Stephanie
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2004
- 70,230
- 10,864
this is digusting and all the people should be pissed over this...all this for 5million people signed up so far, and 6million and more to come lost their insurance policies because of Obama and his grand ( vision, scam, LIE) to reform our health care...
SNIP;
y Edward Morrissey,
The Fiscal Times
March 27, 2014
What the hell is this, a joke? Speaker of the House John Boehner said in reaction to news this week that yet another deadline in the Affordable Care Act had been unilaterally delayed by the Obama administration. Unfortunately, the answer to that question is yes, and its becoming increasingly clear that the joke is on the American taxpayer.
Late Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services which has taken to bragging about enrollment numbers that fall millions short of their original goals announced that the March 31st deadline for open enrollment had become more of a guideline.
For those who could not navigate the troublesome Healthcare.gov web portal in time to meet the cutoff date for accessing approved plans, HHS would now keep the portal open and plans available for purchase, as long as users attested to the fact that they were in line for processing before the deadline. Since the announcement came almost a week before the deadline, that either suggests that it typically takes longer than that to complete an application, or that the website is more popular than a Lady Gaga concert.
Related: White House Extends Enrollment Time for Obamacare
How, though, will HHS determine who has waited in line because the web portal could not keep up with the demand? The Washington Posts Amy Goldstein reports that the simple answer is that they wont bother to try. Consumers will check a blue box in their on-line application to self-attest to their earlier, pre-deadline efforts. This method will rely on an honor system, Goldstein writes.
[The] government will not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth. The new deadline for open enrollment will now shift to somewhere about mid-April, although no one appears to know why it would take a supposedly well-functioning web portal 15 days to process enrollment applications from people attempting to access it for the final six days of an already-extended enrollment period of six months since the rollout last October 1st.
Actually, we do have a couple of hints at what may cause such a delay. The Associated Press reports that, contrary to White House insistence that the Healthcare.gov portal is working smoothly, the site runs more slowly than enrollment portals run by insurers. In fact, response times from the server run twice as long, according to Compuware, a firm that measures website performance. The nine-second response time would garner an unacceptable rating in the private sector.
Related: Insurers on Obamacare--Expect Premium Prices to Soar
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of the people most responsible for forcing Obamacare through Congress in 2010, has another theory. When challenged on the latest delay in the rollout, Reid responded that it was necessary because people are not educated about how to use the Internet.
First, one has to invoke Boehners reaction, because this is clearly a joke; the Internet has become ubiquitous in American commerce which is why Democrats like Reid created Healthcare.gov as the center of Obamacare enrollment in the first place. The problem isnt that people dont know how to use the Internet, its that HHS and the Obama administration has been incompetent in building a web portal, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars over more than three years prior to its launch.
The laughs continue in the list of hardship claims that can win consumers an extension to the open-enrollment cut-off date. HHS released a guidance document the next day outlining all seventeen ways to qualify, among them natural disasters, personal emergencies, and oddly enough, immigration. Fourteen of the seventeen qualifiers have to do with system errors, and not just with Healthcare.gov.
Related: One Third of Uninsured Wont Sign Up for Obamacare
Three of the reasons have to do with incompetence or misconduct by navigators and/or caseworkers from HHS, two of them relate to erroneous Medicaid/CHIP eligibility status, and another two are failures of the system to communicate properly with insurers, thanks to a back end that apparently still isnt fully functional six months after the rollout.
Had this been the only delay in the program, one might have had some sympathy for the issues that come in the final days of open enrollment. However, this is just the latest in a series of unilateral changes since the October 1st launch of Obamacares exchange.
Politico lists eight major delays and deadline changes since that point, including three instances of enrollment deadlines being shifted outward, an extension of high-risk pools that were supposed to be eclipsed by the offering of coverage through the exchanges, and another delay in the employer mandate after a July 2013 one-year delay all of which violate the statutes of the Affordable Care Act.
Perhaps Kathleen Sebelius can explain her Congressional testimony to Speaker Boehner by claiming to have been joking when she insisted that there would be no further delays in Obamacare earlier this month. Sebelius was asked specifically by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) about any potential pushbacks on the open-enrollment deadline two weeks ago, and replied, No sir.
