February, 2015, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Less Competition, Less Privacy, More Personal Agony

For over a year we have had to dedicate multiple posts each month to cover the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. If you follow all of the disasters from this legislation that we have discussed, you cannot help but conclude that this is the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington. 

Millions and millions of Americans have been forced off of their current and preferred health insurance policies. Millions have lost access to their preferred doctors. Millions have lost access to their preferred hospitals. Millions are paying higher premiums and deductibles than before. Over a trillion dollars will be added to the national debt. Unemployment and underemployment has been made worse because of the law’s criteria. Economic growth has been stifled. Millions of Americans are now at a much higher threat of identity theft as a result of the poor data system processes of the law. Many Americans now have health insurance, at a higher cost, but are having trouble getting access to health care as doctors are retiring earlier as a result of the law and many doctors are not accepting the lower payments they will receive from Obama Care insurance customers. And after tens years, there will likely still be tens of millions of Americans who do not have health insurance coverage despite the purported objective of Obama Care.

And as we have pointed out dozens and dozens of times, the legislation will never be successful because it never addressed the underlying root causes of our high health care costs in this country. Obama put forth an insurance solution to a public health problem:

• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans drink too much alcohol.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• America’s food chain is infected and infested with high fructose corn syrup and sugar.
• America is aging making citizens much more likely to be victims of aging diseases such as dementia and Alzheimers.
• Medical practice tort reform is needed nationally and has been shown to work at the state level.
• Cross state border insurance company competition needs to be encouraged.
• The Federal government loses tens of billions of dollars every year via Medicare and Medicaid through waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud, money that could be used to make America healthier, not criminals wealthier.

In the face if these ten root causes, Obama chose to ignore all of them and put n place a Rube Goldberg like government bureaucracy that has no chance of succeeding. To prove this point, let’s take a couple of days and look at the latest unfolding disasters being spawned by Obama Care:

1) The implementation of the Obama Care program was one of the worst data systems rollout disasters in the history of the country. Systems locked up, systems failed, systems lost personal information, the data security processes were called an identity thief’s paradise, a total disaster and embarrassment. Even more of an embarrassment in that the Obama administration had over three years and spent at least hundreds of millions of dollars preparing for the rollout.

One of the main culprits in the mega failure was a company called CGI Federal. CGI Federal was fired in the midst of the implosion of the Obama Care rollout and replaced with other companies who were at least able to get something up and running even if it was pathetic. CGI Federal was paid millions of taxpayer dollars before being shown the door after really delivering nothing of value in return.

But as the Washington political class and Federal government often do, they add insult to injury relative to taxpayer wealth. Merely seven months after CGI was fired from the Obama Care effort in the Department of Health and Human Services, the IRS rehired the company to help manage the enforcement of the Obama Care tax program. Unbelievable, a company so flawed is rehired less than a year later. Even worse, the company is set to receive $4.5 million on its new IRS contract that runs only until August, 2015.

An attorney, Scott Amey, for the nonprofit government watchdog group, Project on Government Oversight, called the company the “poster child for government failure.” He want on to say: “I am shocked that the IRS has turned around and is using them for Obamacare IT work.”

But failure seems to be synonymous with this company. It failed to deliver on its promises relative to Obama Care in Vermont and Massachusetts on their exchange websites. According to the Daily Caller reporting, the Massachusetts site never ended being operational and yet cost taxpayers $170 million that was paid to CGI.

Back to the old Einstein saying: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Unfortunately, the Federal government uses this as a rule rather than the exception.

2) One of the real and large fears of the Obama Care data systems failures was and is the reality the systems’ security measures were not good enough to prevent massive identity theft impossible. However, as it turns out, identity theft from criminals is not the only threat to personal information that Americans may have entered into the Obama Care data systems.

It turns out that the Federal government itself is secretly sending consumers’ personal data out to private companies that are involved in advertising and marketing, according to a recent Associated Press report. According to the AP, information being shared with private firms could include age, income, zipcode, whether or not the person is a smoker, and whether the person is pregnant. It can also include a person’s computer Internet address, which apparently sophisticated marketers can eventually translate into a person’s name and address.

