Environmental Protesters Heckle Obama During Healthcare Rally Speech

President Obama‘s speech on the Affordable Care Act was interrupted Wednesday afternoon by environmental protesters imploring the administration to halt development of the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline Project.

Several moments into his speech at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, a group of attendees arose from their seats and chanted in unison about the pipe project. “Mr. President, [inaudible] Keystone XL! Stop climate change! For our generation! Stop the pipeline!”

“Okay, we’re talking about healthcare today,” the president said with a chuckle as the crowd began to boo as the hecklers were escorted (a sentiment he attempted to hush).

“That is the wrong rally,” he joked. “We had the climate change rally back in the summer! This is the healthcare rally.”

Watch below, via CNN:

Via: Mediaite.com

Continue Reading....

The Outrage Arrives

You can't keep your insurance because Democrats don't want you to control your own health-care spending.

The White House has issued a clarification. When the president said if you like your insurance plan you can keep it, what he meant was you can keep it if he likes it.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans who are getting policy cancellation notices this month can't be as surprised as they pretend to be. President Obama made it clear at his 2010 health care summit what he thought of their taste in insurance.

"It's the equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car. . . . It's basically not health insurance," he explained. "It's house insurance. . . .

"I'm buying that to protect me from some catastrophic situation; otherwise, I'm just paying out of pocket. I don't go to the doctor. I don't get preventive care. There are a whole bunch of things I just do without. But if I get hit by a truck, maybe I don't go bankrupt."

Notice his disdain for those who buy high-deductible policies to protect themselves only from unexpected and unmanageable health-care costs. They are too cheap or too dumb to reach into their own pockets for necessary care that isn't covered by their policy or triggers the deductible.

These customers might like their plan. Their plan might even be the best cure, as many experts believe, for what ails our health-care system, namely too much incentive for Americans to over consume health care. But Mr. Obama doesn't like their plans so they can't keep them.

Democrats at least are consistent. Back in 1993, during the fight over HillaryCare, Mrs. Clinton explained Democratic reasoning to then-House GOP Leader Denny Hastert. If Americans are allowed too much discretion over how they spend their health-care dollars, Mrs. Clinton said, "We just think people will be too focused on saving money and they won't get the care for their children and themselves that they need . . .

"The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better."

Via: WSJ

Continue 

Obama's healthcare promises return to haunt him

WASHINGTON — As the pitchman for his landmark healthcare law, President Obama promised to make buying insurance as easy as buying a plane ticket online or a "TV onAmazon." It would be simple, he said.

If there were problems, the president predicted, they would be "glitches."

And he said, "If you like the plan you have, you can keep it."

Such claims have come back to haunt the president and his allies less than a month into the launch of the online insurance marketplaces at the heart of his healthcare legislation. With the federal website hobbled by bad design and thousands of policyholders receiving cancellation notices, Obama's promises are not being met — prompting charges of deception from some Republicans and concessions from some allies that elements of the law were oversold.

The fallout is only the latest chapter in this White House's three-year struggle to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act, which could come to define the president's legacy. Since signing it into law, the president has variously defended it, promoted it, simplified it and hyped it. But polling shows he has never fully sold, nor educated, the public on the vast new government healthcare program.

Publicly, the White House continued Tuesday to defend the president's pre-launch salesmanship.

"The purpose here wasn't to do anything beyond encourage people to make themselves aware of the options available to them," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.

Behind closed doors, some officials who worked on the rollout say they wish they'd left themselves a little wiggle room. They could have done more to play up ways to sign up other than through the website, such as the call centers, said one official, requesting anonymity to discuss the planning process.

After taking heat from allies for not finding a crisp way to explain the complex law, the White House tried to boil it down to its simplest elements, the official said, and some nuance was inevitably lost.

Via: LA Times

Continue Reading.....

[VIDEO] Software Expert Slams Healthcare.Gov On MSNBC: ‘This Really Shouldn’t Be That Difficult’

MSNBC’s Chris Jansing brought software expert Luke Chung onto Thursday’s Jansing & Co. to analyze the federal government’s troubled healthcare.gov website. Chung, the founder and president of software and database programming company FMS, served up a scathing indictment of the website that left Jansing reeling at certain points during the interview. [See video below the break. MP3 audio here.]

Jansing started by asking how complicated it was to get healthcare.gov up and running. Chung was very frank with her: “I don't know why they made it so complicated. This really shouldn't be that difficult.” Jansing fumbled around, talking about other countries and states that have launched similar programs before playing administration advocate:
 

"[B]ut is it a little bit like comparing apples and oranges because the number of people involved in this and the number of states is so big and so much bigger than had been anticipated?"
 