SNIP:
ALL of it here
Obamacare: Taxpayers in the Hole for $1.5 Trillion | The Fiscal Times
SNIP;
y Edward Morrissey,
The Fiscal Times
March 27, 2014
What the hell is this, a joke? Speaker of the House John Boehner said in reaction to news this week that yet another deadline in the Affordable Care Act had been unilaterally delayed by the Obama administration. Unfortunately, the answer to that question is yes, and its becoming increasingly clear that the joke is on the American taxpayer.
Late Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services which has taken to bragging about enrollment numbers that fall millions short of their original goals announced that the March 31st deadline for open enrollment had become more of a guideline.
For those who could not navigate the troublesome Healthcare.gov web portal in time to meet the cutoff date for accessing approved plans, HHS would now keep the portal open and plans available for purchase, as long as users attested to the fact that they were in line for processing before the deadline. Since the announcement came almost a week before the deadline, that either suggests that it typically takes longer than that to complete an application, or that the website is more popular than a Lady Gaga concert.
Related: White House Extends Enrollment Time for Obamacare
How, though, will HHS determine who has waited in line because the web portal could not keep up with the demand? The Washington Posts Amy Goldstein reports that the simple answer is that they wont bother to try. Consumers will check a blue box in their on-line application to self-attest to their earlier, pre-deadline efforts. This method will rely on an honor system, Goldstein writes.
[The] government will not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth. The new deadline for open enrollment will now shift to somewhere about mid-April, although no one appears to know why it would take a supposedly well-functioning web portal 15 days to process enrollment applications from people attempting to access it for the final six days of an already-extended enrollment period of six months since the rollout last October 1st.
Actually, we do have a couple of hints at what may cause such a delay. The Associated Press reports that, contrary to White House insistence that the Healthcare.gov portal is working smoothly, the site runs more slowly than enrollment portals run by insurers. In fact, response times from the server run twice as long, according to Compuware, a firm that measures website performance. The nine-second response time would garner an unacceptable rating in the private sector.
Related: Insurers on Obamacare--Expect Premium Prices to Soar
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of the people most responsible for forcing Obamacare through Congress in 2010, has another theory. When challenged on the latest delay in the rollout, Reid responded that it was necessary because people are not educated about how to use the Internet.
First, one has to invoke Boehners reaction, because this is clearly a joke; the Internet has become ubiquitous in American commerce which is why Democrats like Reid created Healthcare.gov as the center of Obamacare enrollment in the first place. The problem isnt that people dont know how to use the Internet, its that HHS and the Obama administration has been incompetent in building a web portal, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars over more than three years prior to its launch.
The laughs continue in the list of hardship claims that can win consumers an extension to the open-enrollment cut-off date. HHS released a guidance document the next day outlining all seventeen ways to qualify, among them natural disasters, personal emergencies, and oddly enough, immigration. Fourteen of the seventeen qualifiers have to do with system errors, and not just with Healthcare.gov.
Related: One Third of Uninsured Wont Sign Up for Obamacare
Three of the reasons have to do with incompetence or misconduct by navigators and/or caseworkers from HHS, two of them relate to erroneous Medicaid/CHIP eligibility status, and another two are failures of the system to communicate properly with insurers, thanks to a back end that apparently still isnt fully functional six months after the rollout.
Had this been the only delay in the program, one might have had some sympathy for the issues that come in the final days of open enrollment. However, this is just the latest in a series of unilateral changes since the October 1st launch of Obamacares exchange.
Politico lists eight major delays and deadline changes since that point, including three instances of enrollment deadlines being shifted outward, an extension of high-risk pools that were supposed to be eclipsed by the offering of coverage through the exchanges, and another delay in the employer mandate after a July 2013 one-year delay all of which violate the statutes of the Affordable Care Act.
Perhaps Kathleen Sebelius can explain her Congressional testimony to Speaker Boehner by claiming to have been joking when she insisted that there would be no further delays in Obamacare earlier this month. Sebelius was asked specifically by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) about any potential pushbacks on the open-enrollment deadline two weeks ago, and replied, No sir.
SNIP:
ALL of it here
Obamacare: Taxpayers in the Hole for $1.5 Trillion | The Fiscal Times
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