Apparently, this type of personal information is being sent not just to a few companies but to dozens of third party marketing and data analysis firms. While the administration has guaranteed that the information is not being abused and is used only to make the Obama Care data systems operations more efficient, this the same organization that guaranteed that if you like your current insurance policy, you can keep it, if you like your current doctors, you can keep them, that the Obama Care exchange process would be simple and easy, that Obama Care would not add one dime to the national debt, all of which turned out to be bogus guarantees, if not outright lies.

3) Speaking of Obama Care and Presidential lies, deceptions, and false guarantees, let’s go back in time a few years to 2009 and review another Obama promise, namely that the Obama Care legislation would set up health care exchanges that had a robust set of competitors in each exchange to drive down the cost of health care insurance:

We’ll…[create] a new insurance exchange — a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices. Insurance companies will have an incentive to participate in this exchange because it lets them compete for millions of new customers. As one big group, these customers will have greater leverage to bargain with the insurance companies for better prices and quality coverage.

Sounds great, turns out to be bogus, also like most other Obama promises and ideals that have failed relative to the law. Alyene Senger, writing for the Heritage Foundation on January 16, 2015, pointed out how this promise has fallen flat relative to competition and driving down costs:

• Her analysis is based on data taken directly from Health and Human Services government reports and from state exchange data sources.
• She examined how many insurance companies were actively present in each U.S. county prior to the implementation of Obama Care and how many are present now and actively involved in offering healthcare insurance in each county.
• She found that there is over 20% LESS competition now than prior to the law being enacted, the direct opposite of what Obama promised.
• In one third of all the counties in the country, there are only one, or at most two, companies offering insurance plans in the Obama Care health care exchanges, hardly a robust competition situation.
• In some states such as Kansas and Wyoming, EVERY county has only two competitors in the exchanges from which to choose from.
• In some states such as Iowa, South Dakota, Arkansas and others, every county has no more than three competitors. So much for the Obama promise that insurance companies will have the incentive to take part in the exchanges.
• In a whopping 58% of all U.S. counties, there are no more than three competitors’ plans from which to choose.
• While there are 14 insurance companies competing in Texas, more than half of the counties have three or fewer companies competing within their borders.
• And while the Heritage Foundation article acknowledges there has been some improvement in 2015 vs. 2014 regarding competition, its analysis does show that competition was still more robust BEFORE Obama Care and took effect.
• Thus, fewer competitors and fewer choices within those competitors since Obama Care tenets strictly dictate a limited set of different insurance options makes for a much less attractive and affordable set of policies than prior to Obama Care.
• The article does not cover the reality that by 2017, Federal subsidies to insurance companies in the Obama Care exchanges will be terminated, a situation that will in all likelihood further reduce the number of competitors since the one incentive for remaining, Federal subsidies, will be gone.

The county by county analysis is illustrated below:

4) We will wrap up each Obama Care disaster post this week with real stories coming from real Americans who have seen their lives seriously disrupted by the legislation. Their stories and the stories of many like them can be accessed at the following website:

www.ourhealthcarestoires.com
PAM - MAINE As President Obama reached out Thursday to millions of Americans receiving cancellation notices from their health insurers, Pam Pultz waited to see what the latest twist in the health reform law will mean for her.Pultz, who owns an Agway store in Dover-Foxcroft, buys her own health insurance through Anthem. The plan suits her needs and she wants to keep it, but she said she has been told to expect a cancellation notice by the end of the month because her $14,000 deductible is too high to comply with the Affordable Care Act.

“My fear is I’m going to lose something that I bought and paid for and shopped for,” Pultz said. “I’m not doing anything wrong, and I’m being penalized.”DAN - OREGON I am a Durable Medical Equipment specialist and after 15 years of helping people with medical equipment, I am now unemployed and buying my own insurance which costs me 10 times what I paid previously. Obamacare has ended my career and my affordable health insurance. [Note: I am assuming that Dan worked in the medical device field, a field that has seen thousands of Americans laid off from their jobs as a result of the medical device taxes embedded within the Obama Care legislation.]