Chung called that an “excuse” and said that his experience on the website, as an informed shopper, was awful. He added, “It is just an awful website built by people who really are specializing in getting government contracts and not necessarily delivering technical expertise.”

Jansing then started grasping at straws. As the camera zoomed in on her computer screen, she explained that earlier that morning, she had been unable to access the page that lists plans in her area, but now that page was coming up fine. That glimmer of hope led her to ask this question: “If this should have been simple in the first place, could it be simple to fix because already, just from my limited experience, this little portion of it seems to have gotten better.”

Via: Newsbusters

Continue Reading.....

POLL: Majority believe healthcare website problems indicate broader issue with law

Most Americans say the rocky start for HealthCare.gov is a harbinger of bigger problems for the Affordable Care Act, according to results of a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

A man looks over the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare) signup page on the HealthCare.gov website in New York in this October 2, 2013 photo illustration. REUTERS/Mike Segar

Fifty-six percent of Americans say the website problems are part of a broader problem with the law’s implementation while just 40 percent see the website problems as an isolated incident. Reaction to federal insurance exchange website are deeply rooted in partisanship. More than eight in 10 Republicans say website troubles are a sign of broader implementation problems, while most Democrats call it an isolated incident. Independents resemble the public overall, with 55 percent seeing broader problems with implementation.

President Obama is clearly aware of that conflation and the dangers it presents for the law. “We did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a website,” he said at a speech Monday at the White House.

Via: Washington Post

Continue Reading.....

Thousands Of Consumers Get Insurance Cancellation Notices Due To Health Law Changes

Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies.

The main reason insurers offer is that the policies fall short of what the Affordable Care Act requires starting Jan. 1. Most are ending policies sold after the law passed in March 2010.  At least a few are cancelling plans sold to people with pre-existing medical conditions.

By all accounts, the new policies will offer consumers better coverage, in some cases, for comparable cost -- especially after the inclusion of federal subsidies for those who qualify. The law requires policies sold in the individual market to cover 10 “essential” benefits, such as prescription drugs, mental health treatment and maternity care. In addition, insurers cannot reject people with medical problems or charge them higher prices. The policies must also cap consumers’ annual expenses at levels lower than many plans sold before the new rules.

But the cancellation notices, which began arriving in August, have shocked many consumers in light of President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their plans if they liked them. 

“I don’t feel like I need to change, but I have to,” said Jeff Learned, a television editor in Los Angeles, who must find a new plan for his teenage daughter, who has a health condition that has required multiple surgeries.

An estimated 14 million people purchase their own coverage because they don’t get it through their jobs. Calls to insurers in several states showed that many have sent notices.

Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state.  Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent.

Via: Kaiser Health News

Continue Reading.....

Uninsured Americans Still Unfamiliar With Health Exchanges

Seven in 10 not familiar with exchanges, unchanged since September

PRINCETON, NJ -- Although federal and state health insurance exchanges opened on Oct. 1, 71% of Americans who lack health insurance -- the primary target group for the exchanges -- say they are "not too familiar" or "not familiar at all" with them, little changed from last month. At the same time, 28% of uninsured Americans say they are very or somewhat familiar with the exchanges, up slightly from 25% last month.

The exchanges are online insurance marketplaces that allow eligible Americans to find health insurance plans, as required by the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Many Americans have had difficulty signing up for insurance at the exchanges since they opened, due to heavy traffic on the websites and technical glitches plaguing them. It is unclear how many Americans have signed up for insurance since the exchanges opened; the Obama administration has not yet released enrollment figures.

Via: Gallup

Continue Reading.....

A Bleak First Week: 99.6% of Healthcare.gov Visitors Did NOT Enroll in Obamacare

Since October 1st, Americans living in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. can purchase healthcare through exchanges as part of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare.) Little information has been made available by the administration on the level of interest these exchanges have received or more importantly the number of consumers who actually enrolled, although the rollout has been plagued with widespread reports of system outages and bugs.

Millward Brown Digital (formerly Compete, inc.) prepared the following analysis in order to provide visibility around consumer activity on the various healthcare exchanges since the launch of Obamacare.

Over the course of Obamacare’s first week, 9.5 million people visited healthcare.gov, the federal government’s official healthcare website and the de facto exchange for residents of two thirds of the states. In addition, the 16 operational state-run exchanges combined to attract over 3.1 million visitors during the same period. In total, 11.3 million consumers visited the federal and state exchanges during their first week of operation. Unfortunately, what started as a fire hose of interest, resulted in only a small trickle of actual healthcare enrollments.

