Thread: The Future of Obamacare

20 Million More Healthcare Plans to be Cancelled Due to Obamacare

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Dave Jolly

Remember President Barack Obama telling Americans over and over that if they liked their current healthcare plans that they can keep them? Remember when Obamacare kicked in last October and 6 million Americans had their plans cancelled because of Obamacare? Remember when President Barack Obama stepped in and told the insurance companies to stop cancelling plans and then gave an extension for it all to be worked out?

First off, it couldn’t be worked out because the insurance companies had already spent millions of dollars re-tooling their industry to meet Obamacare requirements. The 6 million cancelled plans failed to meet Obamacare guidelines and to re-instate them would have cost the insurance industry millions more dollars to re-tool their systems again.

Secondly, the grandfather clause in Obamacare was intentionally written to make it impossible for Americans to grandfather their existing policies into our new socialist medical system. Dr. David Hogberg, a healthcare policy analyst for the National Center for Public Policy Research explained:

“If you had your plan prior to March 2010 when Obamacare became law, it was supposed to be grandfathered in. You were supposed to keep it, but the Department of Labor came out with these grandfather regulations. It’s almost like telling a guy you can keep walking on the beach as long as you don’t get any sand on your feet. It’s almost impossible not to violate.”

But what’s going to happen when Obama’s illegal extension ends?

According to some experts, up to 20 million private healthcare policies will be cancelled for failing to meet the Obamacare guidelines. Obamacare established minimum requirements for all healthcare plans offered by the insurance companies and it is estimated that up to 20 million existing polices still fail to meet those minimum requirements.

A number of insurance company executives were summoned before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this week to be grilled on the 6 million previous cancellations. Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) asked them whose fault was it for the cancellation notices that were sent out last year. Gardner’s website posted the following response:

“The witnesses confirmed that these [previous] cancellation notices were sent out due to the president’s healthcare law. It was also disclosed that millions more Americans will see their plans canceled when the president’s healthcare law is fully enforced.”

He then asked the executives how many plans they still offer that fail to meet Obamacare standards. Only one executive, representing Blue Cross Blue Shield answered, telling him about 3.2 million. The other insurance leaders said they would have to do some research to find out. If that’s an average figure for each of the companies represented before the hearing, the number of polices that fail to meet Obamacare’s minimum requirements easily reaches 20 million, possibly more.

That means that when the extension runs out, the insurance companies will have no option but to mail out around 20 million cancellations. Add those to the 6 million already cancelled and to the 18 million Americans that were previously uninsured then subtract Obama’s bogus figure of 8 million enrollees and you end up with 36 million uninsured Americans. That’s twice the number of uninsured Americans prior to Obamacare.

This is the success that Obama and Pelosi are proud of. No wonder our country is going down the toilet under their leadership!

Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/15505/2...xRiW3wAqUM4.99

ObamaCare Workers Paid to do Nothing: Surprised?

Posted by Rodney Lee Conover on May 15, 2014

A former employee at an Affordable Care Act processing center in Missouri recalls having nothing, or so little work to do that she played board games while some co-workers slept.

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Lavonne Takatz, 42, worked at the center in Wentzville from October to April.

“We played Pictionary. We played 20 Questions. We played Trivial Pursuit,” she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Wednesday.

Such allegations have spurred members of Missouri’s congressional delegation to call for investigations of the taxpayer-funded center in Wentzville, one of three nationally that are contracted to process paper applications for the new health-care law.

The federal government, under the auspices of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, gave a five-year, $1.2 billion contract last year to Serco Inc., a processing and security group, to process paper applications for health insurance from the 36 states with federal health insurance exchanges.

Though most sign-ups for insurance under the new marketplace were to be made online, officials at the time estimated that a third of the 20 million people expected to apply would submit paper applications.

Allegations that employees were doing little or no work, first reported by KMOV (Channel 4) on Monday, drew a flurry of responses from Missouri’s delegation Wednesday.

Takatz, who lives in Wentzville, said she originally took the job to help people obtain health care.

“I feel guilty for working there as long as I did,” she said. “It was like I was stealing money from people.”

Takatz said that when she and other employees looked for applications to process, they called it fishing because they were trying to catch an application before someone at another processing center could.

Employees refreshed their pages so frequently that Serco limited them to one refresh per 10 minutes. If workers refreshed more than that, they were called into a supervisor’s office and told to stop.

In the whole month of December, she said, she processed about six applications.

Workers became so bored and hostile, Takatz claims, that Serco began providing books to read. Employees were told they could not speak to the media, even if they left the company.
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Workers at Wentzille Obamacare center played board games, ex-employee says

A former employee at an Affordable Care Act processing center in Wentzville recalls having so little work to do that she played board games while some co-workers slept.

