Free Republic

Psst. Anic-Pay! Bloomberg‘s Megan McArdle (who has been on an incredible roll lately**) takes issue with the idea that the Obama administration needn’t panic about Obamacare, as long as it can get its glitch-plagued health care exchanges up and running by the end of the year. Wrong, she suggests. It’s time to panic. Now. Why? Because the exchanges are the way to sign up young, healthy people and prevent the fabled “death spiral,” in which only older, sicker people sign up for insurance, causing rates to rise and healthier people to drop out, causing rates to rise even more, etc....

SELBYVILLE, Del. (AP) — Delaware officials are celebrating the state's first health insurance exchange enrollee. Department of Health and Social Service officials have declared 59-year-old Janice Baker of Selbyville the first confirmed resident to enroll in the marketplace. It opened Oct. 1 as part of the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act. Baker said Tuesday that she started looking on Oct. 1 and, like many people, made several frustrated attempts to signup online and spent hours on the phone. But Baker says she had success once she cleared the browsing history, cookies and other temporary data on her computer. Secretary...

If you've tried to sign up online for health coverage under the problem-plagued Obamacare exchange, our sympathies. Many people have tried to create accounts and shop for insurance under the new law. Few have succeeded. Those that have enrolled have found that the system is prone to mistakes. Some applications have been sent to the wrong insurance company. Wait. It gets worse. Those who have managed to browse the marketplace have often been hit by sticker shock. Take Adam Weldzius, a nurse practitioner and single father from Carpentersville. He sought the same level of coverage on the exchange as he...

A New York Times investigative article based on two dozen interviews with industry insiders and confidential Obama Administration documents reveals that the catastrophic $500 million Obamacare rollout "has deeply embarrassed the White House" and has the technology companies involved "publicly distancing themselves" from the Obamacare fiasco. "These are not glitches. The extent of the problems is pretty enormous," an insurance executive who participated in Obamacare conference calls told the Times. "At the end of our calls, people say, 'It's awful, just awful.'"

In a much-discussed post titled "Five Thoughts on the ObamaCare Disaster," the Washington Post's Ezra Klein manages to cycle through the first three of Elisabeth Kübler Ross's five stages of grief: • Denial. "In the weeks leading up to the launch I heard some very ugly things about how the system was performing when transferring data to insurers--a necessary step if people are actually going to get insurance. I tried hard to pin the rumors down, but I could never quite nail the story, and there was a wall of official denials from the Obama administration. It was just testing,...

Nothing is more important for a startup burning through cash than winning customers and revenue. So problems with the Affordable Care Act’s online marketplaces, also known as exchanges, aren’t just an inconvenience. They’re a threat. Nobody is pushing the panic button. March 31, the end of enrollment, is several months away. Co-ops are well financed with federal loans. Evergreen holds enough capital to be in good shape even if it doesn’t reach what Beilenson calls “self-sustaining” membership of 15,000 or 20,000 in the first year, he said. But with few confirmed customers so far and no revenue, Evergreen and its...

Talking Points: If ObamaCare's liberal friends are calling its launch a "failure," an "inexcusable mess" and "beyond the pale," why are ObamaCare's Republican enemies completely tongue-tied about this unfolding train wreck? Earlier in the week, former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs called ObamaCare's launch "excruciatingly embarrassing." The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, one of ObamaCare's most shameless boosters, said it was a "disaster" and that the administration deserves "all the criticism they're getting and more." Jon Stewart suggested that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius lied about why the law's individual mandate couldn't be delayed. True, these liberals have a...

Implementation of the Affordable Care Act eventually could cost the Aiken County School District from $300,000 to $400,000 a year, District Comptroller Tray Traxler told School Board members on Tuesday. Those costs are rough estimates based on the number of employees who may or could average 30 hours of service every week. Each employee formally added to the program could cost the District $3,000 to $6,000 annually as its contribution, depending on whether the employee has a child who qualifies. Probably the biggest headache for Traxler's department is the requirement that the District must provide continuous monitoring of such employees'...

Businesses across the nation, including the Pinellas County school district, are adjusting their health care plans to comply with the Affordable Health Care Act, but one variable may end up costing the school district millions: substitute teachers. By 2015, the act requires the school district to provide health care benefits to all employees who work at least 30 hours a week. Last school year, there were 1,798 part time employees, including substitute teachers, working in instructional and administrative positions, according to the school district. “We have substitutes that work on a regular basis and over a certain period of time...

