At the Potemkin healthcare.gov website…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it seems we have Potemkin enrollments:

Obama administration officials acknowledged today that some of the roughly 126,000 Americans who completed the torturous online enrollment process in October and November might not be officially signed up with their selected issuer, even if the website has told them they are.

Technical problems surrounding the transfer of an applicant’s personal information from the federal marketplace to the selected insurance company have plagued the system since its launch, making it difficult for insurers to finalize some enrollments. The 834 forms that issuers receive from the system have been riddled with errors, including often duplicate or incomplete information.

While the front-end of the website has been vastly improved, the back-end glitches remain a serious concern, IT experts and industry officials say.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The whole thing seems to be about PR at the moment, and has been for quite some time. We have a president who can’t manage to do much except undo things (such as, for instance, the health insurance system in America) going out to sell what he can’t manage to do: create a functional alternative health insurance system and a website on which people can actually buy it.

The title of that Politico piece to which I just linked, “White House returns to Obamacare sales mode,” seems a bit in error. After all, has Obama ever left Obamcare sales mode? He’s been selling it for four years, with no end in sight, although it has become a harder sell over time:

President Barack Obama will launch a coordinated campaign Tuesday by the White House, congressional Democrats and their outside allies to return attention to why the Affordable Care Act passed in the first place.

So Obama wants to return attention to the Cornhusker Kickback and all the other wheeling and dealing, including the use of reconciliation to get around the problem in the Senate? No, of course not; it turns out he wants to emphasize the benefits Obamacare affords:

After two months of intense coverage of the botched HealthCare.gov rollout, the president will host a White House event kicking off a three-week drive to refocus the public on the law’s benefits, senior administration officials told POLITICO.

The White House will take the lead in emphasizing a different benefit each day until the Dec. 23 enrollment deadline for Jan. 1 coverage. The daily message will be amplified through press events and social media by Democratic members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee, congressional campaign committees and advocacy organizations, officials said.

I got a new slogan for them: “A benefit a day keeps the doctor…away.” No, I guess that one won’t do.

I would think that if there actually were benefits from Obamacare, then people could perceive them and judge for themselves. Obama is afraid that won’t happen, and that it certainly won’t happen before the all-important 2014 election, so in the absence of felt benefits I guess we must have rhetorically-stated benefits. I would also imagine that those benefits will continue to be ones that are lied about, just as they were before the last election.

Some of those lies will be that the cancellations will only affect a tiny percentage of the population. Others might be about keeping your doctor; how many people will notice the narrowness of the networks right away, or realize what effect Obamacare will have on the US healthcare system as a whole over time? Other lies will involve not just the supposed benefits, but will misrepresent and exaggerate the previous problems with health insurance, including the oft-repeated one about how insurance companies were always cancelling policies when people got sick.

Lies all the way down.

Happy Chanukah!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]

Chanukah began the night before Thanksgiving. But since it has eight days I still get a chance to wish you a happy one—tonight and for two more days, anyway.

The words of this Chanukah song in Yiddish—written in 1924 before the Holocaust and before the establishment of Israel—are not happy. But I didn’t know that when I first heard it, and I post it anyway because I think it’s very beautiful:

Here are the lyrics, as translated by Theodore Bikel (you can hear an excerpt of him singing it here):

O little lights of mystery
You recall our history
And all that went before
The battles and the bravery
And our release from slavery
Miracles galore.

As my eyes behold your flames
I recall our heroes’ names
And our ancient dream:
“Jews were learning how to fight
To defeat an awesome might
They could reign supreme”

“They would rule their own domain
When the enemy was slain,
The Temple cleansed and whole.
Once there was a Jewish land
And a mighty Jewish hand.”
Oh, how it moves my soul!

O little lights of mystery
You retell our history
Your tales are tales of pain.
My heart is filled with fears
My eyes are filled with tears
“What now?” says the haunting refrain.

Remember: written in 1924.

Bikel translated the song that way in order to make the rhymes come out. But a more literal translation of that last verse might be:

Oh little candles,
your old stories
awaken my anguish;
deep in my heart there
stirs
a tearful question:
What will be next?

Indeed.

Fixing Healthcare.gov

The New Neo Posted on by

The government has had three and a half years to construct the website, and two months to fix it after its disastrous first opening.

