Free Republic

San Francisco architect Lee Hammack says he and his wife, JoEllen Brothers, are “cradle Democrats.” They have donated to the liberal group Organizing for America and worked the phone banks a year ago for President Obama’s re-election. Since 1995, Hammack and Brothers have received their health coverage from Kaiser Permanente, where Brothers worked until 2009 as a dietitian and diabetes educator. “We’ve both been in very good health all of our lives – exercise, don’t smoke, drink lightly, healthy weight, no health issues, and so on,” Hammack told me. The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been...

Despite extensive problems with healthcare.gov, a few dozen Alaskans have managed to enroll in a health plan on the marketplace, and Lara Imler is one of them. Imler spends a lot of time in doctors' offices. She has Hashimoto's disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid. The treatments and blood work she needs are expensive. Imler qualified for subsidies, and chose a mid-level plan that will cost her $110 a month. "The website sucks -- I'm not going to lie," she says, "but the idea that I might be able to afford health insurance is huge to me. It...

PRINCETON, NJ -- In the midst of widespread news coverage of problems with the federal health exchange website, relatively few uninsured Americans (18%) -- the primary target population for the exchanges -- have so far attempted to visit an exchange website. The percentage is slightly higher, 22%, among uninsured Americans who say they plan to get insurance through the exchanges. Have you personally gone to, or attempted to go to, a government health insurance exchange website since the Internet-based health exchanges opened on October 1, or not?

A new Gallup poll brings more terrible news for President Obama and his signature health plan, showing that only 22% of uninsured Americans intend to buy insurance through the ObamaCare exchanges. One of the major selling points for using ObamaCare to disrupt our health care system (that polls showed up to 80% of Americans were satisfied with) was to insure the uninsured. But according to this poll, only a very small minority of that small minority is even interested in obtaining insurance. Even more troubling is the realization that a month ago, that number was double; a full 44% of...

So what was the point of all this drama? Why did Democrats pass this awful health care law? Wasn’t it to ensure that those without healthcare insurance would finally be covered? Hmmm … maybe someone should have asked the uninsured whether or not it was a priority for them. Gallup tells us most of them are ignoring the push for them to enroll: In the midst of widespread news coverage of problems with the federal health exchange website, relatively few uninsured Americans (18%) — the primary target population for the exchanges — have so far attempted to visit an exchange...

LINK ONLY PER FR POSTING RULES: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/07/state-aca-numbers/3468489/

LOLOL. Cost them $4M -- a million per signup.

The problem-plagued ObamaCare website was only equipped to handle 1,100 users a day before it was launched, documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee reveal. The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that the website’s repeated crashes were due to unexpectedly high traffic. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said on Oct. 6 that the website was expected to draw around 60,000 simultaneous users but instead drew many more, around 250,000. However, a Healthcare.gov testing bulletin from Sept. 30, the day before the site’s launch, states that the website began to run into trouble with far fewer users. “Currently...

Insurers say the early buyers of health coverage on the nation's troubled new websites are older than expected so far, raising early concerns about the economics of the insurance marketplaces. If the trend continues, an older, more expensive set of customers could drive up prices for everyone, the insurers say, by forcing them to spread their costs around. "We need a broad range of people to make this work, and we're not seeing that right now," said Heather Thiltgen of Medical Mutual of Ohio, the state's largest insurer by individual customers. "We're seeing the population skewing older." The early numbers,...

The uneasy alliance between President Obama and health insurers is being put to the test by the troubled rollout of ObamaCare. With the botched enrollment website dragging Obama’s approval rating to record lows and threatening to undermine his biggest legislative achievement, some Democrats say the president should deflect blame onto the industry. The healthcare companies in many ways represent an ideal political target, as they are unpopular and intimately involved in the rollout — and Democrats haven’t hesitated to go after them in the past. Democrats highlighted what they said were the heartless business practices of insurers during the debate...

The public’s problems in trying to deal with the troubled Health Insurance Marketplace website aren’t the only problems plaguing the system. WNCN Investigates learned the state’s largest insurer has experienced a number of problems with the system. Blue Cross Blue Shield has more than 3.7 million customers in our state, but internal emails obtained by WNCN show that as of last Friday, only one person had enrolled for health insurance through the Exchange and that person hasn’t paid. Without payment, enrollment means nothing because the customer is still not officially in the system.