KENT - NEBRASKA We had our long time blue cross policy cancelled because it was not good enough for O'bama care. The policy we got offered cost us 25% more premium and increased our deductible from 5000.00 year put of pocket to 12,500.00 out of pocket. It had to include crap like birth control and maternity which 50 year old people do not need. To apply for a subsidy we had to give out all of our personal financial data to lord we do not even know who.So today’s disasters include the fact that the company that bungled the whole Obama Care exchange data systems rollout was actually rehired to track down Americans who owe Obama Care taxes, we learned that not only do identity theft hackers likely have access to your personal information, the government’s Obama Care data processes are actually giving out that information to dozens of third party, private companies for them to exploit at our expense, Obama’s promise of robust insurance company competition in the exchanges has fallen apart, and three more Americans shared their personal stories on how Obama Care has screwed up their lives. Sounds about right for this very bad piece of legislation. More disasters tomorrow.Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

September, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 6: Overpaying Chelsea Clinton, Pathetic IRS "Dog Ate Homework/Email Excuses" and More

This is our sixth post in our monthly series for this month that reviews, documents, and discusses American political class insanity. This insanity takes many forms, from wasteful spending to ineffective and inefficient government programs, to criminal fraud to stupid quotes to whatever, never underestimating the ability of the American class to screw things up.

Many of their missteps would actually be quite funny except for the fact that their ineptness almost always causes us to lose money, wealth, and freedom. Unfortunately, as witnessed by this being our sixth post just for this month, their insanity seems to be growing exponentially. 

1) The first insanity from our politicians comes to us via an article by the Tea Party Patriots website. Now, some of my more liberal friends, family members, and readers might automatically discount the following insanity since it comes from a Tea Party source. That would be a mistake since this is purely a factual report from a variety of main stream news sources, no opinion, no political slant, just facts.

These facts are the best six excuses and lies that IRS executives have conjured up in front of Congress and America for why they could not find the incriminating emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS employees. These emails would be critical in proving that the Obama administration was directly involved in persecuting and squashing the First Amendment rights of Americans with different opinions of this administration. 

While the IRS and the White House claimed that they did not exist for the longest time, recent news reports and Congressional testimony show that copies of them probably still exist. If true, there will likely by political, impeachment, criminal, and ethical problems for those involved in trying to deny they existed via the following seven excuses, excuses that now seem more pathetic than the classic, “the dog ate my homework:”

1. “We’re doing everything we can to find them.” The IRS withheld emails from Congressional investigators for a year before then claiming they were all lost in a computer crash

2. “The computer ate our emails.” In June, the IRS claimed a computer crash in 2011 had made it impossible to retrieve Lois Lerner’s emails.

3. “We’ve searched everywhere…” The IRS claimed its technicians tried, but failed to repair Lerner’s hard drive and produce the missing emails.

4. “We’ve already recycled those emails, because, like, they were irrelevant and taking up space.” The IRS also claimed it was impossible to produce the emails because officials had already “recycled” Lerner’s hard drive. 

5. “We “recycled” the Lois Lerner Blackberry also.” No computer, no problem? Think again. The IRS also “recycled” Lerner’s blackberry. News reports are now indicating that “recycled” means destroyed, just after Congress began its investigation.

6. “We didn’t save our instant messaging conversations either!”

The IRS didn’t save its internal messaging system either. How incompetent are the IRS data people: emails lost, computers crash, Blackberries destroyed, instant messaging messages thrown out. It is amazing these people can dress themselves in the morning.

7. “It’s too hard to retrieve the lost emails in the backup system.” This is my favorite, what good is a backup system if you cannot get access to the backed up emails? Why go through the expense and effort to have a useless back up system?

My gosh, my dog could have come up with better excuses than these. Insanity that they think Congress and the American people are going to just say, shucks, too late to prove the criminal misdeeds. People need to go to jail for not only denying First Amendment rights but also for being just plain inept and stupid.

2) Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, is no longer going to do any more work for NBC News according to recent news reports. Apparently her title was “special correspondent,” according to a recent article by People magazine.

She must have been really, really special since it has been seven months since her last “journalistic” piece aired on NBC even though she was being paid an unbelievable $600,000 a year. This is about twelve times more than an average U.S. household earns in a year even though she is quite young and inexperienced and obviously not that busy if it has been seven months since she did anything worth airing.

Please do not tell me that the mainstream media is still independent in this country and is not in bed with the American political class. Not when there is this type of outrageous buddy system between well known politicians’ families and one of the largest news sources in the country.

3) Let’s go waste some taxpayer money for nothing in return. According to a recent report form the EPA’s Inspector General:

• Although the EPA’s Office of Environmental Information spent $2.2 million in 2011 in an attempt to reduce the agency's computing costs and speed up processing via a cloud processing system the agency, it never received the contracted work from two private contractors.
• Lockheed Martin was contracted to move the EPA email system to the cloud, something that later turned out to be impossible to do.
• According to the Inspector General findings: "In addition to paying the vendor full price for agreed-to services not performed as specified in the contract, the EPA is incurring additional costs for maintaining emails not migrated to the cloud." 
• The EPA also paid for services from CGI Inc. to provide "infrastructure-as-a-service" access to EPA clients but the Inspector General’s investigation found that the EPA's information office failed to justify if the contract was even necessary and the contract, which did not meet Federal requirements, cost a little more than $74,000.
• As you may or may not know, CGI was the Canadian company that completely botched the Obama Care information systems development but still, obviously, can be hired by other Federal entities to botch their jobs also.

More money spent for nothing in return. In the real world, outside of the political class and the government, people’s careers are ended and their jobs lost for such incompetence. Want to bet that no ine lost their job within the EPA for such incompetence?

4) Some members of the political class, only Democrats, like to claim that the economy is healthy and robust and that the Obama administration is doing a great economic job. Of course, the reality is quite different. Latest estimates put the number of unemployed and under employed Americans at just under 20 million people. Economic growth since the last recession ended is historically anemic despite record low interest rates for a record length of time, an energy boom, and hundreds of billions spent on a failed stimulus program.

But probably the most telling and the saddest fact about how this administration and this Washington political class have no idea how to implement and operate effective economic policies is the disgraceful amount of Americans that are currently receiving government food assistance, food stamps. According to a recent article in the Fiscal Times, there are currently more Americans on food stamps than before or during the Great Recession. "Although the number is down from the historical high of 48 million Americans in 2012, “total [Federal food assistance] enrollment remains nearly triple the 17 million food stamp users in 2000. In 2009 nearly 39 million people were on food stamps, and the number rose to 44 million in 2010.”"

Four years after the recession ended, four years after Obama proclaimed he had lifted the economy out of the recession, tens of millions of Americans have not yet experienced that recovery and need help putting food on their family’s plate every day. 

This is why Step 36 from “Love my Country, Loathe my Government” is so important. Step 36 would require every member of Congress and the White House to take and pass a course on economic theory and policy before starting their job. 

We see the idiocy and ineffectiveness of their economic policies when they have no economic training. How much worse could it be if we made them learn a few economic principles before passing legislation and policies that affect the economic well being of Americans?

5) According to a recent Associated Press article by Elizabeth Harrington, Federal tax credits intended to stimulate the economies of low-income communities around America have instead gone to doggie day cares, sculptures, recording studios, and breweries. These were the findings from a report released by Senator Tom Coburn.

One billion dollars in tax credits are sold to private investors every year via the Federal New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program. The credits are intended to spur private investment and create jobs in low economic areas.

However, given the wide and ambiguous definition of what constitutes a “low income community,” past credits have been taken advantage of by Hollywood producers, Wall Street bankers, and major corporations. Coburn calls the program a “billionaire’s fantasy island.”

