Free Republic

Here’s the latest chapter in The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.According to Forward Progressives: There’s a saying that goes, “If you can’t win, cheat like hell” and it’s apparently the motto that the GOP has taken to heart across the country in their latest attempts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.What does their newest attempt involve? Creating fake websites with misinformation that look like state insurance exchanges in order to confuse consumers trying to find out what their new insurance options are under Obamacare. Forward Progressives cites three websites recently shut down by the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, including kynect101.com, which,...

Get ready to smash your head against a wall. On Wednesday night, Sean Hannity had two tech experts on his Fox News show to discuss the continuing problems of the Obamacare website. At the end of the interview, Hannity asked the experts how much it would have cost them to build a site similar to healthcare.gov that both operated properly from the beginning and was built secure to protect users’ sensitive information. “I would say to build a site like this with the infrastructure, the architecture around it, you are looking at maybe $5 million to $10 million at a...

There are many reason I don’t like Obamacare, including its punitive impact on taxpayers and the way it takes our healthcare system even further from a market-based approach. But now I’m increasingly worried Obamacare also is creating a playground for hackers and identity thieves – and the rest of us will be the victims. Simply stated, the results probably won’t be very pretty when you mix together these two items. 1) Typical government incompetence. 2) Massive data collection by government. I pontificate on these issues in an interview with Neil Cavuto. Dan Mitchell Discussing How the IRS and Obamacare May...

Success! The Obama administration announced over the weekend that it had hit its deadline of Nov. 30 for HealthCare.gov. Of course, there were caveats. The site will still probably get buggy when there's a lot of traffic, which is why Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius advised people to use it at off-peak hours. But that simply means peak hours will be moved to after midnight. After all, you don't alleviate crowding if you tell everyone to try a different door. Oh, and there will still be crashes, and occasionally the administrators will have to take the whole thing...

Despite the assertion by Jay Carney as to how much improved is the Healthcare.gov website, it still sucks. There are two major problems plaguing it- it's not really signing everyone up and there's no security. So you think you are signed up? Um, maybe not. Bob Shlora of Alpharetta, Ga., was supposed to be a belated Obamacare success story. After weeks of trying, the 61-year-old told ABC News he fully enrolled in a new health insurance plan through the federal marketplace over the weekend, and received a Humana policy ID number to prove it. But two days later, his insurer...

Some people who have managed to complete the burdensome and glitch-filled process of signing up for Obamacare are learning they are not really enrolled at all. "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."

The new and improved Obamacare website struggled under heavy traffic loads on Monday, but still appeared to operate pretty much as the Obama administration has promised: Okay, but not perfect. After a weekend of final, intensive fixes, officials unveiled a somewhat repaired HealthCare.gov on Sunday and promised that it will work well enough to serve the Americans who want insurance exchange coverage by New Year’s.

Remember, the administration is counting people who've selected plans through Healthcare.gov and placed them in virtual shopping carts as "enrollments," so this metric is both overly generous and quite misleading. To be fully enrolled, consumers need to select plans, receive confirmation from insurers, and make their first premium payment. To be covered by the first of the year, consumers must complete that end-to-end process within the next few weeks. Obamacare's website is working better on the front end -- although problems still persist -- but it's not "fixed" by any stretch. Back end flaws could create migrane-inducing backlogs on...

The Obama administration promised the healthcare.gov website would be fixed by today. The Obamacare reboot began with 11-hour website shutdown. That’s not all… Unfortunately there are still bugs and glitches. CNN reported this morning the website crashes during the signup process. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59VTIDjKDZ4

https://www.healthcare.gov/

President Obama's healthcare rollout re-do is headed for a crucial test Saturday – and there's a lot on the line. If the federal healthcare.gov website doesn’t deliver, the president's credibility, political support and fate of his landmark health care law could be in jeopardy. If the site is able to recover from its disastrous Oct. 1 rollout, it will go a long way is restoring confidence in the program. The financial success of the Affordable Care Act rests in getting young, healthy people to sign up for the program. If they lose interest or bolt, the program will not be...

In a Thanksgiving missive that reads more like a love letter to the man than a newspaper article, the Washington Post has announced that Denis McDonough, the White House Chief of Staff, is now in charge of the healthcare hairball. “McDonough is now holding evening meetings every day with key players in the health care rollout,” says the Post, “offering support even as he holds agency leaders accountable.” Support and accountability? Wow. Evening work too. Whoa. In Obama’s White House? If I were McDonough, I’d get my resume ready. Perhaps when he’s looking for work next time, he can just...

How is it possible that Barack Obama did not know that his beloved healthcare.gov website was a botch? That's a question many thoughtful people (including thoughtful Democrats) are asking. We heard him say that he wouldn't have boasted that it would be as easy to use as amazon.com or obitz.com had he known that it wouldn't. I'm not "stupid enough," he said at his Nov. 14 press conference. Most Americans agree that's true. One thing we do know is that this is a chief executive who does not want to hear bad news, or at least effectively discourages his subordinates...

Being speaker of the House doesn’t make it any easier to sign up for health care coverage using the troubled federal website. Just ask John Boehner. … At one point Thursday, Boehner tweeted his frustration—“Guess I’ll just have to keep trying”—along with photos of himself at a computer and the error message he says he received. The House speaker has 583,000 followers on Twitter. Nearly an hour after his tweet, Boehner received an email confirming he was signed up, his spokesman said. …

November 20, 2013, 12:13 pm 'Uh oh': O-Care site crashes on Sebelius By Jonathan Easley The troubled HealthCare.Gov website crashed in front of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday in Miami. A local CBS reporter jumped in while Sebelius was doing a test run on the site to say, “the screen says 'I’m sorry but the system is temporarily down.' ” “Uh oh,” Sebelius responded. The secretary held events in Orlando and Miami on Tuesday encouraging people to sign up for healthcare despite the problems the administration has had in getting the website up and running.

I don’t relish in this. I put these posts up to make the point that there will be absolutely no room for any arguments about how “we had no idea that the Obama putsch regime was malevolent” or “we were taken totally by surprise”. As I have been saying for years and years, PEOPLE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR GOVERNMENT, and an iniquitous gutter republic, such as yours (I renounce any association or connection to the abortion of an overthrown nation-state formerly called the United States of America - I am stateless) that has the temerity to STILL crow about being...

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013. Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing...

CNN has blamed Christians for the problem of Americans without health insurance, calling it "The Obamacare 'scandal' you haven't heard about." In an article on CNN.com's Belief Blog, CNN writer John Blake says that, while famous pastors "preach in states where crosses and church steeples dot the skyline," they do nothing about "the poor who can’t get the health insurance they would receive if they lived elsewhere."

Obama administration officials on Tuesday acknowledged that it still has to build elements of HealthCare.gov, even as it attempts to fix problems on existing portions of the Obamacare website. "We still have to build the payment systems to make payments to issuers in January," Henry Chao, HealthCare.gov's chief project manager at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), told a subpanel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee today. CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille confirmed to reporters that certain "back end" systems are still being built, including financial management systems to transfer tax credits to insurers. Those systems, she said,...

A crucial system for making payments to insurers from the federal Obamacare marketplace, HealthCare.gov, has yet to be built, a senior government IT official admitted Tuesday. The official, Henry Chao, visibly stunned Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) when he said under questioning that a significant fraction of that online insurance marketplace has yet to be constructed. (Read more: Low-bamacare enrollment) Getty Images Henry Chao, deputy CIO and deputy director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Office of Information Services, testifies during a hearing before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "We still need...