Obamacare lie #…well, I’ve lost count of the number
Democrats continue to spin all the plan cancellations as being much ado about nothing: hardly anyone was affected, and those that were affected were silly stupidheads with plans only a dodo-brain would have bought, and from which the ever-helpful Democrats tried to save them.
Kristen Powers is a Democrat, too. But she’s not buying the party line, because she happens to be one of those people whose plan was cancelled, and she’s no stupidhead:
My blood pressure goes up every time they say that they’re protecting us from substandard health insurance plans,” Powers told Bret Baier. “There is nothing to support what they’re saying.”
“I have talked to about how I’m losing my health insurance,” she continued. “If I want to keep the same health insurance, it’s going to cost twice as much. There’s nothing substandard about my plan.”
“All of the things they say that are not in my plan are in my plan,” Powers lamented. “All of the things they have listed ”” there’s no explanation for doubling my premiums other than the fact that it’s subsidizing other people. They need to be honest about that.”
The “they,” of course, is the White House and every pundit and Democratic spokesperson on the planet except for Powers. Is she just learning that “their” lies are egregious and ubiquitous?
Speaking of lies, Ross Douthat takes aim at a common one that was offered by Matt Yglesias in its most recent incarnation, the idea that, in the individual market, insurers were free to cancel a person’s insurance if the person became ill, and did so routinely and often:
During the original Obamacare debate, for instance, the conservative economist John Goodman cited data suggesting that rescission is actually vanishingly rare, and noted that the White House accused insurers of “systematically” rescinding coverage for women with breast cancer based on just four cases out of thousands. Likewise, the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Pauly has done a fair amount of research on individual insurance market outcomes, concluding that “although there have been some anecdotes about insurers slipping out of their policy provision to renew coverage at group average premiums for high risks by canceling the coverage entirely, we conclude that on average guaranteed renewability works in practice as it should in theory and provides a substantial amount of protection against high premiums to those high risk individuals who bought insurance before their risk levels changed.” (In this paper from 2008, he and a co-author found that while the employer coverage was more stable than individual-market coverage for Americans with average health, “for people in fair or poor health” the chances of losing coverage are actually lower in the individual market than in the employer-based market.)
So it’s simply not true that this was a common practice before Obamacare. There were laws against it, and the cases that did occur were the huge exceptions rather than the rule, and actionable—although some have gotten a lot of publicity (and some, such as one prominent one presented by our president, were lies). But hey, why not repeat a lie if people will believe it?
Nothing this administration says, on any subject, can be taken at face value.
It’s like they enjoy lying.
They neither enjoy it nor not-enjoy it. It’s what they *do*.
You and I breathe; they lie.
Are we now supposed to have the healthcare debate we should have had in 2009? What good does it do to employ facts and reason, if the other side will not argue in good faith? For all our trouble, we’ve been called birthers, racists, Nazis, terrorists. How can we have a country with these ideologues, who now seem to make up 95% of the Democratic party?
I’ve been unable to find video of this, but I remember Obama giving a campaign speech in 2012. He’s playing the crowd, “So, we got healthcare.” Wild cheering. “And the sun came up this morning and nobody lost their insurance.” Derisive laughter from Obama and the crowd. And he knew it even then. Despicable man.
LisaM:
I remember something of the sort, but can’t find it either.
Keep trying, though—that would be a great clip to see, if we are remembering correctly.
Not that I am a spokesman (or even work for) health insurance companies; but, oftentimes those policies cancelled in the past when someone got sick was because the person lied on their application. Such as claiming to be a non-smoker when, in fact, they smoked everyday.
Why should any company (or an individual) be held to a contract when the other party entered the contract under deceitful means?
P.S. Lisa M and Neo; I, too, seem to recall such a video. In it, Obama was very mocking of his opponents (as he often is).
N-Neocon: I’ve been noticing more and more over this year that Kirsten Powers is becoming a lot more of a dissenter with the SOP-LibDem line. Maybe our hero, Charles the Great Krauthammer, is pollinating by the seating proximity on Brett’s 6:00pm newscast. She’s been nearly a durn contrarian with Bammyland lately.
