Train Wreck: "Obamacare Rollout Worse Than Initially Realized" Even "Loyal Obama Supporters, Canceled By Obamacare"
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| by AF "Tony" Branco |
President Obama is in Dallas today on the taxpayers dime promoting Obamacare and raising money for Senate Democrats in battleground states.
The House is not in session.
The Senate reconvened at 10:30 AM today and agreed by unanimous consent to proceed to S. 815, legislation known as ENDA (following the successful Monday vote to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed). Votes on amendments to the bill are possible today.
AP writes, “Beset by hard-to-keep promises and a massive website failure, President Barack Obama is promoting his embattled health care law in the state with the highest rate of uninsured Americans, which has also been politically hostile to the signature initiative of his presidency. Obama was traveling to Dallas on Wednesday to encourage participation in the federal insurance marketplace set up by the law. . . . The president has been aggressively promoting the law in the face of numerous setbacks. In addition to the problem-plagued enrollment launch, insurers have been sending some of their customers termination notices because their policies don't meet federal requirements. The notices have put Obama and White House officials on the defensive as they attempt to explain Obama's early vow that under the new law, people who like their existing coverage would be allowed to keep it.”
However, no one really seems to be buying the White House’s new attempts to spin the president’s repeated unequivocal promises that “If you have health insurance and you like it, and you have a doctor that you like, then you can keep it. Period.” Even Politifact, which has been generous to the point of absurdity in its rulings about Obamacare, finally awards the president a “Pants on Fire” for his latest claims. “President Barack Obama’s attempt at explanation has only fanned the flames of controversy over his campaign line, ‘If you like your health care, you can keep it.’ . . . According to Obama, ‘What we said was you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.’ But we found at least 37 times since Obama’s inauguration where he or a top administration official made a variation of the pledge that if you like your plan, you can keep it, and we never found an instance in which he offered the caveat that it only applies to plans that hadn’t changed after the law’s passage. And seven of those 37 cases came after the release of the HHS regulations that defined the ‘grandfathering’ process, when the impact would be clear. . . . Obama is ignoring the overwhelming majority of times he addressed the issue, where most people would have heard it. We rate his claim Pants on Fire.”
As the president continues his spin and sales pitches, the reality of the failures of his administration and the law itself become ever more apparent. The embattled website featured prominently in news stories today. According to The New York Times, “More than 100 pages of ‘war room notes’ released by congressional investigators on Tuesday offer a window into the chaos that overwhelmed the Obama administration as the federal health insurance marketplace started up last month and officials realized that its problems could not be fixed quickly. . . . The notes indicate that by Oct. 8, one week after the exchange opened, administration officials had begun to realize that its problems were widespread and could not be easily fixed. No sooner was one problem solved than others popped up. The documents show that officials were focused on addressing individual bugs, rather than the larger issue: The website was not working properly from Day 1.” CNN adds, “A stack of daily updates written by Obamacare contractors shows the October rollout hit more walls than previously known: In the first days, half of the calls to the phone center had problems, paper applications could not be processed and up to 40,000 people at a time were sitting in the waiting room of HealthCare.gov . . . . ‘50% of the call center calls have issues,’ reads an entry on day three of the sign-up. ‘Anecdotal evidence supports a widerspread problem (with the call centers),’the October 3 document says. Phone trouble continued into the next week. . . . At the same time, the paper applications starting to arrive were in limbo. ‘Serco still cannot process online the 500+ applications they have,’ reads one line from October 8 war room notes. Serco is the company paid to handle all the paperwork involved with the Affordable Care Acts sign-ups. Website problems meant that Serco, like individual consumers themselves, could not file applications online.”
On top of these failures are all the serious security concerns. The AP reports, “Obama administration officials are facing mounting questions about whether they cut corners on security testing while rushing to meet a self-imposed deadline to launch online health insurance markets. Documents show that the part of HealthCare.gov that consumers interact with directly received only a temporary six-month security certification because it had not been fully tested before Oct. 1, when the website went live. It's also the part of the system that stores personal information. The administration insists the trouble-prone website is secure, but technicians had to scramble to make a software fix earlier this week after learning that a North Carolina man tried to log on and got a South Carolina man's personal information.” Politico points out, “Early stumbles on the hobbled Obamacare website — password glitches, incomplete testing and fractured development — underscore considerable safety risks and hint at deeper vulnerabilities, data security experts warn. . . . ‘Some of these things are real amateur hour,’ Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the Center for Democracy & Technology’s chief technologist, said in an interview. ‘This might just be an error, but you could not pass an undergraduate [computer science] class by making these mistakes.’ . . . A software tester recently discovered a series of potential security flaws, including one in the site’s password-reset function that would enable a skilled hacker to access users’ email and security questions. Another allowed a password-reset request to send information to third-party analytics companies such as Pingdom and Google’s DoubleClick. . . . ‘If you couldn’t adequately plan for the system, how could you adequately plan for the security of the system?’ said Julian Waits, CEO of ThreatTrack Security, a cybersecurity company that does work with government agencies.”
