Obamacare Rollout – It’s More Than Just Glitches
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), when queried on October 18 about the problems with the disastrous Obamacare online rollout on October 1, said:
There’s no question that what’s happening with the systems, the national plans is something that has to be improved. They were overwhelmed by the traffic. Okay, but now let’s see how long it’s going to take to have that be fixed. But, that’s about the technology — about the benefits, about the liberation of people to a healthier life of liberty, freedom to choose their happiness, that all remains.
I hope that we would have some answers soon and that the answer will be, okay, we’ve found the glitch or whatever it is, it has been corrected and here’s a demonstration of how people, when they approach it now, will be received.
In other words, once the website functions as intended, people will get to see what the plans look like and they will be happy. This sounds eerily close to Leader Pelosi’s comment, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
Now that Washington has a temporary reprieve on budget and debt ceiling issues, the media is focusing on the Obamacare slow-motion train wreck; from its faulty website, to millions of Americans receiving cancellation notices for health plans they liked, to more people signing up for Medicaid expansion (which on average already consumes 24 percent of states’ budget expenditures) as opposed to purchasing a private healthcare plan in the exchanges.
Former Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibb’s criticism on October 14 seems to have broken the dam that had prevented other advocates of the Affordable Care Act (the official name for Obamacare) from critiquing the website. He said, “The website’s launch was excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services… I hope they’re working day and night to get this done, and when they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work.”
How could the online system fail so badly? After all, Amazon.com handles multiple products and in 2012, sold 27 million items on Cyber Monday, or 306 items per second. Avik Troy, a contributor to Forbes Magazine, gave some insights in an October 14 blog:
A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away…
…This political objective – masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans – far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly. Think about it the other way around. If the ‘Affordable Care Act’ truly did make health insurance more affordable, there would be no need to hide these prices from the public.
For weeks, the Obama administration refused to release enrollment numbers for the federal exchanges. Under intense pressure from Congress and the media, HHS released its enrollment report on November 13, but even these numbers are suspect:
Marketplace Monthly Enrollment-Related Information, 10-1-13 to 11-2-13
Number of completed applications through the Marketplaces: 846,184
Total number of individuals included in completed Marketplace applications: 1,509,883
Number of individuals determined eligible to enroll in a Marketplace plan: 1,081,592
Number of individuals who have selected a Marketplace plan: 106,185
The 1,081,592 figure represents both the number of individuals that have “selected plans from the Marketplace [state and federal]” as well as the 975,407 who “have made it through the process by applying and receiving eligibility determination but have not yet selected a plan.” The 106,185 figure is the number of people who selected a plan, but some (HHS didn’t release the number) have not yet paid their first month’s premium. Of the 106,185, approximately 75 percent have applied through their state marketplace.
Healthcare.gov has been a disaster, but according to National Journal’s Ron Fournier, the online system is far worse than the Obama administration has let on in its public statements. Fournier wrote on October 21, “the White House has heard complaints from insurance companies, consumers, and health policy experts about issues embedded deeply in the online system. For example: inaccurate information provided to people about federal tax credits; low-income people erroneously told they don’t qualify for Medicaid; and insurance companies getting confusing information about who has signed up.”
If the website’s problem isn’t bad enough, now President Obama is facing an onslaught of criticism because he promised the American people for more than four years that, “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” That was not true and the administration knew it.
Millions of Americans are getting cancellation notices for healthcare plans they liked and could afford and now must purchase a plan that complies with Obamacare regulations and mandatory benefit packages. Some of the mandatory benefits include maternity and newborn care, mental health, substance use disorder services, and pediatric services.
One long-time CAGW member recently sent an angry email to his senators complaining how “Obamacare forced a cancellation of a catastrophic $25,000 deductible policy” he and his wife had for 30 years that was “strictly for catastrophic circumstances.” He told his senators, “you should be ashamed for voting for this measure while not knowing what was in it. Shame, shame, shame. You people are ruining the country and all deserve to be tossed out of office… I am very upset for all the people who are losing doctors and insurance plans.”
The CAGW member has joined a chorus of other outraged citizens. An October 5 article in the San Jose Mercury News in blue-state California noted:
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.