Before I talk about the re-opening, here’s a hypothetical: let’s suppose that Healthcare.com really had been “fixed” in those two months. What would that have said about the failure of the previous three and a half years? What was the Obama administration and the people it hired to design the website doing all that time, if it was that easy to reach the goal in a concentrated two-month push? Do backs have to be against the wall and political futures starkly at stake in order to create a functioning website? And what does it all say about the administration’s ability to perform more complex and important tasks—including, for example, designing a system by which all Americans will have effective health insurance without impacting negatively on the economy and the health care system itself?

Of course, if the website really isn’t yet functioning all that well—if (as is highly suspected) the security is still bad, or it can’t handle a large amount of traffic, or the information it conveys is often incorrect, or the website continues to be unable to interface with insurance companies to get payments to them—that also doesn’t say much for the efficiency and competence of the government.

I think we can safely say that either way, this is not government’s finest hour.

In fact, Jeffrey Zients, the man chosen to fix the website, doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of faith in the government’s ability to do this, either [emphasis mine]:

“If you bring this all together ”” private sector speed and execution; the command center in Columbia with real-time monitoring; troubleshooting when things go wrong, and overall coordination and direction; a hardware-upgrade team, and then a software-fix team ”” what’s happened is the site has gotten better and better each week,” Zients said.

If you read the entire article, it’s clear what extraordinary efforts have been made during the past two months. It’s hard not to wonder how much that has cost on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent.

It also seems clear that the last two months were spent concentrating on how the site would appear to the person using it, rather than how it would actually function. The whole thing may now be a sort of Potemkin village:

One example of the “ruthless prioritization” was to focus first on fixing the site for consumers, officials said. That decision has meant that insurers are still getting faulty reports on those who have signed up for coverage, which could become a major problem once more people buy insurance and try to use their benefits.

Great.

[NOTE: Because my main source for the information in this post was this article in Politico, I’d like to point out that Politico is ordinarily a pro-Obama pro-Democratic website. So if that’s what Politico is saying, just imagine what the truth is.]

The drones of Amazon

The New Neo Posted on by

Fantasy? Soon-to-be reality?

Then again, you could just go to a nearby store if you need something that quickly.

Will people be tempted to shoot them down? How will Amazon avoid landing a drone on someone’s head? What about apartment-dwellers? Will the proliferation of drones lead to midair collisions?

Not to mention the fact that the guy in the video was waiting right at his door. How will the drone summon a homeowner who isn’t willing to hang out near the entrance?

Then there’s the competition, which has its own problems:

“Meeting the goal” set for the Obamacare website…

The New Neo Posted on by

…by moving the goalposts.

I guess they’re counting on the fact that most of America isn’t paying attention to what the goal actually was, or is.

[NOTE: More here. I’ll just add that the “Mission Accomplished” banner that Zombie references, the one that became so notorious for President Bush, actually referred to the mission of the aircraft carrier on which he gave the speech. That mission was indeed over, as were the major combat operations that Bush specifically mentioned in his speech:

The banner stating “Mission Accomplished” was a focal point of controversy and criticism. Navy Commander and Pentagon spokesman Conrad Chun said the banner referred specifically to the aircraft carrier’s 10-month deployment (which was the longest deployment of a carrier since the Vietnam War) and not the war itself, saying “It truly did signify a mission accomplished for the crew.”

The White House claimed that the banner was requested by the crew of the ship, who did not have the facilities for producing such a banner. Afterward, the administration and naval sources stated that the banner was the Navy’s idea, White House staff members made the banner, and it was hung by the U.S. Navy personnel. White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN, “We took care of the production of it. We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up.” According to John Dickerson of Time magazine, the White House later conceded that they hung the banner but still insists it had been done at the request of the crew members

I’ve written before about the issue of what Bush meant when he said that major combat operations were over in Iraq, but it bears repeating here [this is an excerpt from the speech Bush gave that day, but the emphasis is mine]:

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country…

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We are pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We have begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We are helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave ”” and we will leave behind a free Iraq…

Al-Qaida is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations, and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people.

It certainly doesn’t sound like a person saying the struggle is over, does it? The promise to stay until our work was done was not kept, of course. But it was Bush’s successor who broke that promise.]

Wouldn’t any song, played over and over and over…

The New Neo Posted on by

…become an instrument of torture?

