Thread: Rush: ObamaCare Website Glitches Are Purposeful In Order To Hide Actual Costs

Rush: ObamaCare Website Glitches Are Purposeful In Order To Keep People From Learning Actual Costs

Posted on October 14, 2013 by BMartin1776



I have no doubt part of the reason the obamascare website doesn’t work is to hide costs. Those who have gotten through the signup process have reported premium increases up to 300% from what they are paying now. The other reason for the glitches is obvious the system was set up by a pack of buffoons who couldn’t program an Atari 2600!

I cannot understand how anyone can support this law with everything we know to date about it. Everything people have been warning about this obamination of a law is true. Allowing the law to be implemented is the worst strategy anyone could suggest. If we wait and hope for a conservative majority in Congress and the White House to repeal it, it will be too late. There will be too many people on the system, it will be embedded into the economic and healthcare system and there will be no way to repeal obamacare.

We have to hold the line and not budge over the shutdown and false threat of a default. DC wants to play games fine let’s play the game and call the radicals bluff on all of their economic scare tactics.
….

Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are

Avik Roy | Forbes

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.

HHS didn’t want users to see Obamacare’s true costs

“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.” Why was it delayed? “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.” (Emphasis added.)

As you know if you’ve been following this space, Obamacare’s bevy of mandates, regulations, taxes, and fees drives up the cost of the insurance plans that are offered under the law’s public exchanges. A Manhattan Institute analysis I helped conduct found that, on average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, under Obamacare, will be 99 percent more expensive for men, and 62 percent more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for healthy people.

That raises an obvious question. If 50 million people are uninsured today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier?

..more

http://savingtherepublic.com/blog/20...-actual-costs/

PHARMA & HEALTHCARE | 10/14/2013 @ 11:39AM |581,793 views

Obamacare's Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn't Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are

Avik Roy, Contributor
1,039 comments, 1,019 called-out
Comment Now

The Healthcare.gov website requires that individuals looking for coverage enter personal information before comparing plans. IT experts believe that this requirement is causing the website to crash.

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.

HHS didn’t want users to see Obamacare’s true costs

“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.” Why was it delayed? “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.” (Emphasis added.)

How Obamacare's Exchanges Turned Into A 'Third World Experience'

Avik RoyContributor

Americans Experiencing Government Shutdown From Their Desktops
Samantha Sharf Forbes Staff

CMS on Obamacare's Health Insurance Exchanges: 'Let's Just Make Sure It's Not a Third-World Experience'
Avik Roy Contributor

Enrollment In Obamacare's Federal Exchange, So Far, May Only Be In 'Single Digits'
Avik Roy Contributor

As you know if you’ve been following this space, Obamacare’s bevy of mandates, regulations, taxes, and fees drives up the cost of the insurance plans that are offered under the law’s public exchanges. AManhattan Institute analysis I helped conduct found that, on average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, under Obamacare, will be 99 percent more expensive for men, and 62 percent more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for healthy people.

That raises an obvious question. If 50 million people are uninsured today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier?

Political objectives trumped operational objectives

The answer is that Obamacare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions.



But the laws’ supporters and enforcers don’t want you to know that, because it would violate the President’s incessantly repeated promise that nothing would change for the people that Obamacare doesn’t directly help. If you shop for Obamacare-based coverage without knowing if you qualify for subsidies, you might be discouraged by the law’s steep costs.

So, by analyzing your income first, if you qualify for heavy subsidies, the website can advertise those subsidies to you instead of just hitting you with Obamacare’s steep premiums. For example, the site could advertise plans that “$0″ or “$30″ instead of explaining that the plan really costs $200, and you’re getting a subsidy of $200 or $170. But you’ll have to be at or near the poverty line to gain subsidies of that size; most people will either not qualify for a subsidy, or qualify for a small one that, net-net, doesn’t make up for the law’s cost hikes.

This political objective—masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans—far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly. Think about it the other way around. If the “Affordable Care Act” truly did make health insurance more affordable, there would be no need to hide these prices from the public.

Subsidy verification created a traffic bottleneck
Comparable private-sector e-commerce sites, like eHealthInsurance.com, allow you to shop for plans and compare prices simply by entering your age and your ZIP code. After you’ve selected a plan you like, you fill out an on-line application. That substantially winnows down the number of people who rely on the site for network-intensive tasks.

The federal government’s decision to force people to apply before shopping, Weaver and Radnofsky write, “proved crucial because, before users can begin shopping for coverage, they must cross a busy digital junction in which data are swapped among separate computer systems built or run by contractors including CGI Group Inc., the healthcare.gov developer, Quality Software Services Inc., a UnitedHealth Group Inc. unit; and credit-checker Experian PLC. If any part of the web of systems fails to work properly, it could lead to a traffic jam blocking most users from the marketplace.”