Among the visitors to healthcare.gov, 5.7 million (or 60% of total visitors to the site) navigated to the individual marketplace landing page where, after selecting their state, they were either directed to continue using the federal site or were redirected to their state-run exchange. From here 1.3 million left for their state-run exchange, while another 3.7 million attempted to register on healthcare.gov. The latter didn’t get far. For two thirds of these consumers, the site either hung or failed altogether before it was finally taken offline over the first weekend. Most had to abandon their attempts to register after facing the government’s equivalent of the blue screen of death, which notified them of ongoing system maintenance.

Despite a myriad of issues with the site, just over a million consumers actually made it through the first gauntlet and successfully registered on healthcare.gov, after which they were sent verification emails. Problems persisted as consumers next encountered difficulty verifying their email addresses and logging into the accounts they had just created. Over 214,000 consumers sought help on the “I’m having trouble logging in to my marketplace account” page, making it one of the most popular pages on the site. Just 27% of those who registered on healthcare.gov successfully logged into accounts.

Via: Complete Pulse

Continue Reading.....

Obamacare’s Website Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know Expensive The Plans Are, Creates “Traffic Bottleneck” By Forcing Users To Create Account Before Seeing Prices…

The Healthcare.gov website requires that individuals looking for coverage enter personal information before comparing plans. IT experts believe that this requirement is causing the website to crash.

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.

HHS didn’t want users to see Obamacare’s true costs

“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.” Why was it delayed? “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.” (Emphasis added.)

Via: Forbes

Continue Reading.....

LA Times: We Don't Publish Letters to Editor Claiming Man Isn't Causing Climate Change

It's one thing for a news outlet to advance the as yet unproven theory of anthropogenic global warming; it's quite another to admit that you won't publish views that oppose it.

As amazing as it may same, that's exactly what the Los Angeles Times did Saturday in an article by editorial writer Jon Healey:

Regular readers of The Times' Opinion pages will know that, among the few letters published over the last week that have blamed the Democrats for the government shutdown (a preponderance faulted House Republicans), none made the argument about Congress exempting itself from Obamacare.

Why? Simply put, this objection to the president's healthcare law is based on a falsehood, and letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there's no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed.

So letters to the editor "that say there's no sign humans have caused climate change...do not get printed."

That's quite a statement coming from an editorial writer not named Al Gore.

Of course, readers are likely just as concerned that the Times is also not publishing letters claiming Congress is exempt from ObamaCare.

After reviewing fact checks on this issue published by CNN, the Washington Post, and Yahoo, it appears the Times has a point here.

Via: Newsbusters

Continue Reading.....

Over 500,000 children could go without healthcare under ObamaCare!!!

WASHINGTON — A “family glitch” in the 2010 health care law threatens to cost some families thousands of dollars in health insurance costs and leave up to 500,000 children without coverage, insurance and health care analysts say.

That’s unless Congress fixes the problem, which seems unlikely given the House’s latest move Friday to strip funding from the Affordable Care Act.

Congress defined “affordable” as 9.5% or less of an employee’s household income, mostly to make sure people did not leave their workplace plans for subsidized coverage through the exchanges. But the “error” was that it only applies to the employee — and not his or her family. So, if an employer offers a woman affordable insurance, but doesn’t provide it for her family, they cannot get subsidized help through the state health exchanges.

That can make a huge difference; the Kaiser Family Foundation said an average plan for an individual is about $5,600, but it goes up to $15,700 for families. Most employers help out with those costs, but not all.

“We saw this two-and-a-half years ago and thought, ‘Has anyone else noticed this?’” said Kosali Simon, a professor of public affairs at Indiana University who specializes in health economics. “Everyone said, ‘No, no. You must be wrong.’ But we weren’t, and that’s going to leave a lot of people out.”

Via: USA Today

Continue Reading.....

Good news for Obamacare

In the conservative echo chamber, there is little doubt about Obamacare: It’s an unmitigated, costly disaster. In the real world, there is a fascinating, high-stakes question that still needs answering: How well will this restructuring of the health-care industry, workable in theory, operate in reality?

Opponents of health-care reform protest outside the Supreme Court last year. (Charles Dharapak/Associated Press)

We won’t have a full picture for a long time. But, as the nation prepares for the phase-in of the law’s most important elements next month, we are starting to get real data back. And at least one major criticism — that the law will require people without employer-sponsored insurance to buy very expensive health-care coverage — looks increasingly weak.