But these are supposedly the Big Five for that purpose:

(1) “I Love You” by Barney the Dinosaur

(2) “Panama” by Van Halen

(3) “The Real Slim Shady” by Eminem

(4) “Copacabana” by Barry Manilow

(5) “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen

I’m trying to think what my choices would be, and there’s no question about the leader (dare I say it? The very title runs the risk of inducing the dread earworm): “It’s a Small World After All.”

And for some reason this one, a song I happen to like somewhat, has the same ghastly tendency (listen at your own risk):

Suggestions?

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but.

Actually, I think I’ll just present this one without comment, except to say that it’s from August of 2009:

By the way, the video is still up at whitehouse.gov, under a heading that reads “Health Insurance Reform Reality Check.” But Linda Douglass left Obama’s employ in April of 2010. My guess is that she’s mighty happy right now that she did.

Believing his own bullshit

The New Neo Posted on by

Towards the end of this recent post I wrote:

I was thinking today that Obama and his helpmates lie so often and so globally and reflexively that I wonder if they can even discern when they are lying and when they are not.

Commenter “Charles” responded:

I have thought this often as well. I’m no psychiatrist; but, don’t real narcissists actually believe what they say? Sort of like they live in their own made-up reality and cannot tell fact from fiction.

Not only that, but presidents—all presidents, not just Obama—tend to live in a bubble where the isolation of White House living, the puffery and perks of the office, and the protection their underlings afford from harsh reality tend to increase as time goes on, which in turn increases the inclination to lose track of truth and begin to believe one’s own lies.

A president needs to be wise enough to counter this by making it clear to his staff that he wants to hear the worst. But the news from the Obama White House is that Obama has given his staff the opposite message:

…[N]o one wanted to even hint to the president that this techno-savvy administration possibly had a website stuck in, say, 1995. “People don’t like to tell him bad news,” says an ex-White House staffer. “Part of it is the no-drama culture.”…

Indeed. People who have served in top jobs at the White House seem to agree on one thing: a president who wants to get at the truth has to understand the extent of his own isolation. And then establish a zone of immunity for truth-tellers.

Not gonna happen, and that’s due to the narcissism. Obama would rather deal with the worshipful (and I mean that literally) Valerie Jarrett:

He knows exactly how smart he is… I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually… He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.

Obama’s opinion of himself even before taking office was extraordinarily high, and that’s compared to a group (presidential aspirants) not especially known for their humility.

But perhaps the most telling quote in terms of what Obama believes or doesn’t believe is true comes from Obama himself. It occurred during a conversation with journalist Richard Wolffe, and appears in Renegade, a book published in 2009 and based on Wolffe’s coverage of Obama’s 2008 campaign:

Every now and then in Renegade, a moment arrives when it seems Obama might reveal something, some tiny thing, about himself. “You know, I actually believe my own bullshit,” Obama told Wolffe with a smile. But what for a nanosecond seemed like candor – would the candidate actually examine his own B.S.? – was just another talking point, as he explained to Wolffe that he truly wanted to bring change to America for better health care, for better schools, and especially for “the kid on the streets.”

There’s much about this quote that’s revealing. First, there’s the serious message Obama is trying to deliver within the joke about bs: “I truly believe that I can make people’s lives better.” But if he really does believe that, then why insert a subtle disclaimer (it’s all “bullshit”) inherent in the casually deprecating tone that seems to negate its seriousness and casts an ironic and juvenile eye on the entire enterprise?

And then, of course, there’s the more subtle message beneath. Obama seems to be admitting that, at least at the moment when he utters whatever bullshit he happens to be spewing, he does believe it. That trick of believing and yet not believing is one of the exercises at which narcissists and con men are skilled. In order to sell a product convincingly, it’s necessary to believe your own bullshit, if only temporarily.

But there’s also another level operating here, one that was described very well by Hilton Kramer. In the following quote he is speaking of Stalinists, but what he says is applicable to the majority of leftists such as Obama as well:

It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying – and not only to others, but first of all to themselves – a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically For their loyalty is to something other than the truth.

So Obama’s ability to lie, and his relationship to his own lies, is multiply-determined: by his narcissism, by the fact of his being a president who is protected from the harsh truth, and by his leftism. He believes and does not believe at the same time, and shifts between the two depending on the strategic value of one or the other attitude at any given moment.

Black Friday at Amazon

The New Neo Posted on by

For me, it’s Leftover Friday. Each to his own.