Lavonne Takatz, 42, worked at the center in Wentzville from October to April.
“We played Pictionary. We played 20 Questions. We played Trivial Pursuit,” she told the Post-Dispatch Wednesday.
Such allegations have spurred members of Missouri’s congressional delegation to call for investigations of the taxpayer-funded center in Wentzville, one of three nationally that are contracted to process paper applications for the new health-care law.
The federal government, under the auspices of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, gave a five-year, $1.2 billion contract last year to Serco Inc., a processing and security group, to process paper applications for health insurance from the 36 states with federal health insurance exchanges.
Though most sign-ups for insurance under the new marketplace were to be made online, officials at the time estimated that a third of the 20 million people expected to apply would submit paper applications.
Allegations that employees were doing little or no work, first reported by KMOV (Channel 4) on Monday, drew a flurry of responses from Missouri’s delegation Wednesday.
Takatz, who lives in Wentzville, said she originally took the job to help people obtain health care.
“I feel guilty for working there as long as I did,” she said. “It was like I was stealing money from people.”
Takatz said that when she and other employees looked for applications to process, they called it fishing because they were trying to catch an application before someone at another processing center could.
Employees refreshed their pages so frequently that Serco limited them to one refresh per 10 minutes. If workers refreshed more than that, they were called into a supervisor’s office and told to stop.
In the whole month of December, she said, she processed about six applications.
Workers became so bored and hostile, Takatz claims, that Serco began providing books to read. Employees were told they could not speak to the media, even if they left the company.
“It was prison,” Takatz said. “We all referred to it as our cell blocks.”
U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, is writing a letter to Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “seeking answers to some of the disturbing allegations that have surfaced,” Luetkemeyer’s spokesman Paul Sloca said late Wednesday.
Luetkemeyer, whose district includes Wentzville, “is talking with all relevant (congressional) committees of jurisdiction to discuss whether or not an investigation is warranted,” Sloca added.
In addition, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., has co-authored a letter with Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee, asking Tavenner to respond to a dozen questions about the allegations.
“We are concerned Serco may have much less work than was expected when CMS awarded the contract, and may not be successfully completing the applications it has received,” the letter said.
And Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., was “putting together a formal action to get to the bottom of it,” her spokesman, John LaBombard, said Wednesday evening, details of which were still being considered.
Serco, based in Reston, Va., directed media inquiries to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid. A spokesman for that agency said the Wentzville workers process paper applications, verify information, resolve conflicts of information and call consumers to obtain missing information or documents. CMS stated Wednesday that Serco employees were still receiving mail to process and working with customers, but CMS regularly reviews and makes adjustments to the center’s staffing levels.
A CMS spokesman said CMS was committed to ensuring federal funds were spent appropriately and performance expectations were “clear and monitored closely.”
“We are confident that the balance is appropriate,” the spokesman wrote in an email.
Efforts to speak to Serco employees outside the building Wednesday evening were unsuccessful.
Serco won the federal contract in July and selected Wentzville as one of three sites to carry it out. The others are in Arkansas and Kentucky.
A benefits and compensation manager with Serco told the Post-Dispatch in August that St. Louis was picked because of its growth potential and high number of college graduates.
The company moved operations to the old US Fidelis call center in Wentzville that month. In September, thousands of hopefuls showed up for job interviews at the center. Serco hired 790 people at a pay rate between $14 and $27 an hour with health insurance and a 401(k). According to CMS, the center now has 660 employees.
In October, the Arkansas processing center announced it would hire as many as 800 workers.
Serco’s parent company, Serco Group, is under fraud investigation in the United Kingdom for monitoring inactive criminals, according to reports.
Blunt’s letter makes reference to that allegation.
“CMS awarded Serco a contract despite the fact that Serco’s parent company, Serco Group plc, was placed under firm review in July 2013 after a British government audit found the company was charging for services it did not provide,” the letter says. “The probe by Britain’s chief procurement officer should raise more questions about Serco’s effort to implement Obamacare.”
The federal health care law has been controversial since before its passage, and a troubled rollout, caused by crashing computer systems supporting Healthcare.gov, dominated headlines for much of the winter. The White House has focused on more than 8 million sign-ups, citing that as proof the law is working.
These new allegations about the facility in Wentzville are already being viewed through that partisan prism.
In a news release Wednesday, Luetkemeyer said that “the implementation of Obamacare has been an absolute disaster from the very beginning, and I am extremely disturbed by these new allegations.”
But McCaskill’s spokesman said these new allegations should not take away from what the law is intended to do.
“Claire’s a strong supporter of the Affordable Care Act, and is encouraged at the good it’s already doing to slow the rise in costs, and make insurance affordable for millions,” LaBombard said in an e-mail. “That said, these allegations are serious — and if true, completely unacceptable.”
Chuck Raasch reported from Washington.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/special-reports/mohealth/report-taxpayer-dollars-pay-wentzville-obamacare-employees-to-do-nothing/article_9a84cbdd-f2ee-5961-98cd-7d24dc5b08eb.html

Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2014/05/oba...SfpFbTs6uDE.99

"If You Like Your Doctor" Might Be Discarded Altogether

Kevin Glass | May 16, 2014



Over at Reason, Peter Suderman writes about the possibility that Obamacare's employer mandate might never be implemented:

At this point, it's widely expected that the provision will remain in limbo permanently. Former White House Press Secretary predicted last month that the provision would never go into effect; the Urban paper will give the administration ammunition to defend the move on policy grounds if and when another delay or permanent postponement is announced.

