available, or accurate in transferring health insurance requests from the website to insurers. Pathetic.
Unfortunately, this is no where close to being the end of the bad news. More to come tomorrow and the next day and the next day…
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