Jay Angoff, a former federal official at the agency that oversees the exchange, told the Journal that he was surprised by the decision. “People should be able to get quotes” without entering all of that information upfront.

Weaver and Radnofsky say that the core problem stems from “the slate of registration systems [that] intersect with Oracle Identity Manager, a software component embedded in a government identity-checking system.” The main Healthcare.gov web page collects information using the CGI Group technology. Then that data is transferred to a system built by Quailty Software Services. QSS then sends data to Experian, the credit-history firm. But the key “identity management system” employed by QSS was designed by Oracle, and according to the Journal’s sources, the Oracle software isn’t playing nicely with the other information systems.

Oracle hotly denies these claims. “Our software is the identical product deployed in most of the world’s most complex systems…our software is running properly,” said an Oracle spokeswoman in a statement.

‘It’s awful, just awful’
Robert Pear and colleagues at the New York Times have a piece up todaydetailing the serious problems with the federal exchange, problems that may get worse, not better. They confirm what we already knew: that the Obama administration refused to delay the implementation of the exchanges, despite the well-known problems, because they were afraid of the political blowback. “Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law.”

As I documented last week, IT and insurance experts have been saying for at least eight months that implementation of the exchanges was going badly, that as early as February officials were warning of a “third world experience.” The Times’ sources are just as blunt. “These are not glitches,” said one insurance executive. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our [conference calls with the administration], people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’”

“We foresee a train wreck,” said another executive in a February interview with the Times. “We don’t have the IT specifications. The level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are.” Richard Foster, the former chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said last week that “so much testing of the new system was so far behind schedule, I was not confident it would work well.”

Henry Chao, the deputy chief information officer at CMS who made the “third world experience” comment, was told by his superiors that failure to meet the October 1 launch deadline “was not an option,” according to the Times.

White House knowingly chose to court disaster

Think about it. It’s quite possible that much of this disaster could have been avoided if the Obama administration had been willing to be open with the public about the degree to which Obamacare escalates the cost of health insurance. If they had, then a number of the problems with the exchange’s software architecture would have been avoided. But that would require admitting that the “Affordable Care Act” was not accurately named.
They knew that their people on the front lines, people like Henry Chao, were worried that the exchanges would get botched. They saw the Congressional Research Service memorandum detailing that the administration has missed half of the statutory deadlines assigned by the law. But they were more afraid of the P.R. disaster of disclosing Obamacare’s high premiums than they were of the P.R. disaster of crashing websites. What you see is the result.

* * *

Follow @Avik on Twitter, Google+, and YouTube, and The Apothecary onFacebook.

Or, sign up to receive a weekly e-mail digest of articles from The Apothecary.

* * *

INVESTORS’ NOTE: The biggest publicly-traded players in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges are Aetna (NYSE:AET), Humana (NYSE:HUM), Cigna (NYSE:CI), Molina (NYSE:MOH), WellPoint (NYSE:WLP), and Centene (NYSE:CNC), in order of the percentage of uninsured, exchange-eligible Americans for whom their plans are available.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapoth...ns-true-costs/

the ONLY People that should be FORCED onto Obamacare are the CRACK HEADS that designed and SIGNED this CRACK HEAD LAW

http://www.alipac.us/f9/lou-dobbs-nu...-video-289567/

Obamacare Exposed Biggest Swindle Ever

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMFLbRilj3M

Published on Oct 12, 2013

Obamacare Exposed Biggest Swindle Ever

After reading the Obamacare Act, I came to realize it wasn't about healthcare at all. It is the biggest swindle in the history of politics.

It literally transfer power from the entire federal government to the secretary that overseas this, who ultimately reports to the president.

Also the website was plagued with glitches, which they already knew, but they launched anyway. No one can sign up for it.

Finally, the democrats and liberal media are advising Obama to take the republican deal and delay Obamacare.

