And although a lot of other crisis have been taking up the headlines lately, e.g. the dissolution of Iraq, the Veterans Administration scandal, the IRS scandal, etc., that does not mean that Obama Care has stopped being a disaster. It just has not been on the front burner because of the rest of the Obama administration implosions, explosions, and criminal acts.
Past reviews can be accessed by going back to previous months' posts using the listings on the right side of this page. Within those past posts, we have provided a comprehensive plan that should have been implemented to resolve the problem of escalating health care costs in this country, a plan that would have worked without the heart break and fiascos of Obama Care.
Thus, over the next few days, we will not be going back over our solution but focusing on the unfolding disasters that is Obama Care. Those of you interested can review our plan at these back posts at your leisure.
1) Consider a mother of a young daughter who has had a serious heart condition since birth. As a result of the entire health care industry upheaval as a result of Obama Care, Holly Fisher’s daughter lost access to the trusted heart care specialist doctors that have been helping her daughter survive her heart condition.
It seems that the Obama Care health exchange insurance policy that she was forced to sign up for does not give her access to her daughter’s current doctors. Like any caring mother whose child is now facing even longer odds of survival, she is lashing out at what Obama Care has done to her family’s lives despite the fact that the President constantly reminded us that “if you like your doctors, you can keep your doctors," a promise that has turned out to be one of the biggest Presidential lies of all time. Shame on him at least in this case of extra stress for a caring family.
Also recall that Harry Reid once called people like Holly Fisher liars themselves for telling the world of their plight. Shame on him also.
For a history of the situation and a desperate mother’s tweets, please go to:
2) The rollout of the Obama Care legislation was an unmitigated disaster in so many ways. But the most visible and probably the most embarrassing component was the utter failure of the online sign up process for Obama Care. People could not get into the system, the system bombed on them, the system provided bad information, the system turned out to be a identify thief’s paradise, etc.
It was truly amazing that so much could fail despite having three years and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, to get it right. But a recent Washington Examiner investigative report, based on a recently released U.S. Senate report, has shed some light on how the Obama administration and Kathleen Sebelius were able to embarrass itself and the country in such a dramatic way:
- Apparently, politics was the overriding driver of the disaster since the White House pressured everyone involved to launch the exchange website on time regardless of its condition and state of readiness.
- This was done despite the now public knowledge of previously unknown warnings from consultants and those working on the site that it was insecure, untested, and would likely crash if just 500 people accessed the site at the same time.
- According to the Senate report: “The White House continually meddled in technical decisions and put pressure on [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] officials to launch the website on time, regardless of operability and security concerns. As a result, officials ignored countless red flags to launch a website with thousands of defects. In the end, the launch failed miserably, crashing on takeoff.”
- Senate members and staffs spent months going over government emails, interviewing personnel involved with the site, etc,
- The investigation concluded that top government officials were feeling the pressure to burnish President Obama's health care legacy, and thus rather than doing the right thing, they ignored several warnings and flipped the switch to the website on schedule October 1 way before it was ready for use” "Both metaphorically and factually, the website was designed to be the public face of President Obama's signature achievement."
- As a result, the report concluded: “No one wanted to be the messenger that told the White House that its signature piece of legislation was going to crash at takeoff. The administration prioritized political success over protecting taxpayers."
Great, a President’s fragile ego and self worth resulted in hundreds of million s of dollars wasted, the financial well being of millions of Americans exposed to identity thieves, and mass confusion, frustration, and embarrassment in the eyes of Americans, many of whom were already suspicious and felt that the Federal government bureaucracy was to inept and too incompetent to do anything well, never mind such a massive and untested endeavor like Obama Care.
How bad was the situation and the red flags? The report found the following obvious reasons to delay the whole rollout:
- Just 23% of the site’s coding had been tested.
- Only 40% of security controls had been verified as sound.
- This resulted in the administration fully knowing that they could not be positive they could protect the personal medical and financial information of Obama Care applicants.
- The White House continually placed more changes and new demands on the developers, delaying the project.
- The same White House people then “meddled with the launch with pestering requests and questions.”
- A top official in the administration had actually made the decision to delay the rollout but was overriden by Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner.
- An outside audit firm, TurningPoint Global Solutions, had warned the administration many times that the development and testing of the site was behind schedule, there were 677 “serious defects,” and 21,000 lines of coding were defective.
- Despite these warnings, a top official noted in their email that Tavenner’s office knew that it would crash if just 500 people were on the website at once.
- The final cost just on the development of the website came to $834 million.
A summary statement from the Senate report sums up this example of massive government incompetence nicely: “This is a staggering amount of taxpayer funds to enroll a few million people. In addition to the waste and inefficiency, the people forced to use the website had to waste time and effort dealing with a dysfunctional system.”
3) One of Obama Care’s supposed big selling points is that the legislation would dramatically reduce the use of hospital emergency rooms since people with insurance would now be more likely to go to the doctors available under their insurance policy rather than emergency rooms. This would theoretically dramatically reduce one of the more expensive components of health care in this country.
But according to a recent Bloomberg report, that assumption so far has proven to be dramatically false also, much like many other promises of Obama Care:
- A survey recently conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), found that since the start of the Obama Care era, 46% of surveyed emergency physicians said they have experienced jumps in patients while only 23% reported a decrease;
- 27% said the emergency room volume they are involved with has stayed about the same.
- Doctors surveyed said they expected this, despite the promises made within the Obama Care debate, as discussed Howard Mell, a spokesman for the ACEP and an emergency care physician, told Business Insider: “We told you this was going to happen. We don’t mind that it has. But we’d sure appreciate some support,”
- Furthermore, 86% of emergency physicians expect there to be some level of increase in the amount of emergency room visits in their facilities over the next three years.
- 77% do not believe their facilities are prepared for the expected influx of patients.
- Thus, another Obama Care vow and promise broken, at least in the eyes of the experts in the field and early results at least from this survey. But broken promises are a trademark of this legislation and this administration so no surprise here.
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