A new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation offers the clearest picture yet of how much different sorts of Americans will have to pay for their coverage in the “exchanges” the government is setting up for individual insurance customers. Bottom-line costs will vary, as they do now, depending on where you live, your income, your age and other factors. But, “while premiums will vary significantly across the country,” the report concludes, “they are generally lower than expected.”

For example, we estimate that the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office imply that the premium for a 40-year-old in the second lowest cost silver plan would average $320 per month nationally. Fifteen of the eighteen rating areas we examined have premiums below this level, suggesting that the cost of coverage for consumers and the federal budgetary cost for tax credits will be lower than anticipated.

Via: Washington Post

Continue Reading..... 

Obamacare exchanges aren't the only game in town

Americans who buy their own health insurance next year won't have to get coverage through their state-based exchange.

Many insurers will offer individual policies outside the Obamacare exchanges in 2014. Consumers can avoid the exchanges by buying plans directly from insurers or through brokers.

But should they?

First, anyone earning less than 400% of the poverty line will be eligible for federal subsidies toward exchange-based plans, so going off the exchange would likely not make sense.

But those who make too much to qualify for subsidies should look both on and off the exchanges for a plan that best fits their needs, experts say.

The off-exchange policies are required to have many of the same Obamacare protections as plans sold on the exchanges, like maternity and mental health benefits, plus insurers can't exclude enrollees because of pre-existing conditions. Only a handful of current individual policies that meet strict guidelines will be grandfathered in.

So why might one want to go off the exchange?

#1: Possible better coverage: Some insurers may opt to offer richer policies or continue grandfathered plans off the exchange to hold onto long-time customers. These policies may have more comprehensive doctors' networks or lower drug co-pays ... with a higher premium to boot, said Dan Mendelson, chief executive of Avalere Health, an advisory company for insurers. But they could be more attractive to current customers than the exchange policies, which may be more restrictive in order to keep premiums under control.

Via: CNN Money

Continue Reading....

President Obama responds to Daily Caller request for comment

Barack Obama, president of the United States, personally responded to a Daily Caller request for comment.

“Dear Patrick: Thank you for writing,” President Obama wrote in an email to this reporter in response to a days-old inquiry regarding his administration’s use of the term “shared responsibility payment” to refer to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty.

President Obama presumably wrote the letter from the White House, where he lives with the first lady and daughters Sasha and Malia.

“I have heard from many Americans regarding our health care system and the Affordable Care Act, and I appreciate your perspective,” President Obama wrote.

“Basically, there are two main things the American people need to know about the Affordable Care Act and what it means,” President Obama wrote near the top of the nine-paragraph letter.

“Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, American workers and families can feel more secure knowing that they can get the care they need at prices they can afford,” President Obama concluded, notifying The Daily Caller about other government websites where we can learn about the Affordable Care Act.

President Obama is the 44th president of the United States. He grew up in Hawaii, attended Columbia University, and worked as a community organizer in Chicago before he became president.

“I have not made a decision” yet on whether or not to attack the nation of Syria, President Obama said several hours before sending The Daily Caller a letter.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading....

Catholic Hospital Association Continues to Provide Cover for ObamaCare's Abortion Funding

At the height of the contentious debate that surrounded health care reform in 2010, negotiations nearly ground to a halt due objections made by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) over abortion funding provisions in the legislation.  The USCCB, which is considered quite liberal in the American sense of the word on the issues of health care and health insurance, refused to give its blessing to what would become ObamaCare due to the legislation's funding for elective abortions.

At the time, ObamaCare appeared doomed.  Many Democrats stated that they could not support a health care bill which didn't include expanded abortion funding, while other pro-life Democrats (such as then-Rep. Bart Stupak and his "Stupak Dozen") refused to cede any ground and stood with the USCCB.  

Just when it appeared that this controversy would end the Democrats' latest attempt at "health care reform," the Catholic Hospital Association (CHA) intervened in an attempt to end the standoff.  As described by Slate shortly after ObamaCare became law:

In the run-up to passage of the health care bill, representatives of the nearly 60,000 U.S. nuns signed a letter in support of the health care bill, contra the bishops, because, they wrote, supporting better health care is "the real pro-life stance." From there, the dominoes toppled fast-Bart Stupak, the Catholic pro-life Democrat who'd refused to vote in favor of the bill because of the abortion question, initially dismissed the nuns' letter but then backed down and settled for an executive order on abortion of questionable import and scope. And the bill passed.

Via: The American Thinker

Continue Reading