As the realities of Obamacare continue to sink in, more and more people are getting letters from their health insurance providers telling them that their plans no longer comply with federal requirements under Obamacare. We just brought you the story of “Trick Shot Titus” and his family facing significant increases in the cost of their health care plans. Now, a community blogger on the far-left Daily Kos website has penned a blog post complaining that both he and his wife are facing a nearly 100 percent increase in their monthly premiums. He claims he is canceling his insurance and refuses to pay any “f***ing...

Dan Pfeiffer’s fingerprints are all over the White House’s strategy of not negotiating with congressional Republicans over the government shutdown and debt ceiling. The senior adviser to President Obama has been plotting the White House’s every move, and is described by some within the administration as the “relentless guardian” of Obama’s no-negotiations stance. “He’s been the most ferocious on that principle,” one senior administration official said. “He was quite adamant and relentless about this. And on the face of it, it’s not an easy argument to make.” Even before the shutdown began on Oct. 1, Republicans had turned their fire...

Consider for a moment what will come next for Obamacare, in the context of Ezra Klein’s five thoughts on the disastrous launch of the program – a bellwether of sorts for how the administration failed to live up to the expectations it sold to the law’s supporters and opinion leaders. There are a few different directions it can go from here, but the worst case scenario hasn’t really entered people’s consciences yet, in part because the insurers are staying quiet at the moment. The reality now is that the system is at least a month from actually working, and likelier...

When CNSNews.com asked Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) if he had read all of the 10,535 pages of final regulations published by the administration to implement Obamacare in the Federal Register, he said he had not and described them as “incomprehensible.” “Well, of course, I voted against [Obamacare], and I have not read all the rules and regulations,” Fleming told CNSNews.com earlier this month at the Capitol. “They’re extremely complex. An average person even with a law degree or a medical degree like me can’t understand them,” Fleming said. “They’re incomprehensible.” When asked if he was surprised by the large number...

".........I am tired of funding Republicans who campaign against Obamacare then refuse to fight. It’s time to find a new batch of Republicans to actually practice what the current crop preaches. The irony in all of this is that Obamacare’s individual mandate is going to be delayed. Just wait. Liberals are already whispering that it has to happen. They can’t get the computers up and running. People aren’t signing up. They whole process is broken. But they also do not want to cave in to the GOP. So they will wait. Barack Obama will wait for the GOP to surrender,...

".......A day that was supposed to bring Washington to the edge of resolving the fiscal showdown instead seemed to bring chaos and retrenching. And a bitter fight that had begun over stripping money from the president’s signature health care law had essentially descended in the House into one over whether lawmakers and their staff members would pay the full cost of their health insurance premiums, unlike most workers at American companies, and how to restrict the administration from using flexibility to extend the debt limit beyond a fixed deadline.............."

The irony is rich. President Obama told Maryland college students just days before the launch of his healthcare “marketplace” that it would take just a few keystrokes to compare prices and policy details. “Don’t take my word for it, go on the website,” Obama told a crowd at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, MD, five days before the launch. “See for yourself what the prices are. See for yourself what the choices are and then make up your own mind. That’s all I’m asking.” But the bureaucrats in his administration clearly weren’t listening. They created a website that is...

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Sen. Ted Cruz did not stand at the podium to give the keynote address Tuesday night at the 30th annual gala for the Republican Women of Huntsville. Instead, one of the nation's most outspoken GOP leaders addressed a packed ballroom at the Huntsville Marriott through live video from Washington on two screens set up in the corners. It didn't seem to matter as the junior senator from Texas received a warm, half-hearted standing ovation upon his introduction and a more raucous, more unanimous standing ovation upon the conclusion. He outlined his plan for American economic recovery, harshly...

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) on Tuesday said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wouldn’t know bipartisanship “if it came up and slapped him.” “He wouldn’t know bipartisanship if it came up and slapped him and said we’re bipartisan because he has never participated in any kind of bicameral bipartisanship,” Gohmert said on Fox News. House Republican leaders offered a new debt-ceiling and budget deal Tuesday, despite a plan Senate leaders proposed Monday. The House plan goes further than the Senate’s to weaken the new healthcare law. It includes a delay in ObamaCare’s medical device tax and a mandate to remove...

Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen isn’t a fan of a new House Republican proposal to re-open the government and raise the debt limit, criticizing the majority for its latest salvo on Tuesday even before GOP House Speaker John Boehner hit the microphones to outline the new offer from his caucus. Mr. Van Hollen, of Maryland, said Republicans were demonstrating the definition of insanity by once again trying to alter the new health care law, a signature legacy item for President Obama. “Yet here we are, two days before we risk default on the full faith and credit of the United...