Category

News & Politics

License

Standard YouTube License

OBAMACARE MELTDOWN TRIGGERS CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS



By: Byron York
10/15/2013 01:34 PM

House Republicans don’t have the power to stop Obamacare. But they do have the power to investigate it.
Recent weeks have seen the meltdown of the Obamacare national online marketplace, reported to have cost between $400 million and $600 million so far. There are also indications the administration knew serious problems were coming and hid them from lawmakers who have a responsibility to oversee the program.
The episode has prompted a lot of questions on Capitol Hill. Just how many people have tried to purchase coverage on the exchanges? How many have succeeded? Is the level of interest sufficient for Obamacare to reach its goal of seven million enrollees? Why is the administration being so secretive about it?
Also, what about the security of Americans’ confidential health and financial information? Does the struggling system have adequate protections for that?
And once the administration finally gets its website working, will millions of Americans experience sticker shock, discovering that they will have to pay higher premiums and deductibles for coverage? What were the administration’s in-house estimates on that?
As House Republicans see it, there is much to talk about. Last Thursday, Rep. Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent letters to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, as well as some major Obamacare contractors, wanting to know why HHS officials were painting a rosy picture of the exchanges just weeks before it all came crashing down.
“Staff from your agency who briefed committee staff in August 2013 explained that testing of the [exchanges] was proceeding on schedule and did not identify any problems like the ones now being experienced on HealthCare.gov,” Upton told Sebelius. In addition, Upton said a top Obamacare official told the committee on Sept. 19 that consumers would have immediate and full access to Obamacare’s programs, “and they will be able to choose a plan and get enrolled in coverage beginning Oct. 1.”
That certainly didn’t happen. Citing what he calls “a host of broken promises” from the Obama administration, Upton is preparing to call those officials back for more testimony. “We want to look at the rollout, and what they said this summer,” Upton told me, “when they absolutely verified that everything was fine and dandy.”
In addition to testimony, Upton wants internal documents relating to the exchange’s design and testing, plus documents from outside experts involved.
And there are still more questions. How did the Obama team select the contractors involved in the (so far, disastrous) rollout? The Washington Examiner’s Richard Pollock has reported that federal officials relied on just one company to design the system. “Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders,” Pollock reported, “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.”
That is a classic subject for congressional investigation. And so is the subject of cost: Just how much has the administration spent on the exchanges so far versus its original estimates, and how much will it cost to fix the system now? And what about the administration’s story that the exchanges’ early problems were due simply to an enormous amount of traffic from people wanting to sign up? Where did that come from?
In addition to Upton, Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Lamar Alexander, the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, are seeking answers from the administration. In a letter to Sebelius on Thursday, the lawmakers demanded a wide range of information from HHS, “for us to better determine whether any corrective legislative actions are necessary.”
The number of Obamacare investigations on Capitol Hill is likely to grow in coming weeks. There’s no denying the probes will have a political element, as Republican chairmen in the House lead the charge. And if Obamacare’s problems continue, and perhaps expand, the situation could be politically advantageous for the GOP. No one should be surprised if a White House on the defensive accuses Republicans of playing politics.
But the fact is, the investigations are necessary and appropriate; Obamacare is a massive, and massively expensive, federal undertaking that could bring about major changes in the lives of millions of Americans. It must have congressional supervision.
“We’re going to be pursuing this with a lot of vigor,” said Upton. “This issue is not going away.”