Let’s nurture the smart cutey and save her a chair in the Evil Neocon Cabal. (-:
Obama flacks like to say the individual insurance policy market is only 5% of the population. That’s true of the gay community but liberals see gay rights as huge.
Matt Y just makes up stuff.
The lies are neck deep for the Democrats.
It has been hilarious the last couple of weeks reading to reactions of ACA supporters to the discoveries that the exchange plans don’t actually function very well as comprehensive coverage. A writer at NakedCapitalism, and also the site’s owner in a comment, were surprised to find that a bronze plan, designed to have an actuarial value of 60%, doesn’t cover even close to 60% of a pregnancy in most cases.
“Democrats continue to spin all the plan cancellations as being much ado about nothing”
It’s easy to get caught up in the perception that democrats are united but behind closed doors elected democrats are screaming bloody murder about all of the cancellations with a website that won’t allow people to ‘transition’ to a new plan.
Blaming cancellations on the insurance companies doesn’t attach to a dysfunctional website that sets a new standard in incompetence.
Allahpundit over @ HotAir has a post up that speaks to this; Angry House Dems demand ObamaCare fix from White House aides in “heated” meeting; Update: “It’s ugly”
“Here’s your early-afternoon reminder that these people are either (a) imbeciles who didn’t understand when they voted for O-Care that mass cancellations were part of the plan or (b) lying schmucks who understood it full well but who are too gutless to take the heat now that it’s happening.
Did somebody here order the schadenfreude?”
Allapundit points out that House democrats did not emerge conciliated, which means its unlikely that the OC website will be working on Dec 1st.
And if the website’s not working, then the pressure on democrats to vote for the “Keep Your Plan Act” becomes severe.
Which would put the ball in Harry Reid’s court; if he kills the bill, he pisses off red-state democrats who need to do something to show their constituents that they’re trying to get plans un-canceled and runs the risk of losing the Senate majority in 2015.
If Reid allows the bill to go to vote, it could pass and go to the House where Boehner can “bring it to a vote in the House, just to maximize the humiliation for Obama as Democrats cross the aisle en masse to vote for it.”
Reid also runs the risk of placing Obama in an untenable position; Obama can veto the bill but if he does, the GOP will destroy him for singlehandedly condemning millions of canceled consumers to their new, more expensive plans.
But if Obama signs it, he’s willingly sabotaging ObamaCare in the name of protecting his party and, admits that implementation of his signature legislative achievement is an utter failure, demonstrating his and his party’s incompetence.
On the tech side I really recommend this analysis by
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/20132
Money quotes:
There are 51 state Medicaid/CHIP systems (add DC) to interface with, half a dozen federal data systems such as the IRS and SSA (to name two), and 26 state Exchanges each implementing a subset of the Federal Exchange. That totals about 85 major and complex interfaces to work the ‘glitches’ out of. Not to mention the hundreds of insurance companies trying to get valid data out the back end.
The arrogance of such an endeavor is mind boggling. Tie together 85 data systems that are all independently developed and implemented? Just mapping the data model across these would take 2 years! Each data system uses some ID to identify some attribute (e.g., name, given name, first name, etc). All this information has to be collated in the exchange so that it can be used to calculate what options each individual has. But of course, it is not just individuals, it is families too, so don’t think one individual per application.
This is an enormous undertaking with lots and lots of moving parts. Each of the external systems is under independent development, many are legacy systems. You cannot use an Agile SW Process to tackle this job. First and foremost you need to define all interfaces and get them on a coherent schedule. Then you have to model all state and federal sources of data (i.e., define how each one labels common information and create a Rosetta stone to related each existing label in those data sources to a common definition, like “first name”) and then you need to model all data products (each state and each insurer in the state has unique definitions for data as well). Just understanding the format for “DOB” or “Date Of Birth” in terms of whether the day or month comes first is tedious, time consuming work. But it must be CHECKED and verified if you want to get it right from the applicant’s input through onto the insurance enrollment form.
“Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company. Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.”
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/
“Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov.”
One correction.
The word ‘earned’ is a falsehood. Were they being honest (I know, I know), it would say “was given”.
By definition, a no-bid contract cannot be ‘earned’.
