New England looks so bad, it's as if they are channeling the roll-out of Obamacare.
Oct. 1 - "The glitches will get fixed."AND NOW .... Drumroll please!
Oct. 14th - "Obviously they messed up the programming big time, which is kind of a shock. But this will get fixed..."
Nov. 6 - "If the bugs in healthcare.gov get fixed..."
Nov. 20 - "But the future of the reform depends not on policy per se but on whether the IT issues can be fixed well enough soon enough, a subject on which I have zero expertise."There we go...Krugman has no clue. He had no business saying that anything would work. It took almost 2 months, but he got there.
The problem there was politics, not code. In the first version of HealthCare.gov, there was no way to window shop. You needed to register an account in order to see the plans. The rationale was sensible enough: The White House wanted to ensure people saw the real price they'd be paying. That meant verifying their identity, their income, their age, their citizenship, and everything else that goes into calculating subsidies.
This proved a technological nightmare. Imagine if before browsing a book in Barnes & Noble you had to find a clerk and have them take down and verify your credit card, your phone number, and the address you want the book sent to once you've bought it. The staff would quickly be overloaded. No one would ever get into the store. And it would be a massive waste of time because many of the people clogging the line were just there to browse anyway.When the Post says the White House wanted people to see the real price they would be paying, it is saying the White House didn't want people to see the real cost of their health insurance. It didn't want old and sick to see how much it really costs to insure them, because they may choose not to buy. Where they less concerned the young and healthy people wouldn't notice they were being forced to overpay to subsidize the old and sick, or did they succumb to their own hype and believe somehow exchanges would result in lower prices for the young and healthy as well? Or was it a numbers game: many more getting subsidies, than paying for over-priced insurance and the politicians were willing to make that trade-off?
Bill
Up to seven million people may be able to get health policies without paying any premium at all. Some four million people may have to pay more for new (and better) policies, not all of whom will necessarily be upset at getting better coverage at a competitive rate.(At least) 4 million will not be able to keep their plan and "may have to pay more." This is just the individual market. The employer based market is much bigger and the disruptions to the employer market will be much larger as well. For instance, my small employer will be switching plans to avoid the Cadillac tax. The Cadillac Tax is a tax on high-price, high-benefit plans. The reason our old plan was a Cadillac plan is because we are a small company operating in NY. We have high premiums, but certainly not extravagant, not even generous, benefits. But such is the "logic" of the law that I must change to a plan with FEWER benefits for the purpose of..... If anyone can tell me I'd love to hear the answer. The Affordable Care Act's response to their assertion American's pay too much for health care is to incentivice me from buying health care. Ok, but why? What if I want to buy health care? What's wrong with that? I like Apple products. An increasing portion of my budget over the years has gone to Apple products. But that's not a national crisis. I digress.
“Obamacare or Kafkacare?” I posted on Facebook as soon as I hung up with Anthem. I vented about the call and wrote that the president should be protecting the middle class, not making our lives substantially harder. For extra sympathy, I may have thrown in the fact that I’m a single mom. (O.K., I did.)She wanted sympathy and instead was told to suck it up.
A growing thicket of federal regulations under the Obama administration has contributed to an employment spike in at least one corner of the job market: the increasingly vital compliance industry.
ObamaCare, the Dodd-Frank Act and other large federal undertakings have led to an outpouring of new agency rules derided by business groups and defended by advocates.
But the regulations have also been a boon for professional compliance officers paid to help companies understand and adapt to the new requirements.
“Staff to track compliance issues is on the rise, and it has been for the last several years,” said Richard Riese, senior vice president for regulatory compliance at the American Bankers Association. “And, at the moment, there’s no prospect it will decrease anytime soon.”
Data kept by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows an 18-percent increase in the number of compliance officers in the United States between 2009 and 2012, according to an analysis conducted by the conservative American Action Forum (AAF).
Any married couple that earns more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level—that is $62,040—for a family of two earns too much for subsidies under Obamacare. "If you're over 400 percent of poverty, you're never eligible for premium" support, explains Gary Claxton, director of the Health Care Marketplace Project at the Kaiser Family Foundation.Personally, I don't care if people marry, who they marry, how many they marry, how often they marry, what species they marry. Personally, I don't think the government should care either.
But if that same couple lived together unmarried, they could earn up to $45,960 each—$91,920 total—and still be eligible for subsidies through the exchanges in New York state, where insurance is comparatively expensive and the state exchange was set up in such a way as to not provide lower rates for younger people.
Moreover, this is not an issue of the adequacy of the group coverage that's lost, it simply that the ACA induces market participants to tolerate coverage loses in order to, at taxpayer expense, reduce the monetary loses they experience as a consequence of the law.
SCHIEFFER: The president said in the beginning that one thing was that if you like the health care program you had you could keep it. We now know there was debate within the administration before he said that as to whether that was actually a promise that could be kept. Should the president not have made that statement?
FEINSTEIN: Well, as I understand it you can keep it up to the time -- and I hope this is correct, but this is what I've been told -- up to the time the bill was enacted, then after that it's a different story. I think that part of it, if true, was never made clear. It is really very unclear right now exactly what the situation is. And, yes, that's a problem. But I think it has to be said, this is a very large major priority. And if it can get up and running, it can be, I think, a very positive thing. The big problem here is there are so many destroyers -- in the House, in the public, in the private health care sector that just want to destroy. That's not helpful.
(CBS News) WASHINGTON - For 31 days now, the Obama administration has been telling us that Americans by the millions are visiting the new health insurance website, despite all its problems.
But no one in the administration has been willing to tell us how many policies have been purchased, and this may be the reason: CBS News has learned enrollments got off to an incredibly slow start.
Early enrollment figures are contained in notes from twice-a-day "war room" meetings convened within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after the website failed on Oct. 1. They were turned over in response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee.The number that signed up the first day? 6. As in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Not six hundred, or six thousand. VI.
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