Over the course of the week, the BizTimes editorial team attempted to log on to the website to learn more information about the new marketplaces. After running into several error messages on various attempts, we were eventually able to create an account, but were not able to fully log in to the online marketplace. Stephanie Smiley, communications director for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), said that she said she did not know of a single Wisconsin resident who had been able to sign up for health insurance at healthcare.gov. "So far, folks are getting caught up in the...

HUNTSVILLE, AL (WAFF) - One lawmaker in the eye of the storm that is the government shutdown offered his encouragement to residents in the Tennessee Valley Tuesday night. Texas Senator Ted Cruz spoke at a dinner held by the Huntsville Republican Women. He gave a speech and then took questions from the crowd, via a video link from Washington. Cruz had been scheduled to appear in person but the turmoil in Washington kept him there. During the event, Cruz took the opportunity to blast the Obama administration on a wide range of issues. "We're seeing the constitutional rights of law-abiding...

A New York Times investigative article based on two dozen interviews with industry insiders and confidential Obama Administration documents reveals that the catastrophic $500 million Obamacare rollout "has deeply embarrassed the White House" and has the technology companies involved "publicly distancing themselves" from the Obamacare fiasco.  "These are not glitches. The extent of the problems is pretty enormous," an insurance executive who participated in Obamacare conference calls told the Times. "At the end of our calls, people say, 'It's awful, just awful.'" The Times says those closest to the three-and-a-half year-long building of Obamacare, like embattled Health and Human Services Secretary...

SAN FRANCISCO - One reason the Republicans are so adamantly against Obamacare, is that it's driving individual insurance premiums up. And with the law now kicking in, the bills are coming due. In looking into this, we talked to health insurance companies, and representatives of Covered California, agency implementing the Affordable Care Act in California. What they told us may be a bitter pill to swallow, for those who will pay more. Cynthia Jaynes thought her family would benefit from the Affordable Care Act. The author of several young adult books says her family will see a minimum 11 percent...

“The Health Insurance Marketplace is Open!” the home page on the Health Care.gov website breezily announces, but for most of the 14.6 million people who have tried to log in over the last two weeks, that promise proved a chimera. Computer problems caused by a perfect storm of complexity, inadequacy, and opposition have plagued the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. It’s not as if there were no forecasts of impending disaster. The New York Times reported that “deadline after deadline was missed.” Over the last 10 months, while HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius continued insisting that all was well, senior...

Is the Affordable Health Care Act making health care unaffordable for some people? Some customers of Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of Oregon’s largest insurance providers, say that's exactly what's happening. They say they are finding their health care plans are dramatically changing under the Affordable Care Act. “Policy holders are seeing almost double their monthly premiums,” said a KATU viewer named Larry in an email. He said his wife’s premium will increase by $300 under the Affordable Care Act. The issue, according to Regence spokesman Jared Ishkanian, is you’ll have to pay for those benefits even if you...

WASHINGTON DC (KDKA) — Frustration seems to be more common in Washington than the ability to reach a bipartisan deal across party lines. Pennsylvania’s senior senator, a Democrat, knows who he blames. “The Tea Party caused this shutdown, and if we allow it to continue, we’re going to have a Tea Party default and that’s not good for anyone,” says Sen. Bob Casey. Sen. Casey says ultraconservatives in the House are so fixated on repealing or changing Obamacare that they are willing to risk the nation’s economic health. “If they keep throwing out the ideas they’ve been talking about that...

First, some background: I've spent almost a decade in the healthcare insurance industry now, after departing my last job. I've •investigated fraudulent Medicaid and Medicare claims , personally having revoked some $113 milion worth, and disenrolled over 25,000 fraudlent Medicaid subscribers •Investigated fraud / waste / abuse trends in hospital and small clinic claims •Investigated and testified about waste and abuse in most electronic medical billing and diagnosis code platforms, as well as willful 'bundling' of unrelated and fraudlent charges by hospitals and clinics•Researched electronic eligibility and risk pool demographics and statistics in studying insurance rate increases and stabilizations •Worked...

Obtaining health care is no laughing matter. Yet the only way to cope with practical implications of the Democrat-sponsored Affordable Care Act is comic relief. Would Democrats rather commit political suicide than try to fix massive flaws in a bungled rollout of a mangled law? Forget about delaying Obamacare for a year, perhaps we should delay it until Democrats can pass a critically scored sanity check. A divisive law, that few read, and that a thin majority shoved down our throats deserves the date it will eventually get with the electoral version of “death panels”. It is a monstrosity which...