“The New Market Tax Credit is a reverse Robin Hood scheme paid for with the taxes collected from working Americans to provide pay outs to big banks and corporations in the hope that those it took the money from might benefit,” Coburn said in a statement. “When government picks winners and losers, the losers usually end up being taxpayers. Washington should reduce federal taxes on working Americans and all business owners who create jobs by eliminating tax earmarks, loopholes, and giveaways like the New Markets Tax Credit.” 

Coburn’s report found that:

• The tax credit has subsidized almost 4,000 projects, including limousine services, eBay consignment selling services, churches, doggie day care and a dog grooming facility.
• Some of the tax credits went to major corporations like IHOP and Subway chain restaurants.
• Although ineligible to receive credits, hot tub facilities, golf courses and country clubs, and tanning salons investments actually did occur under the program.
• In one instance, a California wellness center also spent $65,000 of NMTC financing on a sculpture entitled, “Dancing on the Wind,” that features two figures “reaching toward the heavens.” Obviously, spending $65,000 on a statue is $65,000 that can not be spent on real economic development.

Although around for about fourteen years, want to bet that no one in the political class ever did an economic payback/viability analysis of whether or not the billions of dollars distributed under this program did any good? More wasted taxpayer wealth.

That will do it for today.  Overpaid politicians’ daughters, over funded and ineffective government programs, an under-imaginative IRS, an empty handed-EPA, and economically deficient politicians, just from today's poltiical class insanity.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2013 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 7: Chicago Tribune and Doctors Abandoning Obama Care, Sergeant Shultz In The Administration and More

This is our seventh post this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. These seven posts follow more than twenty other posts we did over the past three months trying to document, review, and quantify all of the fiascos being spawned by this legislation. 

We will finish up this month’s review over the next 2-3 days. Not because there is nothing else to talk about. On the contrary, the bad news grows every day as more glitches, failures, and lies are uncovered. We are just getting tired and depressed of the whole topic. 

It is a failure. The administration lied. It is causing millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred insurance policies and doctors. The administration lied some more. The website for signups was designed as if a bunch of chimps did the programming. The administration continued to lie. The estimated cost of the whole effort has doubled in just three years. They lied again. The logic of the whole effort will not rein in skyrocketing health care costs; if anything, it will cause them to rise quicker. They continue to lie. The legislation is depressing and suppressing economic growth. More lies. Americans are losing their jobs and having their hours cut back substantially as a result of the legislation. And yes, they continue to lie.

1) The President’s home town newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, correctly crucified the legislation and the operations of the government in mid-October:

If you’ve tried to sign up online for health coverage under the problem-plagued Obamacare exchange, our sympathies. Many people have tried to create accounts and shop for insurance under the new law. Few have succeeded. Those that have enrolled have found that the system is prone to mistakes. Some applications have been sent to the wrong insurance company.

Wait. It gets worse. Those who have managed to browse the marketplace have often been hit by sticker shock. Take Adam Weldzius, a nurse practitioner and single father from Carpentersville. He sought the same level of coverage on the exchange as he and his 7-year-old daughter have now, with the same insurer and the same network of doctors and hospitals. At best, Weldzius found, his monthly premium of $233 would more than double. If he chose a plan priced at the same level, the annual deductible would be $12,700, more than three times his current $3,500 deductible.

2) Journalist Ezra Klein, a longtime Obama supporter also recently got in on the shredding of the Obama Care effort:

So far, the Affordable Care Act’s launch has been a failure. Not “troubled.” Not “glitchy.” A failure. The Obama administration’s top job isn’t beating the Republicans. It’s running the government well. On this — the most important initiative they’ve launched — they’ve run the government badly. They deserve all the criticism they’re getting and more.

When your close friends and supporters are publicly calling your effort a failure, things must be really bad.

3) Three years and over $600 million dollars were not enough to create a relatively simple website to have people sign up for health insurance policies via Obama Care exchanges. When the system went live on October 1, 2013, it was a nightmare. The Obama administration promised that it would all be fixed and ready to go correctly by the end of November. 

This was a highly doubtful and probably stupid promise to make, given that those involved could not make it work in the three years head start they had. It is doubtful they can fix it in eight weeks. 