The policy rationale for ending the employer mandate is clear enough: Because it requires employers to provide coverage for full-time workers once the 50-employee threshold is reached, it creates incentives for firms to avoid hiring, or to cap employee hours so that they do not qualify as full time. End the mandate, and those incentives disappear.

But the employer mandate wasn't included in the law for no reason. It's meant to prevent employers from simply dropping coverage and sending full-time workers to get insurance through the exchanges. In an initial draft of the law that lacked a mandate, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that about 15 million employees would lose their workplace coverage and be sent to the exchanges instead—increasing the law's disruption of current coverage arrangements and the cost of subsidies for exchange-based insurance. The inclusion of an employer mandate significantly mitigated the CBO's estimate of these effects.

Here's the thing: health policy wonks on both the left and right have spoken about the upsides of disentangling employment and health insurance. The past (and current) status quo still includes huge incentives for employers to be the primary vehicles for insurance, however. The employer mandate is a part of that.

Obamacare was controversial enough on its own without going after the employment-insurance nexus, though. So one of the key promises from President Obama was the now-infamous "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" promise. That was a blatant falsehood at the time and it has been exposed as such. The employer mandate was key to this promise. As Suderman writes, without the mandate, there are incentives for businesses to just ditch insurance as a benefit and let the exchanges and federal government subsidies take care of it.

Without the mandate, there would have been (and might still be, if it never goes into effect) a lot more disruption in the insurance market. If Obama had never made the "keep your doctor" promise, it would have been much easier to never include an employer mandate in the first place. Now that Obamacare is settling into an uneasy status quo, however, the "keep your doctor" promise is no longer needed. The employer mandate might no longer be needed either.

This is a subtle political point that Republicans might have overstressed: most conservative-ish health reform would have included as much insurance disruption as Obamacare. The point that Republicans should be attacking the President on is the lie of "keep your doctor," not necessarily on the inherent goodness of the insurance status quo. However, that has likely gotten mangled - and many conservatives do believe that everyone should be able to keep their insurance status quo in any broad-based reform plans. But the breaking of the employment-insurance nexus will by necessity require a lot of disruption, and honest conservatives will admit that to themselves.

The "keep your doctor" promise has been called "Obamacare's original sin." Now that we've admitted the sin, however, Obama might not feel compelled to even try to keep the original promise.


http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevingl...ether-n1839288




If a law is unjust...(Quotation)



Quotation: "If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."


Variations: None known.

Sources checked:

1. Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Digital Edition
2. Thomas Jefferson retirement papers
3. Thomas Jefferson: Papers and Biographies collections in Hathi Trust Digital Library

Other attributions: None known.
Earliest appearance in print: undetermined


Comments: This quotation has not been found in Thomas Jefferson's papers. It has been suggested that it is a paraphrase of Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence, "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...," although such a paraphrase would seem to be taking some radical liberties with the original version. The quotation bears a much closer resemblance to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s comment in his famous letter from Birmingham Jail: "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."[1]

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

I think this fits here very well these laws are made by unjust men!!!

The Founders' Origination Clause (and Implications for the Affordable Care Act) | Tenth Amendment Center
tenthamendmentcenter.com

The Founders’ Origination Clause (and Implications for the ACA)


This Article is the first comprehensive examination of the original legal force of the Constitution’s Origination Clause, drawing not merely on the records of the 1787-90 constitutional debates, but also on Founding Era British and American legislative practice and other sources. This Article’s findings include the scope of the bills governed by the Clause, the precise meaning of the House origination requirement, and the extent of the Senate’s amendment power.

For illustrative purposes, the Article tests against its findings the claim, currently being litigated, that the financial penalty for failure to acquire health insurance under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is invalid as a Senate-originated “tax.” The Article concludes that because the Supreme Court has sustained the penalty as a “tax,” it was a valid Senate amendment to a House-adopted revenue bill. The Article also concludes, however, that the regulatory provisions added to the bill were outside the power of the Senate to amend under the Origination Clause, and therefore are constitutionally invalid.