House Republicans on Tuesday narrowed their attack on Obamacare to the issue of fairness, insisting that President Obama and his top political appointees all have to buy their insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges as part of a new bill to end the government shutdown and extend the federal debt ceiling. GOP leaders hope to put the bill on their chamber’s floor for a vote later Tuesday, with little time to spare before the Thursday deadline the Treasury Department has set for when it will run out of maneuvering room under the current $16.7 trillion debt ceiling. The new...

This is very funny. A Daily Kos regular gets his Obamacare premium notice and is shocked to learn that as young, healthy people, he and his wife will pay twice as much! "My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don’t go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe. Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife’s rate is gong to...

Attorney: Divorce rate likely to rise under Obamacare SAN DIEGO — The Affordable Healthcare Act could make health coverage more affordable for some, but it may have other side effects, like an increase in the divorce rate. heart healthFamily practice attorney Myra Fleischer stressed how healthcare costs carry a heavyweight when it comes to those considering calling it quits on their marriage. “The middle class is what this is supposed to help and most divorces are middle class,” said Fleischer. “We look at those numbers and they choose to stay in the marriage,” said Fleischer who explained how that may...

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Tuesday that the Tea Party has stuck a knife in the backs of working-class families by shutting down the government and threatening default. “There was so much economic hurt that had already piled up … people just didn’t have any wiggle room, when the Tea Party decided to stick a knife into the backs of hard-working American families,” Murphy said on the Senate floor. The government has been shutdown for more than two weeks, and lawmakers are also fighting an Oct. 17 deadline for when the U.S. can no longer borrow money. Murphy said this...

President Obama's concession in the current budget negotiations may be that he will enforce his own health care law. Meanwhile, Republicans have shied away from trying to repeal a tax on big business because the party's base doesn't see it as a priority.It's an odd time in Washington.To the perpetual irritation of presidents, the Constitution vests the power to make laws solely in Congress. Like his predecessors, Obama bends laws and stretches executive power in order to seize some legislative power for himself.Most egregiously, Obama has expanded, contracted, twisted, and amended his 2010 Affordable Care Act many times.Obama in early...

A report by a private foundation on how the Obamacare website was designed reveals that cronyism and sheer incompetence is at fault for the spectacular failures of the rollout. InfoWorld summed it up: "It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT." ---------------- (snip) --------------- All the same, CGI Federal -- which received $88 million for its work since March of this year -- told Congress in September it was indeed ready for the onslaught of users that would come when Healthcare.gov opened to the public. The same was claimed...

You know ObamaCare is in big trouble when even true believer KOmmies are getting burned by it as you can see in this THREAD, "Just my 2 cents-Health Care Market Place." This is what happens when a community organizer with no real world business experience awards the ObamaCare software contract not to the lowest bidder but to the highest bundler. It's the Chicago Way and the result is that CGI Federal has become the Solyndra of government software contracts. It just doesn't work and won't be working any time soon...if ever. So let us now watch KOmmie appledown lose...

----"Plan B" and fiscal cliff vote, redux. Having hammered out a deal to shoot back to the Senate tonight -- with most Republicans reportedly on board -- House GOP leadership has been forced to delay or cancel those votes after support among conservatives collapsed in the early evening hours. The rules committee meeting, which would have formally drawn up the bill and advanced it to the full house, has been postponed indefinitely. The reason is simple. They don't have the votes: What happened? The counter-offer's broad outline, which I've been following all day, seemed to be on track. Then the...

Heritage Action For America, an influential conservative group, on Tuesday urged House Republicans to vote against their leaders' latest bill to fund the government and raise U.S. borrowing authority. The private group said that the legislation, which was scheduled to be voted on late on Tuesday, fails to "stop Obamacare's massive new entitlements from taking root." The group is warning lawmakers that it will look at their positions on this legislation in considering whether to encourage candidates to run against them in Republican primary campaigns next year.

Above: Maria Marroquin: Illegal alien...and ObamaCare "Navigator"- by John HillStand With ArizonaAmericans were outraged after the Obama Administration denied access to the WWII memorial for veterans  - but allowed illegal aliens to hold a rally for amnesty on the "closed" National Mall. Americans were also angered last week after the Healthcare.gov ObamaCare website, which cost $634 million to build (half a billion dollars over budget), utterly failed to work. Now it has emerged that an illegal alien in New York is serving as an Obamacare navigator, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. According to the CIS report, Maria Marroquin — identified as an illegal...