While the Obama administration last month worked on resolving issues with HealthCare.gov, it had concerns that it was misleading consumers by suggesting they'd make more progress signing up for an Obamacare insurance plan with a paper application, documents recently turned over to Congress show. "The paper applications allow people to feel like they are moving forward in the process and provides another option; at the end of the day, we are all stuck in the same queue," the notes from an Obama administration meeting on Oct. 11 say. Notes from an Oct. 15 meeting say, "Navigators are seeing people very...

I wanted to let you know that earlier today I received my "Obamacare enrollment packet” from the White House. It contained: · An aspirin and a band-aid. · An 'Obama Hope & Change' bumper sticker · A 'Bush's Fault' yard sign · A 'Blame Republicans first, then anybody and everybody' poster · A 'Tax the Rich' banner · An application for unemployment and a free cellphone · An application for food stamps · A prayer rug · A letter assigning my debt to my grandchildren · And lastly, a coupon for a machine that blows smoke up my ass. Everything...

Gov. John Kitzhaber on Friday downplayed the problems that have plagued Oregon’s health insurance exchange and urged people who need insurance by Jan. 1 to fill out a paper application instead of waiting for online enrollment to work. Nobody has been able to enroll in health insurance through Cover Oregon, the state’s health insurance exchange, because software glitches have prevented the website from accurately determining whether people qualify for federal subsidies or publicly funded health care through Medicaid.

Insurance company executives told a state legislative panel Wednesday they have enrolled fewer than 170 Arkansans in health insurance plans through the Arkansas Health Insurance Marketplace. Cal Kellogg, executive vice president and chief strategy officer of Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield, Michael Stock, president and CEO of QualChoice of Arkansas, and John Ryan, CEO of Arkansas Health & Wellness Solutions, were asked about enrollment numbers while testifying before the legislative oversight committee on the marketplace.Four insurance carriers sell plans through the marketplace, which launched Oct. 1. The fourth is the national Blue Cross Blue Shield. Kellogg said he has seen...

CBS News has learned the website failed with a small test pool of 200 to 300 people that included employees from the government and insurance companies. CMS employees were provided fake personal information to enter into HealthCare.gov rather than their own data and were given a date that testing would begin. However, on that date, the employees were told it was being postponed. When the testing finally took place in late September, the testers started trying to create an application. Just a couple of pages into the process, everything "ground to a stop," said one source. "It froze. It couldn't...

Marilyn B. Tavenner, the official in charge of President Obama’s health insurance marketplace, apologized on Tuesday to millions of Americans who have been frustrated in trying to buy insurance under the new health care law. She repeatedly refused to say how many of those people had actually enrolled in health insurance plans since the federal and state marketplaces, or exchanges, opened on Oct. 1. “That number will not be available until mid-November,” Ms. Tavenner said. “We expect the initial number to be small.”

The head of the agency responsible for overseeing the troubled HealthCare.gov repeatedly refused to disclose how many people have enrolled in ObamaCare -- during a hearing where she did not deny that officials have that information. Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, testified Tuesday before the House Ways and Means Committee. At the top of the hearing, she apologized for the failures of the main ObamaCare website and vowed to fix them. But, raising more questions about the administration's transparency on the project, she declined to cite enrollment numbers. She did not claim, as Health...

You can now see cost options of various Obamacare plans whether or not you are registered. Once on the site (click on the above link), filter your state and county. Click on the lines as shown by the arrow, not the "i" symbol. Don't bother with the instruction line at the top of the form that reads "For instructions on how to read and use this data, please view the documentation available under the ‘About’ tab on" If you find and click on the "about tab", it humorously looks like this: After you click on the "about tab", one of...

An old saying reminds us that when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But the opposite is also true: if you plan to fail, you fail to plan. If the success of a project is not important to you, if you secretly hope that it will fail, then you will not be bothered to exercise the due diligence necessary to make it succeed. Does this explain the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare? Was the system designed to fail from the beginning? ObamaCare has always been based on an untenable contradiction. President Obama's rhetoric when he pushed through his signature...