But since it’s in my interest to promote shopping at Amazon through the neo-neocon portal—I’ll point out that Amazon has a ton of special deals for Black Friday and lasting through November 30. Here’s an offer that relates particularly to books.

And remember to please shop through neo-neocon whenever you use Amazon, year-round. I appreciate it very much.

Next up: Medicaid

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps the most important Obamacare lie will turn out to be the one about Medicaid:

The biggest lie of all is that 15-30 million additional people who will be enticed or shoved onto Medicaid will receive quality health care.

In reality, they will receive health care “insurance,” but there will be few doctors willing to see them because the reimbursement rates are so low.

Everyone who was even remotely familiar with the way Medicaid works was quite aware of this at the time Obamacare was passed, because Medicaid recipients were already having great difficulty getting a doctor to see them due to the low reimbursement rates. The Obamacare Medicaid expansion provides people with the trappings of care but is unlikely to be able to deliver all that much of it.

Unless, of course, more doctors come under the thumb of government:

Forcing doctors to accept Medicaid patients will be the inevitable solution.

Oh, doctors. They earn too much money anyway, don’t they?

Not in the Soviet Union. Not even in post-Soviet Russia. Why? Here’s why [emphasis mine]:

Soviet doctors never had anything like the status and money of Western doctors. The medicine they practice was considered to be below the levels of the West, the system always suffered from shortages, and the social status of a provincial general practitioner was akin to a schoolteacher’s, respectable, but modest…

But under Communism, doctors at least lived no worse than anybody else — and maybe a bit better.

That has changed. Caught between an impoverished government that cannot afford universal medical care and a deep-rooted Soviet scorn for medicine-for-profit, many of Russia’s doctors, especially here in the provinces, seem worn thin, out of canteen water but still marching ahead.

”When everything else took the capitalist road of development, and medicine was left on the socialist road, we got an imbalance that is killing medicine,” said Dr. Aleksei Golland, one of a handful of private doctors in Kostroma.

”It’s an economic death,” he said. ”If it continues like this, I see the murder of medicine in that the masses of quality doctors don’t have ground to stand on. A surgeon has to plant potatoes to feed his family.”

Ask what keeps the government-paid doctors going and the same words keep coming up: Vocation. Duty. Mercy. Naked enthusiasm…

A few doctors are doing pretty well. There are a handful of legally private doctors. And there are the doctors who practice a sort of black-market medicine in which they operate in state facilities, but charge their own little tolls.

Has the situation changed much in Russia since the above quotes were written in 2000? It certainly doesn’t seem that way. And I wonder if that’s part of the reason life expectancy there is so lousy.

Here’s your post-Thanksgiving regimen

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m all for keeping fit, but Robert Durbin is a bit extreme. He’s 64 and lost 70 pounds seven years ago by radically transforming his health habits, going on a rigorous diet and exercising. He had already quit smoking and drinking some years before that.

Did I say “exercising”? There should be a stronger word for what Durbin does:

Every morning right after he wakes up, he does about a mile on his elliptical ski glider, followed by 1,200 to 1,800 repetitions of abdominal exercises.

Then it’s off to the gym, where he spends three hours doing CrossFit, weight training and skills training.

At night, he repeats his ski glider workout and abdominal exercises before he goes to bed. And he visits the gym several evenings per week for kettlebell, yoga and kickboxing classes.

Durbin isn’t quite satisfied, though, “I’d still like to get a little bit of the skin gone down there, you know, around my lower stomach.”

In the video of Durbin at the link (I can’t find a way to embed it, so you have to go here to view it) he says that one of his motivations for getting fit was that he was afraid that he wouldn’t have much time left with his grandchildren. He may have improved his chances for longevity—and he’s most definitely improved his mobility, because before beginning his regimen he was even having trouble walking. But I’m not at all sure he’s got more time now on a day-to-day basis to see his grandkids, with a schedule like that.

For someone like Durbin, the line between conscientious and obsessed can be a fine one. I’m well aware of the problem. I don’t have a physique anything like his (or rather, anything like the female version of his). But I’ve long been accused of being somewhat obsessive about exercise, and back in my dancing days I definitely was—as most dancers are.

Here’s Durbin:

“I just go bonkers if I can’t get to the gym or something,” he said. “My gym, I think it’s closed (on Thanksgiving) so I’m going to have a fit.”

That doesn’t seem all that…healthy.