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/10/1...nvestigations/

Obamacare: Sticker Shock Hits Obama’s Home Town

Posted on 15 October, 2013 by sophia



Via Townhall
As promised, here’s a second tranche of Obamacare news. Yesterday, we focused on the depth and breadth of Obamacare’s technical failures — an important storyline, to be sure. But fixating exclusively on the trainwreck aspect is a mistake. This law is harmful and damaging for reasons far beyond the shocking incompetence of its launch:
(1) While we’re on the topic of the online exchange meltdown, you’ll likely be interested in the Washington Examiner’s report that the Obama administration only entertained one contract to build the now-infamous federal exchange website. Several years and nearly $100,000,000.00 later, Obama’s no-bid contract has produced a complete mess. Lest you’d forgotten, liberals railed against no-bid contracts during the Bush years, muttering endlessly about Dick Cheney and Halliburton, for instance. Barack Obama pledged to reform the government procurement process; like many Obama promises, it has gone unfulfilled. The result is the monument to government ineptitude known as healthcare.gov.
(2) CNN estimates that a paltry 117,000 Americans have enrolled in Obamacare so far — a statistic that may or may not suffer from the duplication issue that’s plagued the suppressed-then-leaked federal numbers. In individual states, things continue to go badly. In most states, enrollment data is incomplete or unavailable.
(3) Hospitals are shedding staff, and insurers are still pulling out of markets, both phenomena will exacerbate consumers’ “access shock” in places like California and New Hampshire.
(4) In Massachusetts — the state-level laboratory for Obamacare — an acute doctor shortage is becoming more severe, raising access concerns. Obamacare expands this issue on a national scale.
(5) The San Francisco Chronicle has discovered a brilliant method of lowering one’s healthcare costs under the new law: Earn less money. To come out ahead under this scheme, individuals or families would have to reduce their income to the point that it dips below the maximum threshold for government assistance. What a message that sends. Work less, earn less, get more from Uncle Sam hard-working taxpayers.
(6) Finally, and importantly, we’re witnessing more premium shock for average people. We wrote about Obamacare’s terrible consequences for a disabled mother of a young child on Friday; now the Chicago Tribune introduces America to some additional victims of the president’s “Affordable” Care Act:
Adam Weldzius, a nurse practitioner, considers himself better informed than most when it comes to the inner workings of health insurance. But even he wasn’t prepared for the pocketbook hit he’ll face next year under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. If the 33-year-old single father wants the same level of coverage next year as what he has now with the same insurer and the same network of doctors and hospitals, his monthly premium of $233 will more than double. If he wants to keep his monthly payments in check, the Carpentersville resident is looking at an annual deductible for himself and his 7-year-old daughter of $12,700, a more than threefold increase from $3,500 today. “I believe everybody should be able to have health insurance, but at the same time, I’m being penalized. And for what?” said Weldzius…a Tribune analysis shows that 21 of the 22 lowest-priced plansoffered on the Illinois health insurance exchange for Cook Countyhave annual deductibles of more than $4,000 for an individual and $8,000 for family coverage. Those deductibles, which represent the out-of-pocket money consumers must spend on health care before most insurance benefits kick in, are higher than what many consumers expected or may be able to stomach, benefit experts said.
Premium shock is only one part of the puzzle. Out-of-pocket sticker shock is just as pernicious, and just as unaffordable for many working families.

http://gopthedailydose.com/2013/10/1...mas-home-town/

DOCTOR'S ORDERS

Obama 'crashing health-care site on purpose'

Fear that public would be terrified if people knew true cost

Published: 1 day ago
Bob Unruh

2 Videos at the Page Link:

Obamacare officials were so worried about the reaction should Americans actually see what their health coverage will cost under the president’s signature law that they chose to set up a system that clogs up and crashes while an applicant’s eligibility for a subsidy is evaluated.

1st Video at the Page Link:

That’s according to a report by Forbes that says Healthcare.gov forces users to create an account and enter detailed personal information before they can start shopping.

Forbes contributor Avik Roy explains that the system creates a massive traffic bottleneck as the government verifies the information and decides whether or not the applicant is eligible for subsidies.

“HHS bureaucrats knew that would make the website run more slowly,” he writes. “But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.”

Whatever the reason, it appears that very few people have successfully navigated Healthcare.gov

Officials in Colorado, running their “Connect for Health” program, said only 226 people signed up for the insurance in the first full week of operations.

And in that state, according to the Denver Post, customers “are still being asked to complete their purchases by phone to ensure they get appropriate government subsidies based on their incomes.”

Sign a petition urging the GOP not to cave in.

Talk-radio icon Rush Limbaugh discussed the Forbes report Monday.

“The purpose was to get healthy people with average incomes to sign up and then gouge them, but the IT experts say the regime didn’t want them to see when they signed up they were getting gouged,” he said.

2nd Video at the Page Link:

“So they caused the glitches that caused the slowdown so that people would keep trying to sign up, while not being able to, all because at this stage the regime can’t afford for people to learn that there isn’t going to be a $2,500 discount in your premium, there isn’t going to be free health care, there isn’t going to be anything Obama’s promised for healthy people with average incomes. They think that they are the chosen group!”

Roy’s Forbes report said the Wall Street Journal documented that there was supposed to be an Obamacare option to browse before registering, but that tool was delayed.

The Wall Street Journal reported “an HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.”

Roy says a Manhattan Institute analysis on which he worked found that Obamacare policies for men will be 99 percent more expensive – and for women 62 percent more expensive – than the cheapest plan offered under the old system.

“That raises an obvious questions,” Roy writes. “If 50 million people are uninsured today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier?

“The answer is that Obamcare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions,” he says.

“But the laws’ supporters and enforcers don’t want you to know that, because it would violate the president’s incessantly repeated promise that nothing would change for the people that Obamcare doesn’t directly help. If you shop for Obamacare-based coverage without knowing if you qualify for subsidies, you might be discouraged by the law’s steep costs.”

Healthcare.gov now can advertise plans for “$0″ or “$30″ instead of explaining the actual cost, $200, is subsidized.

“This political objective – masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans – far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly,” Roy writes.

“Think about it. It’s quite possible that much of this disaster could have been avoided if the Obama administration had been willing to be open with the public about the degree to which Obamacare escalates the cost of health insurance.”

