Two Years Old and Not Part of the Family? (Updated)

The Obamacare elves have been busy doling out holiday tips on how to talk about signing onto the Affordable Care Act website while huddled around the yuletide fire singing secular songs with uninsured family members.

One tip the tip-givers forgot to include in the "Healthcare for the Holidays" Guide to Getting Insured was how to explain to those with children under the age of two that family insurance plans in the New York health exchange do not cover the littlest members of the family.

Wait! Maybe Peter Singer, colleague of Barack Obama's Science and Technology Czar John Holdren, had some input in the 'under two' individual policy idea and New York is a pilot state. Singer, a bioethics professor at Michelle Obama's alma mater, Princeton University, is of the opinion that disposing of children up to age two is fine because newborns and toddlers lack the "essential characteristics of personhood," which Singer says are rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness.

So until Americans decide whether they're going to keep the little rug rats, maybe Obamacare advisors thought it would be best to prevent the little ones from mucking up the family plan.

Does requiring a two-year-old to have their own health insurance policy sound like a joke?  Well it's no joke, because that's exactly what happened to self-employed title insurance business owner Cornelius Kelly and his pediatrician wife Jennifer. 

Via: American Thinker

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Report: White House Discussed Scrapping Entire ObamaCare Website

The abysmal rollout of the Obamacare individual mandate last month exposed a website so badly flawed that White House officials considered junking it altogether, according to a detailed account of the inner workings of the healthcare plan's debacle.

 

While President Barack Obama touted publicly that "interest way exceeded expectations, and that's the good news" during the first weekend of the rollout, White House officials were considering another question, The New York Times reports in a front page article Sunday — "Should we just take the website down altogether for a time so it can be fixed?"

The question was dismissed by Todd Park, the administration's chief technology officer, because, he said, HealthCare.com had to be up and running for one simple reason — "To see where the problems are," the Times reports.

Via: Fox News

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Triage for HealthCare.gov: Administration Punts on Small Business Exchange

Sometimes to save the patient, you have to chop off a limb. The Obama administration is doing just that with the underperfoming HealthCare.gov website, announcing Wednesday that it will give up on opening the exchange for small businesses for another year and will rely on direct enrollment through insurance companies and brokers instead.

“This allows small employers to sign up for coverage through offline enrollment while [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] works on creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace,” an official at the Department of Health and Human Services said.

The move allows the administration to focus all of its efforts on the individual exchange, which is expected to face a crush of users as the clock clicks closer to a Dec. 23 deadline for enrollment to be insured on Jan. 1. Administration officials Wednesday afternoon were already warning that the website would be able to handle 50,000 people at a time — or about 800,000 per day — but could continue to have problems handling spikes in volume.

There are some positives for small businesses in the decision, according to details provided by an HHS official. Small businesses will no longer have to be certified as eligible for tax credits before signing up for their plans. They will merely have to have their applicaiton done before filing their taxes.

But the latest announcement is another stunning setback for the administration’s signature initiative and comes just a day before Thanksgiving and days before a self-imposed Dec. 1 deadline for the main website to be ready for the vast majority of users — one that the administration has been worried enough about of late to not engage in a full-court promotional press to get Americans to apply.

Republicans quickly pounced.

Via: Roll Call

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Allen West: White House ‘sounds like a very cheap retailer’ hawking Obamacare

Former Florida congressman Allen West mocked the news that the Obamacare website would be down for maintenance the night of its long-awaited Dec. 1 fix, warning that the White House’s repeated excuses make it sound “like a very cheap retailer.”

On Fox News Channel’s On The Record Friday night, West told Harris Faulker that the Obama administration’s decision to delay the website fix further was “incredible.”

“They should not have put their own set mandate on it,” he said, “because now everyone is watching them. And for them to continually come back and say that we can only take 50 thousand or as you just reported, [the website] is going to be down — this is eroding the confidence and the credibility not just of the Obama administration, but of President Obama himself.”

West added that the political ramifications for the Democratic party as a whole would be “chilling.”

The former congressman also had harsh words for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius after Faulker read a holiday-shopping themed message from the secretary to consumers: ”The product is popular,” Sebelius wrote, “so avoid the lines and shop HealthCare.gov during off-peak hours (mornings/nights/weekends)… There are 23 shopping days in December (for coverage starting January 1, 2014). No need to rush.”

“Isn’t it very amazing that we have a United States federal government that is starting to sound like a very cheap retailer?” West said. “I don’t think that, once again, helps the confidence and the credibility of this administration. No poll-tested, market-driven little gimmick is going to solve this issue. The American people are very concerned.”

West also outlined a few Republican fixes for the health care law, including establishing high-risk pools and breaking down “state-by-state mini-monopolies” to promote competition.

Via: Daily Caller

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Heritage releases witty Thanksgiving cards poking fun at Obamacare, ‘Let’s Move’

What do you have to be thankful for this year? Your family? Your job? That the First Lady isn’t keeping a watchful eye on how much pumpkin pie you eat?