Eleven million American adults with mental illnesses do not have health insurance, making it very difficult for them to get treatment. It is difficult for these Americans to get health insurance because their applications are often rejected due to their pre-existing condition of mental illnesses. Thankfully, the Affordable Care Act has many provisions that aim at trying to fix this problem. Here are some of the ways Obamacare is working to bridge the insurance gap that exists for adults with mental disorders:

LINK ONLY PER FR POSTING RULES. Gist: Official from Michigan Department of Insurance cannot confirm that anyone has enrolled.

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday to deliver a brutal review of the Affordable Care Act's launch. "When you implement a project of this size, the first thing is unit testing, then application testing, and then integrated testing, and then scaleability testing and user testing," Bertolini said. "That plan is usually a lot longer than some of the application development itself. That's happening on the fly." The hosts were disbelieving. "None of that was done beforehand?" one asked. "All of it has been on the fly," Bertolini said.

The Obama administration’s internal projections called for strong enrollment in the states in the first year of new health insurance markets, according to unpublished estimates obtained by The Associated Press. The draft, dated Sept. 20, broke down the figure of 7 million among states. It estimated the expected enrollment in California, for example, at 1. 3 million people in 2014. The estimate for Texas was 629,000 and for Florida, 477,000. The report estimated 340,000 people would enroll in Washington state, and 218,000 in New York.

Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher got the opportunity to ask White House Press Secretary Jay Carney a question at Tuesday’s daily press briefing, an opportunity he used to present a partisan line of questioning about Obamacare, the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. This Was an Actual Question at Tuesdays White House Press Conference “When I had a heart attack a few years ago, I was uninsured and I haven’t been able to get insurance ever since then,” Christopher began. “Listening to all the pressure on the president to negotiate, some of it coming from inside this room, made me think: Is...

A 59-year-old small business owner from Selbyville spent over seven hours between phone calls and the computer, but her patience earned her the distinction of being the first person from Delaware to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. When everything was done Baker said she found coverage for about $700 /month. She and her husband had been paying $1600/month. He now has his own insurance, which is written through a private carrier. Baker wouldn't describe the type of plan she eventually signed up for, but said she didn't qualify for subsidies.

Tirge Caps, a blogger at Daily Kos, says that in 2013, pre-Obamacare, he pays $150 a month for a health insurance plan from Kaiser. His wife pays $168. However, under Obamacare, their rates will nearly double, to $284 and $302, respectively: Read the comments section to see how Tirge’s compadres reacted to his situation.

Senate staffers were notified by the Disbursing Office on Tuesday that they will need to enter the D.C. health care exchange, regardless of their state of residency, and will lose their employer contribution if they do not enter the D.C. exchange, according to a memo obtained by CQ Roll Call. Some Washington, D.C.-based congressional staff retain their in-state residency (oftentimes to pay the lower tax rate in their home state) and all members have district staff outside Washington. The open enrollment in the D.C. exchange for most staffers who are losing their Federal Employee Health Benefits plans will be Nov....

Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut. Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance. CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if...

The hallmark of the Obama era is government of, for and by crisis. Elected amid (or possibly because of) a financial crisis, the Panic of 2008, President Obama has spent his time in office lurching from disaster to disaster. Obama’s reflexes, praised instinctive timing and audacious as a candidate, turn out to be poorly suited to high office. Obama has been mostly reactive and mostly captive to events. Veering here and there is part of being president. The world is big and dangerous and governance is hard. But watching Obama govern is like watching a distracted man flipping through television...

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said it was “pathetic” if Republicans have shutdown the government and threatened defaulting on federal debt over whether congressional staffers get an employer health insurance contribution. “That’s it? That’s what this is all about?” Durbin said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “We’ve shutdown our government and risked defaulting on our loans over whether our employees are going to get employer contribution? That’s pathetic.” Lawmakers are at an impasse on how to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government, which has been shut down for more than two weeks. They are also working against an...

House Republican leaders are preparing legislation that would fund the government until Dec. 15, extend the debt ceiling until Feb. 7 and strike the health care subsidies that members of Congress, White House appointees and staff were set to receive under the new health care law, a GOP lawmaker said. Under the new House GOP proposal — the second one they proposed Tuesday — union workers would also remain subject to a $63 health insurance tax from which they had sought an exemption. The proposal also would give the House and Senate until mid-December negotiate a new, long-term budget. "The...