May 18, 2014By Rob NatelsonConstitution Founding Principles Origination Clause Leave a comment

http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2014...9#.U3n_6i9qP5Y


About the author
In private life, Rob Natelson is a long-time conservative/free market activist, but professionally he is a constitutional scholar whose meticulous studies of the Constitution's original meaning have been published or cited by many top law journals. (See: www.constitution.i2i.org/about/.) Most recently, he co-authored The Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause (Cambridge University Press) and The Original Constitution (Tenth Amendment Center). After a quarter of a century as Professor of Law at the University of Montana, he recently retired to work full time at Colorado's Independence Institute.

U.S. CITIZENS ON TRACK TO LOSE MEDICAL PRIVACY WITH OBAMACARE

By NWV News Writer Jim Kouri
Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
May 19, 2014
© 2014 NewsWithViews.com



This week’s news of the Obama Administration’s handling of healthcare for American war heroes and veterans begs the question from reporters: If there is fraud, abuse and alleged death of patients being investigated in a small healthcare bureaucracy as the VA hospitals, what can we expected from a huge power-grab that allowed the federal government to totally control the entire medical industry?


With the IRS taking a significant role in the health care law signed by President Barack Obama on national television, that part of the Obamacare plan continues to worry those who have little faith in government efficiency, especially when Americans' privacy issues are involved, according to conservative security experts who favor constitutional government.


Many security experts fear that Americans' patient information will be vulnerable to unauthorized access and distribution with perpetrators being outside hackers or IRS insiders.


Today's Internal Revenue Service relies extensively on computerized systems to carry out its demanding responsibilities to collect taxes, process tax returns, and enforce the nation's tax laws. Add the new responsibilities of taxing health care under the guise of levying fines on those who violate Obamacare provisions as well as record keeping, and there now exists a greater likelihood of patient information being unlawfully accessed or accidentally released to third parties.


"Effective information security controls are essential to protect financial and taxpayer information from inadvertent or deliberate misuse, improper disclosure, or destruction," said Sidney Franes, owner of FLT Security Services.


"Having a person's medical records along with other personal information is an identity thief's dream come true, especially the [computer] hackers," said Franes.


As part of its audit of IRS's financial statements, Congress requested the Government Accountability Office to assess the status of IRS's actions to correct or mitigate previously reported information security weaknesses, and whether controls over key financial and tax processing systems are effective in ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of financial and sensitive taxpayer information.


To do this, GAO examined IRS information security policies, plans, and procedures; tested controls over key financial applications; and interviewed key agency officials at six sites, said officials.


The GAO reported that the IRS has continued to make progress in correcting previously reported information security weaknesses that GAO reported as unresolved at the conclusion of its audit.


Specifically, IRS has corrected or mitigated 28 of the 89 weaknesses and deficiencies -- 21 of 74 previously identified information security control weaknesses and 7 of 15 previously identified program deficiencies, according to GAO officials.


For example, it has changed vendor-supplied user accounts and passwords and avoided storing clear-text passwords in scripts. It also enhanced its policies and procedures for configuring mainframe operations and established an alternate processing site for its procurement system.


While IRS has corrected 28 control weaknesses and program deficiencies, 61 of them -- or about 69 percent -- remain unresolved or unmitigated, stated the GAO report.
The IRS continued to install patches in an untimely manner and used passwords that were not complex. In addition, IRS did not always verify that remedial actions were implemented or effectively mitigated the security weaknesses, the GAO report revealed.


According to IRS officials, they continued to address uncorrected weaknesses and, subsequent to GAO's site visits, had completed additional corrective actions on some of them. Despite these actions, newly identified and the unresolved information security control weaknesses in key financial and tax processing systems continue to jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of financial and sensitive taxpayer information.


The IRS did not consistently implement controls that were intended to prevent, limit, and detect unauthorized access to its systems and information. For example, IRS officials did not always enforce strong password management for properly identifying and authenticating users. It also failed the authorized user access tests that permit only the access needed to perform job functions. It also failed to log and monitor security events on a key system and did not physically protect its computer resources, the GAO analysts stated.

A key reason for these weaknesses is that IRS has not yet fully implemented its agency-wide information security program to ensure that controls are appropriately designed and operating effectively. Although IRS has made important progress in developing and documenting its information security program, it did not, among other things, review risk assessments at least annually for certain systems or ensure contractors receive awareness training.


Until these control weaknesses and program deficiencies are corrected, the agency remains unnecessarily vulnerable to insider threats related to the unauthorized access to and disclosure, modification, or destruction of financial and taxpayer information, as well as the disruption of system operations and services, the analysts pointed out in their report to Congress.
The new and unresolved weaknesses and deficiencies are the basis for GAO's determination that IRS had a material weakness in internal controls over financial reporting related to information security last year. The GAO advised the IRS that it should develop and implement policies and procedures for more securely configuring routers to encrypt network traffic, configuring switches to defend against attacks that could crash the network, and for notifying CSIRC of network changes that could affect its ability to detect unauthorized access.

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