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank , has released a set of six Thanksgiving cards that poke fun at the Affordable Care Act and Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative that promotes healthy eating and exercise. The cards are a cheeky way to “express exactly what we can all be thankful for this year,” according to the website.

The Heritage email blast also recommended sending a card to “that really annoying liberal in your life.”

One of the cards makes fun of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, while another card mocks the glitches of HealthCare.gov. See a couple of the cards below, and check out the Heritage website to see them all — and send one or two to your friends and family!

Via: Red Alert Politics

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HHS swapping Verizon with Hewlett-Packard for Healthcare.gov

 The Department of Health and Human Services has tapped Hewlett-Packard to replace Verizon Communications' Terremark subsidiary as the Web-hosting provider for HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance marketplace that has had a troubled rollout since launching in October.

A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services division confirmed the move Wednesday but noted that the change in providers had been contracted well before the website launched.

(Read more: Nine Senate Dems push for Obamacare work-around)

"As we think about the overall performance and functionality of the site, redundancy is a critical part of our planning and we are working to ensure it in all aspects of the system," the spokesman said in an email to CNBC.

Dow Jones first reported the pending change in Web hosts.

Terremark's data center contract ends in March. HP won the right to take over the job this past July.

Via: CNBC

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Sebelius on HealthCare.gov Fix: 'This Isn't a Magic Turn On The On-Switch'

(CNSNews.com) - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday thanked local elected officials for their efforts to promote Obamacare in their states and communities.

"We are now eight weeks into open enrollment. I can tell you two things, that we are definitely on track to gave a significantly different user experience by the end of this month," Sebelius said on a conference call. "But just so you all know, this isn't a magic turn on the on-switch. The experience is vastly improved each and every day.

"We are seeing more and more enrollment each and every day, very different kind of user issues. So we've added hardware. We've added software. We're continuing to work on the parts of the website that were too confusing to people. And well beyond December 1st those improvements will continue.

"We get feedback on a regular basis from user experiences. We want to continue to update this. But I would urge you and your folks on the ground to not hesitate to recommend that people go to healthcare.gov and get signed up because that experience is currently working much better, and it will continue to work much better."

In response to a question (she took only three), Sebelius said she doesn't have demographic information about who is -- and who isn't -- signing up.

"We hope to add this to our statistics very soon, but we really don't have the breakdown by age and ZIP code and area. I could tell you that the outreach efforts need to be focused on general populations in terms of likely uninsured and -- but young and healthy individuals who are in that uninsured category sometimes take the most work to get their attention and get their focus."

Via: CNS News

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Obamacare’s online SHOP enrollment delayed by one year

The White House will hold off on launching its online health exchange where small businesses can shop for coverage until November 2014, an HHS official confirmed Wednesday.

Small businesses will still have the option to purchase coverage through the new marketplace but will not be able to do so online. Instead, until next fall, employers with fewer than 50 workers will need to work through a broker or agent to buy health plans for their employees.

"We’ve concluded that we can best serve small employers by continuing this offline process while we concentrate on both creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace, and adding key new features, including an employee choice option and premium aggregation services, by November 2014," the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services wrote in a Q&A distributed to health law stakeholders.

Health law supporters expressed frustration at the decision, but said they still support the overall goal of making it easier for small businesses to shop for coverage.

Via: Washington Post

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EXCLUSIVE–RUBIO: PREVENT BLANK CHECK BAILOUTS UNDER OBAMACARE

It's become a hallmark of Barack Obama's presidency that mistakes made by policy makers, businesses, and governments at all levels must be paid for by American taxpayers. 

This perverse bailout culture is again evident in ObamaCare, which we now know contains a little-known provision that grants the administration a blank check for a taxpayer-funded bailout of insurance companies when ObamaCare fails.

When President Obama recently announced his unilateral order to allow health insurers to ignore ObamaCare's mandates and regulations and keep offering health plans that people wanted to keep, it exposed another fundamental problem in the law which puts American taxpayers on the hook.

Buried deep within ObamaCare's approximately 1,000 pages was section 1342, which authorized what are known as risk corridors that limit the amount of profit insurers could extract from the program while also limiting their losses. While risk corridors can be structured in budget-neutral ways that protect taxpayers, ObamaCare did no such thing.

After the law was signed, thousands of more pages of regulations, administrative interpretations, and executive actions included further clarity on how this administration would implement this provision.

The day the president announced his temporary "keep your plan fix," he unsurprisingly left this important background detail out of his speech, leaving it to his Department of Health and Human Services to acknowledge in the fine print of a press release: “Though this transitional policy was not anticipated by health insurance issuers when setting rates for 2014, the risk corridor program should help ameliorate unanticipated changes in premium revenue. We intend to explore ways to modify the risk corridor program final rules to provide additional assistance.”

Via: Breitbart

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