1) We usually get our silly quotes or out of this world quotes from Nancy Pelosi, as we have already shared this week. However, she apparently does not have a monopoly on inane statements as we see from what U.S Senator Angus King said on a Sunday morning news show: “There’s no such thing as Obama Care. You can’t sign up for Obama Care. You sign up for an Anthem policy, or an Aetna policy, or a Welthorn policy. It’s private insurance.”
Who knew, there is no such thing as Obama Care. That 2,500 page piece of legislation that Reid, Pelosi, and Obama rushed through for passage was apparently a mirage. The fact that millions and millions of Americans have lost their insurance because of that piece of legislation is just a smoke screen. The fact that the American taxpayer spent billions of dollars on non-working health insurance websites because of the legislation was just a piece of mass hypnosis.
Of course it is private insurance, driven by the OBAMA CARE legislation. Again, what world, what reality do these Washington politicians live in? Pathetic.
2) On May 19, 2014, the website of Judicial Watch put out a public relations release that described the chaos and ineptness of the Obama Care rollout’s initial days and how that ineptness was likely still affecting the numbers that the Obama administration have been hyping as proof of success. Specifically, Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request went after “any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to the number of individuals that purchased health insurance through Healthcare.gov between October 1, 2013, and October 4, 2013.”
October 1, 2014 is critical since that was the first day that people could sign up for health insurance via the Federal Obama Care web portal/website. As you may recall, those first few days were an unmitigated disaster from a data systems perspective despite the government having over three years and having spent probably over a billion dollars trying to get ready.
The Judicial Watch posting reminds readers how it was impossible to get a total number of enrollees during those early days in October from the administration: “Marilyn Tavenner, head of the HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, refused to disclose the number of people who had purchased insurance through the site saying, “We have just decided not to release that yet.””
We now know, via this Freedom Of Information Act effort, why the government was a little reluctant to tell what the enrollment numbers were:
- On October 1, there were 43,208 accounts created and a grand total of…one enrollment.
- As of October 31, 2013, there were 1,319,425 accounts created nationwide, resulting in only 30,512 actual enrollments in Obama Care, an enrollment closure rate of a measly 2.3%.
- At the end of the first day of open enrollment for Obama Care, October 1, 2013, the Senior Advisor at Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Brigid M. Russell, sent out an email to her staff with a subject line celebrating “2 enrollments!” The body copy of the email read: "We have our second official FFM enrollment! The first two Form 834s sent out are to: 1) CareSource in Ohio, 2) BCBS of North Carolina."
- Serious problems were not restricted to ordinary American citizens since all 24,000 Congressional staffers that are required to use Obama Care also faced numerous failures and delays. An October 2, 2013 email from HHS Special Assistant Marianne Bowen indicated serious problems with Congressional enrollments: “The Congressional issue (68 attempts for Direct enrollment) was an issue stemming from incomplete applications being sent through (started, not finished, sent anyway) and the way the issuers are assigning unique numbers. Turns out there were only 4 complete Direct Enrollment applications that went through, the other 64 were not complete."
- On October 2, 2013, the Obama Care website had 70 million page views but only 5 million were unique visitors, and a whopping 48% of registrations failed.
- And here is the truly critical take away from the Judicial Watch information cache. On April 17, 2014, President Obama announced that eight million people had signed up for health insurance on Obama Care health insurance exchanges. However, this number may be seriously over estimated since, according to testimony earlier this month by the America’s Health Insurance Plans Association in front of the House Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, “Because of the challenges that surfaced with the launch of the Exchanges in October 2013, some consumers were advised to create a new account and enroll again. As a result, insurers have many duplicate enrollments in their system for which they never received any payment.”
3) One Obama administration person who was in the thick of the whole chaos and disaster was HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius. She is no longer in that position, having left government employment a few months ago once the initial Obama Care enrollment period ended.
Given how awful the launch was back in October, it is quite beyond belief that she was not booted out of her job long before she left due to incompetence. However, that is a story for another post, namely how incompetent does one have to be as a government employee before being fired for being…incompetent?
During the chaos of the launch, a local Oklahoma television reporter was interviewing Ms. Sebelius and discussed the fact that Obama Care was very unpopular. He then paused, waiting for a reaction to that observation from the Secretary. Embarrassingly, Ms. Sebelius just sat silently, at a loss for words in reaction to his statement.
After about seven awkward seconds without a response, the reporter speaks up and says that perhaps the sound isn’t working. Sebelius replies that the sound is working just fine. She just didn’t have anything to say. The video clip on how she was stunned to think that Obama Care was unpopular can be seen at:
This is a “deer in the headlights” embarrassing from the government leader that was supposed to hold it all together but who could not even react to a simple question.
4) One of the emerging problems of Obama Care that is just being talked about is the high out of pocket costs that Obama Care patients have to pout out before they start seeing any benefits of their Obama Care policies. Apparently, in their previous policies, policies that were killed by the Obama Care legislation, they did not have the large out of pocket costs that they have to live with now.
A recent Associated Press report had some examples of what this new potentially deadly wrinkle is:
- One of the problems is that Obama Care policies have little or no flexibility when it comes to out of pocket costs, just about everyone is treated the same way.
- Breast cancer survivor Ginny Mason can now no longer afford her arthritis medication, Celebrex, under Obama Care because of her higher out-of-pocket costs.
- To keep taking Celebrex, Mason would have had to pay $648 a month up to a $1500 deductible, and then a co-pay of $85 a month: “I was grateful for the Affordable Care Act because it didn't turn me down but ... it's like where's the affordable on this one,” Mason said.
- Brian Rosen, senior vice president for public policy for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society explained in the article that specialty cancer drugs are prohibitively expensive under Obama Care: “The challenge is for the sickest patients, the ones that need access to these specialty drugs, the costs are going to come in most cases from that out of pocket cap ... they are likely to hit that $6,350 ceiling and in some cases quickly.”
- In other words, in many Obama Care policies, the ailing customer will have to put out over $6,000 of their own money before seeing any benefit from their policy. Many people do not have $6,000 available in their household cash flow to afford such an outlay upfront. That is why their previous policies may have higher costs per month but avoided large cash outlays upfront.
- This is very distressing and potentially fatal since a recent study from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine “found that patients with higher co-payments were 70 percent more likely to stop taking their cancer treatment and 42 percent more likely to skip doses.”
- Thus, many Oabma Care patients may be faced with a decision that is critical and contingent on their cash flow: do they scale back taking their medicine because of the high upfront costs of their Obama Care policy deductibles or do they skip a mortgage payment of a college tuition payment. The North Carolina study looks like they will skip the medicine, imperiling their health.
5) One last Obama Care disaster before we sign off for this month. Back in early April, the head of the Maryland Health Insurance Exchange testified in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that only 60,000 Maryland residents had signed up for Obama Care through the state’s exchange. But it was noted at the hearing that it was well known and accurate that about 73,000 Maryland residents had lost access to their current insurance policies because of Obama Care.
Thus, the net gain, or in this case loss, of health insured residents in Maryland was negative 13,000. Only in Washington can you try to get more people health insurance and after years of prep and billions of dollars of expense, in at least one state, Maryland, you end with FEWER insured people eight months after you launch your program…to get people insured.
That will do it for this month’s disasters. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure we will be right back here at the end of next month reviewing even more disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by the most inept set of politicians ever to be in power.
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