Limbaugh said the people “that vote for Obama, healthy Democrats, they think they’re in it and Obamacare is to get this for them free or much cheaper than what it would cost them if they had to use their employer.”

“And, of course, the dirty little secret – and it always has been, I mean by design – is that healthy people who are not going to access the system for treatment because they’re healthy are going to be gouged and their higher premiums are going to cover the cost for those who do need treatment and the people that can’t afford it,” he said.

Limbaugh noted that Obama sold his health-care plan as: “You get to keep your doctor, you get to keep your insurance plan if you like it, and your premiums going to come down $2,500.”

But “none of that’s true,” Limbaugh said.

“The truth starting to trickle out is that it isn’t affordable, it isn’t going to be cheaper, and it’s actually designed to screw young, healthy people who are going to be paying more and eventually their fines are going to be higher than what the cost of a policy would be.”

Sign a petition telling the GOP not to cave in.

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Expensive Obamacare Website Crashed Purposely, To Hide Expensive Obamacare Plans

October 22, 2013 by Sam Rolley

PHOTOS.COM

Conservative estimates of the amount of taxpayer dollars spent on President Barack Obama’s glitch-ridden healthcare exchange website place its cost somewhere in the range of $500 million.

According to figures from the Government Accountability Office, nearly $394 million from fiscal year 2010 through March 2013 was spent on contracts to build the “federally facilitated exchanges.” An estimated additional $150 million has been spent on administrative costs associated with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

By comparison, here’s what similar investments have garnered in the private tech industry in the United States, according to an assessment by Digital Trends:

• After receiving an initial round of investment in June 2004, Facebook grew and improved until 2010 without spending $500 million.
• Twitter operated with $360.17 million in funding from 2006 until 2011, when it received an additional $400 million in funding.
• Before being bought by Facebook for $1 billion, the wildly popular photo sharing company Instagram operated with just $57.5 million in funding from 2010 to 2012.
• Linkedin, the preferred social network of business professionals, has raised only $200 million in funding.

Facebook has more than 1 billion active users. Twitter handles more than 340 million tweets each day. On any given day, more than 7.3 million people might be active on Instagram. And Linkedin is helping more than 225 million professionals throughout the world network at the moment.

Obama’s online health insurance exchange, after being online for just more than two weeks, is falling apart. And while it may seem natural for glitches to be part of the initial rollout process, reports indicate that the Obamacare website is rife with problems that are much more serious than a few lines of errant computer code.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that up to 5 million lines of coding could need to be rewritten in order to improve the Obamacare enrollment system to the point that users can actually make it through the enrollment process. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said over the weekend it was bringing in “some of the best and brightest” to fix the website. But the job may not be finished in time for uninsured Americans to sign up for health insurance in time to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.

“Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1,” the Times report said.

“However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system.

“Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.”

Even once the surface problems are repaired, one expert told the Times, other malfunctions are certain to become apparent.

The President assured Americans in a speech from the White House Rose Garden on Monday: “Nobody’s madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s going to get fixed.”

Flocked by what the White House described as a group of people who “have either benefited from the health care law already or are helping consumers learn about what the law means for them and how they can get covered,” Obama went on the say that the website failures are not representative of the Affordable Care Act’s overall effect.

“The essence of the law, the health insurance that’s available to people, is working just fine,” Obama said.

But, some observers believe that the President is lying.

Writing for Forbes, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Avik Roy, posited earlier in the month that part of the reason the healthcare exchange website is so dysfunctional is related to a lack of transparency over the massive healthcare cost increases that accompany Obamacare.

Roy wrote: “Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.”

Later in the article he continued: “A Manhattan Institute analysis I helped conduct found that, on average, the cheapest plan offered in a given state, under Obamacare, will be 99 percent more expensive for men, and 62 percent more expensive for women, than the cheapest plan offered under the old system. And those disparities are even wider for healthy people.

“That raises an obvious question. If 50 million people are uninsured today, mainly because insurance is too expensive, why is it better to make coverage even costlier?”

In short, the White House likely knew that its health insurance exchange websites would crash once opened. It has even been suggested that Administration officials were repeatedly warned by IT experts that the bottleneck created by making Americans sign in and provide mountains of information before getting to see the actual cost of the Obamacare plans would crash the site. But, it seems, the President and his Administration officials made the determination that criticism over a broken website was better than the alternative of not hiding the prices, thereby revealing that, for the average American, the Affordable Care Act is anything but affordable.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Staff Reports

http://personalliberty.com/2013/10/2...amacare-plans/