This is the view of a recent Washington Post story from November 12, 2013:

Software problems with the federal online health insurance marketplace, especially in handling high volumes, are proving so stubborn that the system is unlikely to work fully by the end of the month as the White House has promised, according to an official with knowledge of the project.

The insurance exchange is balking when more than 20,000 to 30,000 people attempt to use it at the same time — about half its intended capacity, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal information. And CGI Federal, the main contractor that built the site, has succeeded in repairing only about six of every 10 of the defects it has addressed so far.

Looks like another promise broken, another potential lie uncovered, at least in the view of the Post.

4) In late October, 2013, a poll conducted by the New York State Medical Society was made public. The survey invited 409 doctors to anonymously share opinions about the new health care law, and many took time out of their busy days to rip into Obama Care. The findings of the survey of the Society are quite distressing in that they point out another dangerous facet of Obama Care. Many doctors do not like the legislation, will not participate with the people who get health insurance through the exchanges, and many may retire out of disgust or economic necessity because of Obama Care.

Which raises a gruesome scenario: what happens if millions of Americans get insurance via Obama Care but there are no doctors to serve them? The scary results of the survey include the following statistics and quotes:

• 44% of doctors survey said they will not participate in the nation’s new health-care plan.
• Another 33% said they’re still not sure whether to become Obama Care providers.
• Only 23% of the 409 physicians in the survey said they’re taking patients who signed up through Obama Care’s health exchanges.
• “This is so poorly designed that a lot of doctors are afraid to participate,” said Dr. Sam Unterricht, president of the 29,000-member organization. “There’s a lot of resistance. Doctors don’t know what they’re going to get paid.”
• About 75% of doctors who are participated in the Obama Care effort said they “had to participate” because of existing contractual obligations with an insurer or medical provider, not because they wanted to.
• Only one in four doctors “affirmatively” chose to sign up for the exchanges.
• 77% said they had not even been given an Obama Care fee schedule to show much they’ll get paid if they sign up.
• “Obama Care wants to start right away, but who see all these new patients???? Not me,” e-mailed one doctor.
• Another said, “I plan to retire if this disaster is implemented. This is a train wreck.”
• “I refuse to participate in the exchange plans! I am completely opposed to this new law,” said a third respondent.
• One doctor was quite blunt relative to participating in Obama Care: “The solution is simple: Just say no.”
• One physician was so disgusted, he threatened to taken only cash patients going forward.
• “I am seriously considering opting out of all insurance plans including Medicare because of [ObamaCare].”
• “OBAMACARE is a disaster. I have already seen denial of medication, denial of referrals,” one doc said.
• “Any doctor who accepts the exchange is just a bad businessman/woman. Pays terrible,” argued one doctor.
• Said another MD, “Can’t imagine any doctors would be willing to work for so little money? All doctors should boycott.
• “I get screwed from insurance companies already. I refuse to get screwed any longer,” one doctor said.
• Others said they don’t have enough information to make an informed choice: “This is a joke. We are flying blind,” said one doctor.

Old medical saying: the operation was a success but the patient died. Even if Obama Care supporters and the President are able to work out all of the numerous and difficult problems with the operations of the legislation and people do indeed get health care insurance via the exchanges, what if there are only a few doctors around that will service the newly insured? The legislation was a success but the insured still died. Pitiful legislation and inability to anticipate unintended consequences.

5) Another lie and/or deception from the White House was recently reported by CNN, which up until recently was blind to anything that went wrong in the Obama administration. CNN is reporting that a month before the Obama Care website was to go live, many people in the know were warning the White House that the website was not ready to launch despite testimony from administration officials that that was not the case:

• The Obama administration was given stark warnings just one month before launch that the federal healthcare site was not ready to go live, according to a confidential report obtained by CNN.
• The caution, from the main contractor CGI, warned of a number of open risks and issues for the HealthCare.gov web site even as company executives were testifying publicly that the project had achieved key milestones.
• On Capitol Hill on Monday, Medicaid Chief Marilyn Tavenner, whose job it was to oversee the October 1 rollout of the website, said she did not foresee its problems.
• “No, we had tested the website and we were comfortable with its performance,” she said. “Now, like I said, we knew all along there would be as with any new website, some individual glitches we would have to work out. But, the volume issue and the creation of account issues was not anticipated and obviously took us by surprise. And did not show up in testing.”
• But the CGI document, which describes “top risks currently open” and “outstanding issues currently being mitigated” says the testing timeframes are “not adequate to complete full functional, system, and integration testing activities” and lists the impact of the problems as “significant.”
• Another element is listed as ” not enough time in schedule to conduct adequate performance testing” and given the highest priority.
• CGI had no comment other than to confirm authenticity of the report that also gave “the highest priority” and warns “we don’t have access to monitoring tools” and “hub services are intermittently unavailable” — short for the “site’s not working sometimes.”

The week before this CNN reporting, CNN also reported that: 

President Barack Obama didn’t know of problems with the Affordable Care Act’s website — despite insurance companies’ complaints and the site’s crashing during a test run — until after its now well-documented abysmal launch, the nation’s health chief told CNN on Tuesday.

So all of this garbage was going on but no one told the lady in charge of the roll out and no one told the President that his signature legislation victory was about to implode? Are we to believe that Obama and Tavenner were so out of touch with reality that they thought everything was going to be fine? Or did they suppress that information to avoid political and public embarrassment for as long as possible, not telling Americans to take cover to avoid the fallout of this fiasco? 

They are either liars or ignorant, two characteristics no one wants in their leaders.

That will do it for today. Doctors saying no way to Obama Care, highly ranking administration officials either out of the loop or deceptive, a liberal press turning on the administration for its outright failures, and a likely other failure/lie when the system is still not glitch free by the promised November 30 date.

Is there any doubt that this is the worst piece of legislation ever passed by Washington by the most inept set of politicians in the history of our country?

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

October, 2013 Obama Care Disaster Update, Part 1: Insurance Prices Are Up and Data Systems Are Down

Although we took a few weeks off from discussing the disaster that is Obama Care, the overwhelmingly bad news that has occurred since its October 1, 2013 rollout requires us to revisit this disaster. It is failing in so many ways: nonfunctional software, higher costs for existing people with insurance, data integrity, identity theft, etc. that not to review its failings would be a disgrace.

There is so much news to cover that we will not go into as much detail of the fiascos as we might usually do, that would take weeks to get through. We will hit the highlights/lowlights to give a sense of why this atrocious piece of legislation needs to be either repealed or massively overhauled.

1) 34 states were so scared of Obama Care that they opted out of creating their own so-called health care exchanges, as allowed by the law, and passed that responsibility along to the Federal government. Unfortunately, as we and many others predicted, the Federal government has not been able to build as simple, functioning website to execute one function, allow people to sign up for health care insurance.

According to news reports, the Federal website fails to load drop-down menus and other critical elements for users that successfully gain entrance, often does not confirm if a person has actually successfully completed the sign up process, and generally prevents uninsured Americans in the states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates. For this basically nonfunctioning website, the American taxpayer has already paid over $634 million for basically nothing.

And as with all government contracts, it has managed to overrun its budget at $634 million, by an amazing factor of seven. When the company who won the contract to build the Obama Care Federal exchange website was identified back in 2011, the contract stipulated that the cost of development could be as high as $94.7 million. Thus, the Federal government has already spent seven times what the original cost estimate was and STILL does not have a working website. Disgraceful.

Consider two benchmarks of success against which we measure the failure of the Obama Care Federal exchange website. Facebook received its first investment in June 2004 and operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in expenses in June 2010. Twitter was created in 2006, and spent only $360.17 million over the next five years until a $400 million investor boost in 2011. 

These two complicated web efforts spent far less in more years than the Federal government has already spent with the distinction being that they were fully functional sooner and for far less money. But to say the political class can run government functions that are fully functional for far less money are words that have never been uttered.

2) But maybe the supporters and implementers of Obama Care should have known this was likely to happen all along, given how badly the main company who built the Obama Care Federal exchange failed in Canada, according to an October 10, 2013 story from the Washington Examiner. 