The hypocrisy of the left accusing others of crony capitalism while wallowing in it themselves is typical of these bottom feeders.
In addition, $678 million for a website? Please. This is GRAFT writ large. Holder of course will ignore calls for an independent investigation.
About Kirsten Powers: She recently wrote a piece for Christianity Today explaining how and why she became an evangelical Christian.
I’ve got a feeling she’s not been super comfortable with the liberal party line for some time. And I’ll bet they’ve not been all that thrilled with her, and not least because of her turn to evangelical Christianity.
Gina…
The system doesn’t even have the pipelines/ fiber-optics to handle the staggering data flow.
That build out will take years — and billions.
It’s beyond a code writing issue.
They even got the infrastructure terribly wrong.
Forget December 1, 2013 — try December 1, 2017.
Ann:
She was a big defender of Obamacare, though.
I think she feels personally betrayed.
This is a much worse mess than even Ted Cruz was pointing out. The law does not improve the healthcare insurance market. The law does not bend the insurance cost curve down for most people. The law does nothing to slow the upward trending provider fees. The law does not provide insurance for all the uninsured. The implementation of the web-based market doesn’t work as advertised and has security problems. The man in charge will not admit any of the foregoing. It’s hard to believe it’s happening because we wanted to believe that it could somehow be stopped.
Some excellent informational comments. This disaster has so many moving parts, it’s hard to process with any kind of clear focus.
Gina…
One more point, as actually structured 0-care is granular down to the COUNTY level — not the STATE level.
So Strata is way, way, way underestimating the components… and he’s pretty shocked as it is.
By granular we mean that each county has its own pricing structure — and included institutions.
It’s not enough — at all — to just know which state you’re in.
Further, in every case I heard of, the institutions are NOT allowing participation across county lines.
Think that through. The number of Americans living adjacent to county lines is vast, vast, vast. They can not go to the nearest clinic/ hospital and get coverage. Such out of area usage means that they pay all cash, all the time.
This latter situation is STILL generally unknown — even among Conservatives.
The Democrats have literally blown up the system — 1//6 of the American economy.
It will be rubblized before November 2014.
JJ formerly says, “This disaster has so many moving parts, it’s hard to process with any kind of clear focus.”
Four possible explanations:
1. It was intended to be a disaster in order to bring about single payer.
2. Obama and his goon squad are utterly incompetent.
3. Murphy’s law.
4. All of the above.
Personally I think 4 is the explanation. When you fervently believe you are the smartest person in every room for all time you are a narcissistic fool who believes your own bull shit. If no one else will, Murphy will eventually take you down for a hard, hard fall. You can take that to the Federal Reserve. 😉
Heads Up: From Daniel Greenfield:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-inc-wants-libyans-to-come-to-us-work-in-aviation-maintenance-and-nuclear-fields/
I thought that this issue had been covered in “Back to the Future.”
It should make evident that Barry is out to destroy America — and Israel and the West generally — just about as fast as he can.
This folly is only being driven from the top: Barry and Valerie girl. No one else would dare propose such a perverted folly.
Similar follies surround the Syrian diaspora — of such a recent vintage.
Valerie and Barry turn every situation to mud.
He’s become mentally unstable.
It’s the bong — no doubt.
BHO’s disturbed personality disorder is a strange brew of a disfunctional family which produced a chip on the shoulder larger than all the annual production of mary jane in Hawaii, ego stroking pandering on the part of the affirmative action crowd, youthful exposure to Islam and communism, and so on and so forth. Its not just the bong… its everything that has shaped this twisted persona that needs constant adoration. He is unstable and would be an object of pity were he a drug addict panhandling for just one more fix. But it is long ago that he may have been a promising candidate for rehabilitation…. now he is an incurable supreme narcissist/psychopath incapable of acknowledging the need for intensive therapy in a locked down institution.
Dittos.
Next up: Barry appoints a horse as Senator. And they build a stall for the beast, obsequiously.
I talked to my Polish friend, she who was part of the Solidarity movement, and whose father was in the WW II resistance against first the Nazis, then the Communists.
She said, “Health care in Poland, the government health care, was terrible. It was so bad. No one went there unless they were completely poor. You just scraped together whatever money you could, and went to the private doctors and paid for it yourself.”