But, as Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell explained on the Senate floor this morning, “The White House keeps promising Americans that, once HealthCare.gov is fixed, everyone’s going to love Obamacare. But it’s hard to see how that could possibly happen.
- An I.T. guy isn’t going to give Americans their health plans back.
- An I.T. guy isn’t going to make Obamacare premiums any more affordable, or its coverage any better.
- An I.T. guy isn’t going to allow Americans to keep seeing the same doctors they like, or to continue going to the hospitals that deliver the care they want.
- And let’s not forget: There is no software fix for undoing damage this law has already inflicted on the paychecks and lost hours of our constituents; there’s no string of code for repairing Obamacare’s harm to jobs and our economy.
Indeed, in the midst of all the new reporting on website problems the negative policy consequences of this unpopular law continue to hit home. In New Mexico, the Albuquerque Journal reports, “Fees the federal government will impose Jan. 1 to help fund provisions of the Affordable Care Act will cost the city of Albuquerque an additional $875,000 in the current fiscal year and Bernalillo County an additional $349,000, according to a city Budget Division analysis. In all, 17 agencies and local and county governments that have come together to create an insurance purchasing pool will face an extra budget hit of $1.452 million between Jan. 1 and the end of the 2014 fiscal year June 30 – over and above the money they already spend to provide health insurance to employees. That amount would double to nearly $3 million for a full year in fiscal 2015. . . . The charges do not provide any additional direct benefit to people already covered by city or county health insurance.”
Meanwhile, ProPublica writes, “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 dietician and diabetes educator. . . . The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been paying $550 a month for their health coverage — a plan that offers solid coverage, not one of the skimpy plans Obama has criticized. But recently, Kaiser informed them the plan would be canceled at the end of the year because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The couple would need to find another one. The cost would be around double what they pay now, but the benefits would be worse. . . . When they shopped around and looked for a different plan on California's new health insurance marketplace, Covered California, the cheapest one was $975, with hefty deductibles and copays.”
Even more reports in bullet form:
- “…at least 80,000 people in Louisiana won't be able to keep their current insurance coverage because of the federal health overhaul.” (AP)
- “Obama had repeatedly promised that under the new signature law, people with insurance would be able to keep their existing plans if they wanted to…” (Reuters)
- “…that wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. … On Monday night, Obama revised his pledge, changing the ‘period’ into an ‘asterisk.’” (Los Angeles Times)
- “Obama stands accused by critics of brashly lying about implications of his signature health care law … So far, Obama's efforts to extricate himself have backfired.” (AFP)
- “Is it really misspeaking when the president repeats a poll-tested pledge dozens of times, often reading from prepared remarks on his teleprompter, straight into the camera?” (Jonah Goldberg, USA Today)
- “Obama administration officials are facing mounting questions about whether they cut corners on security testing …” (AP)
- “…documents make clear that the administration grossly underestimated the scope of the website’s technical problems; struggled to contain widespread confusion among insurers and applicants; and now faces a barrage of new challenges triggered by its emphasis on paper applications.” (ABC News)
- “‘The launching of the Affordable Care Act has been more than bumpy,’ [Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)] said. ‘I believe there’s been a crisis of confidence created in the dysfunctional nature of the website, the canceling of policies, and sticker shock from some people.’” (National Journal)
- WATCH: “‘We're concerned next media story is some consumers getting on website and finding fewer options, higher prices’…” (CNN)
As Leader McConnell said, “The White House has tried to dismiss stories about folks losing insurance by saying they had lousy plans to begin with, and that those Americans should be happy that the government is now forcing them to get a different one. But what so many have discovered is that Obamacare is actually worse. . . . Look: Our constituents are worried. They feel deceived. They’re upset. And they should be. Not only with the law itself, but with the way this Administration has basically brushed their concerns aside. Concerns it doesn’t seem all that interested in solving. . . . It’s not right or fair. And here’s an important lesson here: Obamacare would not be law today if the President and his allies in Congress had told the truth about the consequences it would bring. . . . So the President can keep talking about a website if he wants. But Republicans are going to keep fighting for the middle-class Americans who are suffering under this law.”
Tags: Train Wreck, Obamacare, rollout, news sources, worse than expected To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!
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