Over the past two days we have been reviewing the many ways that health care costs and health insurance costs could be reduced dramatically without 2,500 pages of useless regulations from Washington. Those posts can be accessed at:
The next series of posts will go through the disasters that have arisen just over the past month or so. We will hit them pretty fast, given how many of them there are. For a more detailed view of what went wrong and what should have been done to address the high costs problem, please refer back to the three posts listed above.
1) The first discussion point today is a parody that was created by some creative people somewhere that fully captures the disaster that is Obama Care. The basis of the parody is a pretty famous clip from a German movie about World War II and takes place in Hitler’s bunker towards the end of the war.
The clip keeps the original German soundtrack and dialog but overdubs different words onto the screen to completely change the meaning of the clip. This clip has been used many times in many different areas including explaining how the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots in two Super Bowls for those of you looking for other parodies using the same scene.
This version adjusts the dubbed dialog to reflect the many disasters of Obama Care including Hitler losing his preferred doctor, his current insurance plan, paying higher premiums, etc. Enjoy the parody at:
2) The Democrats in Oregon were one of the earliest and most avid supporters of Obama Care. They went all out to push for a state based Obama Care health insurance exchange website and process and spent millions of dollars advertising the availability of Obama Care policies through their state exchange.
But as we previously reported, the website supporting the health exchange has been a nightmare, with some news reports saying that no one or virtually no one in the state of Oregon was able to sign up for Obama Care via the Oregon website. Virtually no one despite spending at least tens of millions of dollars in constructing the website.
How bad was the experience? On April 24, 2014, the newspaper The Oregonian, reported that Oregon’s top information technologies official was recommending Cover Oregon, the Obama Care effort in Oregon, scrap the state’s online health insurance exchange that failed to sign up a single resident. Alex Pettit, Oregon’s Chief Information Officer, recommended to a 16-member technical advisory committee that Cover Oregon should drop its glitch-filled website and join the Federal government’s online insurance exchange, which also has been pretty much a disaster from day one
Unfortunately for taxpayers, Oregon has received more than $305 million in Federal grants for the state’s health exchange and, since January 16, has spent nearly $200 million through Cover Oregon and the Oregon Health Authority. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars, the website has never worked properly and Oregon applicants were forced to use a “costly, time-consuming, hybrid paper-online process,” according to The Associated Press.
Pettit told the technical committee that it was a more expensive to partially fix the state’s website, $78 million, with no guarantee the problems would be fixed, than what the original cost estimate for the whole development of the website was, $40 million. To add insult to injury, Cover Oregon is one of several Obama Care state exchanges under investigation by the General Accountability Office which will audit the process and effort to see if there was criminal or negligent use of taxpayer wealth.
Unbelievable, you cannot make up such incompetence. These folks at both the Federal and state level cannot build a relatively simple website and they want to run the nation’s health care industry. Heaven help us.
3) While the website was a huge factor in lower than expect signups for Obama Care in Oregon, the associated advertising campaign could not have been very helpful either. One of their TV commercials can be viewed at the following link:
After viewing the ad, ask yourself: what compelling reason did the ad provide to make you rush out and sign up for an Obama Care policy? Answer: absolutely none. No call to action, no cost vs. benefits sell, just a poorly done cartoon of fluff. And apparently this commercial and others cost taxpayers over $3 million to develop and air.
If you were just looking at the graphics and music I contend that this could have been an ad for anything from laundry detergent to shampoo to a Saturday morning kids show, that is how innocuous and ineffective it is. Insane. I wonder what the “bad” advertising concepts looked like, the ones that were rejected in favor of this piece of nothing.
4) The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) continually churns out new numbers on Obama Care as the disasters unfold. The latest numbers are not good, as the operational costs continue to go up while the number of Americans who attain insurance continue to see their estimated premium costs go up:
- The CBO now predicts that the net impact on the national debt over the next ten years as a result of the Obama Care legislation will be $1.383 TRILLION. Remember that the original promise from this administration is that the deficit would not go up at all.
- This increase in the national debt of almost $1.4 TRILLION will only get 26 million more Americans covered by an insurance policy.
- This comes out to a whopping per person coverage cost of over $53,000 per person ($1.383 TRILLION divided by 26 million newly insured.)
- The really sad part from this new analysis is that the original purpose of Obama Care was to get health insurance coverage for EVERY American. The CBO’s latest analysis shows that ten years from now, 31 million Americans will still not have insurance coverage, five million more than the 26 million Americans that do attain coverage. Thus, Obama Care will not cover even half of those it was supposed to help. Pathetic.
5) Although the Obama administration spent well over $700 million building and rebuilding its flawed Federal Obama Care exchange website, an Associated Press article from April 19, 2014 pointed out that this effort is possibly infected with the so-called Heartbleed Internet security flaw. As a result, users of the Obama Care Federal exchange website are being told to change their passwords as a precaution.
Obama administration officials said there is no indication that the HealthCare.gov site has been affected and the action is being taken out of an abundance of caution. The government review is ongoing, the officials said, noting that users of other websites may also be told to change their passwords in the coming days, including those with accounts on the popular WhiteHouse.gov petitions page.
Hundreds of millions of dollars and yet another example of the government’s systems actually being an “identity thief’s paradise.”
That will do it for today’s disasters. Hitler loses under Obama Care, Oregonians lose under Obama Care, trillions spent to insure millions, and more identity theft troubles. Just a typical day in Obama Care land. More to follow tomorrow.
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