The following report comes from the September 30 Daily Kos, a liberal-leaning blog, in which Tirge Caps, a regular contributor wrote:
My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don’t go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe.
Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife’s rate is going to $302 per month and mine is jumping to $284.
I am canceling insurance for us and I am not paying any f*****g penalty. What the hell kind of reform is this?
Oh, ok, if we qualify, we can get some government assistance. Great. So now I have to jump through another hoop to just chisel some of this off. And we don’t qualify, anyway, so what’s the point?
I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.
I don’t know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.”
These excerpts appeared in a report in the October 13 Chicago Tribune:
Adam Weldzius, a nurse practitioner, considers himself better informed than most when it comes to the inner workings of health insurance. But even he wasn’t prepared for the pocketbook hit he’ll face next year under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
If the 33-year-old single father wants the same level of coverage next year as what he has now with the same insurer and the same network of doctors and hospitals, his monthly premium of $233 will more than double… “For someone who’s always had insurance, who’s always taken care of myself, now I have to change my plan?”
Many Illinoisans buying health coverage on their own next year will face a similar dilemma spurred by the health care overhaul: pay higher monthly insurance premiums or run the risk of having to shell out thousands more in deductibles for health care if they get sick.
Here is another story from the October 6 Charlotte Observer in North Carolina:
Across North Carolina, thousands of people have been shocked in recent weeks to find out their health insurance plans will be canceled at the end of the year – and premiums for comparable coverage could increase sharply.
One of them is George Schwab of Charlotte, who pays $228 a month for his family’s $10,000 deductible plan from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.
In a Sept. 23 letter, Blue Cross notified him that his current plan doesn’t meet benefit requirements outlined in the Affordable Care Act and suggested a comparable plan for $1,208 a month – $980 more than he now pays.
‘I’m 62 and retired,’ Schwab said. ‘This creates a tremendous financial burden for our family.’
‘The President told the American people numerous times that… If you like your coverage, you can keep it,’ Schwab said. ‘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?’”
Even the president’s strongest supporters are expressing anger and frustration with Obamacare, as noted in a November 6 story from Pro Publica:
San Francisco architect Lee Hammack says he and his wife, JoEllen Brothers, are ‘cradle Democrats.’ They have donated to the liberal group Organizing for America and worked the phone banks a year ago for President Obama’s re-election.
Since 1995, Hammack and Brothers have received their health coverage from Kaiser Permanente, where Brothers worked until 2009 as a dietitian and diabetes educator. ‘We’ve both been in very good health all of our lives – exercise, don’t smoke, drink lightly, healthy weight, no health issues, and so on,’ Hammack told me.
The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been paying $550 a month for their health coverage — a plan that offers solid coverage, not one of the skimpy plans Obama has criticized. But recently, Kaiser informed them the plan would be canceled at the end of the year because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The couple would need to find another one. The cost would be around double what they pay now, but the benefits would be worse.
‘From all of the sob stories I’ve heard and read, ours is the most extreme,’ Lee told me in an email last week.
Sounding like a TV pitchman, the president said in his October 21 Rose Garden speech, “The product, the health insurance is good. The prices are good. It is a good deal. People don’t just want it; they’re showing up to buy it.” But as people finally work their way through the Obamacare website and get to shop around, it is far from clear that the Obamacare hype will live up to the reality.
According to Avik Troy, who has been collecting data on what the Obamacare mandates, regulations and taxes are doing to the cost of healthcare, a lot of Americans may be experiencing sticker shock when they finally register on the Obamacare website and shop for a plan. Troy’s analysis found that, “on average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, under Obamacare, will be 99 percent more expensive for men, and 62 percent more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for healthy people.” He ponders, if “50 million people are uninsured today, mainly insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier?” He answers his own question by declaring Obamacare wasn’t created to help healthy people with average incomes to get insurance. The purpose of the law was to force healthy people without insurance to pay more to subsidize people near the poverty line or with pre-existing and costly because medical conditions.
Every day Americans learn something new about Obamacare and it’s making them sick.
If you want to share your horror story, visit the website www.MyCancellation.com