That story reported that Canadian health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obama Care health exchange websites,  for nonperformance and missed deadlines.  CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s online medical registry.

The online registry was supposed to be up and running by June 2011 but more than a year later was still not in operation. Other companies were eventually hired who were able to fix what this Obama Care data systems provider could not.

Three troubling issues here. Did someone in the Federal government procurement process know how incompetent this company was and still went ahead and awarded them the contract? The Federal government had three years to put this process and computer system in place, why did it fail so miserably on the first day and continues to fail? And finally, why did we send hundreds of millions of dollars to a foreign company? Were there no American companies that could have done the job? The whole episode smells of incompetence and shadiness.

3) We have previously reported on how many Americans are seeing the costs of their current health care insurance skyrocket as a result of Obama Care. The Heritage Foundation documented three recent examples of just how much those insurance costs are going up for Americans:

- George Schwab of  North Carolina was recently notified in a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield on September 23 that his current health insurance plan doesn’t meet Obama Care’s benefit requirements and would have to be terminated at the end of the year. While Blue Cross did suggest a comparable plan, it was $980 more than what he now pays.

“The President told the American people numerous times that  ‘If you like your current coverage, you can keep it,’” Schwab told The Charlotte Observer. “How can we keep it if it has been eliminated? How can we keep it if the premium has been increased 430 percent in one year?”

- Michael Yount and his wife, a retired couple in North Carolina, buy their individual insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield and pay about $380 a month with an $11,000 deductible. 

But they were recently informed that their new insurance plan will be THREE times the price, costing them $1,124.50 a month, The Christian Science Monitor reported. The couple said they plan to drop out of formal health insurance, pay the penalty, and “self-insure.”

- Cindy Vinson in California “will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy,” reports the San Jose Mercury News. She is an Obama voter who was surprised by the personal impact of Obama Care. “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.” 

Who did she think was going to pay for it? Given that Obama Care does not resolve the underlying root causes of our high health care costs, all it does is move existing costs in an unworkable Rube Goldberg manner so that everyone pays more but the underlying problem and related costs never get resolved.

Losing a current policy, paying much more for a replacement policy, and going self insured, three things that any health care reform effort should not do but what Obama Care is doing.

4) According to a recent Washington Post story: 

Major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies repeatedly warned the Obama administration in recent months that the new federal health-insurance exchange had significant problems, according to people familiar with the conversations. Despite those warnings and intense criticism from Republicans, the White House proceeded with an Oct. 1 launch…Robert Laszewski, a health-care consultant with clients in the insurance industry, said insurers were complaining loudly that the site, www.healthcare.gov, was not working smoothly during frequent teleconferences with officials at the Department of Health and Human Services before the exchange’s launch and afterward. “People were pulling out their hair,” he said.

Which raises the question that if just about everyone knew this rollout was going to bomb, why did the Obama administration go ahead with a rollout that actually bombed? Could it be politics overrode common sense? If this aspect of Obama Care had also been delayed like many, many other aspects of the legislation that have already been delayed or terminated, it would have been a political nightmare for Obama. It would have provided further proof that the Federal government was unable to manage such a complicated, and unnecessary, process and that the associated legislation needed to be scrapped.

Thus, rather than do the right thing, the administration rolled out a disaster on a wing and a prayer, neither of which held up. Now the American taxpayer is probably paying big bucks for overtime, crisis fueled data programming resources in order to fix what never should have gone live. Americans who might actually have wanted to sign up for insurance may decide it is not worth the hassle even if the system is adequately fixed in the future since their first attempt to sign up was a frustrating failure. When politics overrides common sense there is never a good outcome.

Given all of the hassles, how many people have successfully signed up for Obama Care through the Federal process? No one knows and/or no one is telling. You can bet if this process was successful, the Federal government and Obama would be touting its victory. However, no touting has to mean no victory, for either the government, the American taxpayer, and the unresolved problem of high health care costs in this country.

We are just getting started, more to come on the following days on the unfolding Obama Care disaster.

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