I told her, “That’s EXACTLY what the Left has set up for us here.”
You know, I’ve been thinking about this subsidy thing. A jerk in a previous thread accused me of “lying” about his precious communist healthcare because I didn’t mention the subsidies. Well, folks, that still leaves us with a wee little problem — the “insurance” doesn’t protect you if it only pays 60% of routine expenses after a $6000 cap, and only 50% of hospitalization.
Now does it. Hmmm? So subsidized garbage is still — garbage.
Also, my Polish friend said all the GOOD doctors stayed in the private sector business. The poor souls who had to resort to Govt. Hellcare were left with the dregs.
But if Hussein and Valerie Rasputin have their way, we’ll have the North Korean model: NO private sector medicine. Because, fairness! (there will of course be separate arrangements for Them and their Friends).
Gina – the state-federal Medicaid interchange used currently is the Social Security number, cleverly “secured” by adding one or two characters at the end. The characters are usually, but not always, used to indicate what class of aid the individual is receiving.
Now, isn’t that just special to have all your personal, most intimate details linked to one easily obtainable number?
BTW, up until 2011, the first 5 digits of your SSAN were determined by state of issue and date of birth. There used to be a website that would tell where and when you were born by giving it your first 5 digits, but I can’t find it any more, no surprise there. But there are any number of sites showing how it’s done. So redacting the first five digits is not effective security against someone who has or can get your date and place of birth.
I don’t recall Powers being all that excited when it was other people’s income, property,and rights that were being redistributed.
Funny how that works huh?
Some lefty comments I’ve read go like this: ‘I’m all for free health care for the poor. I just didn’t think I’d be paying for it!’
Yeah, lib’ruls are great at putting other people’s money where their mouth is.
So does anyone realize the number of soldiers and death squad members that can be trained and created using the amount of money Obama has thrown around since? What’ll happen when the orders are given to the fascists?
Her problem is that she would have been purged from the Left the same as done to Zell Miller or Juan Williams. Essentially either stripped of political power or fired from positions of authority.
Her only protection, it seems, is that she works for Fox News. It’ll soon come to be that “not being fired” for having anti Leftist views will be the new “fair and balanced”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsten_Powers
A neat public source bio. Not as good as the Facebook back door mirror copies but still…
Her political positions are obviously that of a Democrat. If it wasn’t for the heat haze and mutual blue on blue concerning ObamaCare, she would be under a lot more heat.
People like her though, reminds me of those true believers that when turned or converted, end up as even more determined zealots. Take for example, defecting communists. These people have a personal drive for revenge or something. It’s not an authority or money making them do something.
I’ve never lived anywhere other than the US of A and I have a real and visceral personal hatred for commies. History did it to me.
Ann,
An interesting article. It seems Kirsten obeyed the powers and authority of the Left, doing as she was ordered to and believing as she was told to. First by her father and then later, by her social circle and friends.
By changing her point of authority to something else, the change seems overly dramatic. I never had such negative reactions as her when missionaries from Jehovah and Mormon lines came to my home to speak of Jesus Christ. This fear, this external “Othering” she used, appears to me nothing more than the frail insecurities of someone who wants a Power/Authority to rely on.
I’ve never lived anywhere other than the US of A and I have a real and visceral personal hatred for commies. History did it to me.
People often have their reasons to feel as they do. It’s not always from one source or kind of thing. I’ve never particularly cared what people believed in, so long as it gave them strength enough to fight (for it).
bert:
I don’t doubt that they have much more wrong than even the analysis by strata-sphere.
They needed to create in two years a seamless communication system between counties (Thanks Richard Saunders), states, 6 divisions of the federal government, 85 (guestimate) insurance companies, and presumably every medical coding company for the hospitals bill.
And at the top of it all is the IRS that will enforce the system by fining individuals and companies that don’t comply.
I can’t think of anything like this in history.
Any ideas?
Surrender to chaos.
It just can’t be done.
Since the system is inherently unstable, no matter how fast you fix one element, the flow of control/ decision has to change, yet again.
You literally can’t pin down a stable design.
This is seen in quantum physics.
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