Thread: The Future of Obamacare

House passes measure requiring O-Care updates; 33 Dems defect

video at link below

Dozens of House Democrats broke ranks with President Obama on Friday to support legislation that would require people to be notified of security breaches under ObamaCare.

The House passed the Health Exchange Security and Transparency Act, H.R. 3811, in a 291-122 vote. Sixty-seven Democrats voted for the bill, ignoring arguments from party leaders that the bill was a "messaging" vote meant to discourage people from signing up for insurance.


The one-sentence bill says that no later than two business days after any security breach on an ObamaCare site is discovered, "the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall provide notice of such breach to each individual." Republicans said that under current law, the government is not required to notify people if their information is put at risk."It may shock some people to learn that there is no legal requirement that the Department of Health and Human Services notify an individual if his or her personal information is breached or improperly accessed through the Affordable Care Act's exchanges," said Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.).

The White House said it opposed the bill, arguing the government already has plans to tell people if their information has been compromised.

But that argument didn't sway a large group House Democrats, many of whom fear the problem-plagued rollout of ObamaCare will cost them at the polls in November.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said the new requirement is critical because a senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) advised in September that the site should not be launched due to security problems. Teresa Fryer, the Chief Information Security Officer at CMS, testified before Issa's committee late last year.

"The truth is that actual interviews and depositions taken of the highest-ranking people that helped develop this website, both public and private, shows there was no end-to-end testing," Issa said Friday. "It did not meet the spirit of any definition of a secure website."
Democrats rejected those arguments, and said Republicans were not explaining Fryer's complete views on the security of HealthCare.gov.

"All week, Republicans have been trying to make their case for this bill by quoting from a memo drafted by the chief information security officer at CMS about concerns before the website was launched," said Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat on Issa's committee. "But they omit one critical fact: this official never sent the memo. It was a draft, and she never gave it to anyone, including her own supervisor."

Democrats said the GOP was trying to stir up fears about HealthCare.gov and the other enrollment sites by raising the idea that people's personal information could be stolen.

"There have been no successful security attacks on HealthCare.gov, and no one has maliciously accessed personal information," said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.). "This is just another one of those scare tactics, and I just hope that my colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, are not fooled by this."
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) fired back at the charge that the bill is for “messaging purposes,” noting that it simply requires officials to tell people when a data breach occurs.

"That's it," Cantor said. "There's no message in there, this is just trying to help people."

The White House, meanwhile, claimed the legislation would create costly new reporting requirements.

"The administration opposes House passage of H.R. 3811 because it would create unrealistic and costly paperwork requirements that do not improve the safety or security of personally-identifiable information in the Health Insurance Marketplaces," the White House said in a policy statement.

"Unlike existing requirements, H.R. 3811 requires expensive and unnecessary notification for the compromise of publicly-available information, even if there is no reasonable risk that information could be used to cause harm."

The White House stopped short of issuing a veto threat against the bill, but Senate Democrats are unlikely to take it up.
— This story was updated at 11:52 a.m.

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Boehner: ObamaCare replacement coming





By Russell Berman - 01/16/14 12:43 PM EST



Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday predicted that House Republicans would unveil — and possibly vote on — a plan to replace the healthcare law in 2014, fulfilling a long-delayed promise to voters.

An alternative to ObamaCare will be “one of the big issues” the House GOP will discuss at its annual policy retreat at the end of the month, Boehner said.



While the party has repeatedly run on a pledge to “repeal and replace” President Obama’s signature law, GOP lawmakers have never coalesced around a single alternative. Boehner is now facing mounting pressure from conservatives who say the party cannot continue to merely denounce the unpopular ObamaCare as a means of winning elections.

“It’s one of the big issues for conversation in terms of our agenda for this year, and I think you’ll see Republicans come forward with a plan to replace ObamaCare,” Boehner said Thursday, “a plan that will actually reduce costs for the American people and make health insurance more accessible.”

The Speaker signaled he agrees with members who are arguing that the party must run on a robust agenda, but party leaders are waiting until the retreat to decide exactly how aggressive to be in an election year. Party leaders favor a politically safer approach in which the GOP would draft principles on a range of issues, including healthcare, tax reform and immigration, but may not actually hold votes that could be targeted in campaigns.

“It’s important for us as a party, especially in an election year, to tell the people what you’re for,” Boehner said. “We’re for getting rid of ObamaCare and replacing it with a patient-centered healthcare system. I think you’ll see ample evidence of that. We believe in tax reform, closing loopholes, getting rid of unnecessary deductions, lowering rates, will be good for our economy and help create more jobs. We believe in education reform.”

“So we’re going to outline these issues,” he continued. “Many of them will be voted on, I’m sure, in the coming year.”

In meetings in the Capitol on Wednesday, conservatives resolved to push the leadership to commit to an ambitious agenda that would include floor votes on a healthcare replacement, tax reform and other issues.

“I don’t want to see us just come up with a vision,” Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said. “I want to see us devote considerable floor time in this calendar year to implementing that vision.”

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I wouldn't trust any of them this has potential of being a golden goose for these politicians everyone paying into the health care system he who controls it controls the money!!!!!

“I don’t want to see us just come up with a vision,” Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said. “I want to see us devote considerable floor time in this calendar year to implementing that vision.”

I BET!!!!!

Must Watch: Sen. Cruz: We Need to Make DC Listen. We Need to Stop the Harms of Obamacare.
Jan 18, 2014 04:12 pm

Go To Full Post: Must Watch: Sen. Cruz: We Need to Make DC Listen. We Need to Stop the Harms of Obamacare.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Lose Your Plan, Lose Your Doctor, Lose Your Personal Data

Obamacare Site “Alarmingly” Insecure, Expert Says

Lily Dane
Activist Post

Top cyber security consultant David Kennedy has provided testimony to Congress that outlines “critical flaws” and “alarming security threats” on the Healthcare.gov website.

Last Sunday, Kennedy told Fox’s Chris Wallace that he was easily able to penetrate the healthcare exchange. He said he determined that he could gain access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees.

He’s a security expert, so surely he used some tricks of the trade to crack the website, right?

Nope. Kennedy said it only took him about 4 minutes and a standard browser to access the information, and that he didn’t even have to hack the website:

“And 70,000 was just one of the numbers that I was able to go up to and I stopped after that,” he said. “You know, I’m sure it’s hundreds of thousands, if not more, and it was done within about a 4 minute time frame. So, it’s just wide open.”

“You can literally just open up your browser, go to this, and extract all this information without actually having to hack the website itself,” he said.

Kennedy explained what he and other experts discovered about the lack of security on the exchange:

“What we learned was that they had rushed through what we call the software development life cycle where they actually build the application.”

“So when you do that, security doesn’t really get integrated into it. And what happened with the rocky launch in October is they slapped a bunch of servers in trying to fix the website just to keep it up and running so that people could actually go and use it. The problem is they still didn’t imbed any security into it.”

“It’s not just myself that’s saying this website is insecure, it’s also seven other independent security researchers that also looked at the research I’ve done and came to the exact same conclusion.”

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Last Thursday, Kennedy told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee that nothing has changed since the November hearing on the site’s security issues:

HealthCare.gov is not secure today. I don’t understand how we’re still discussing whether the website is insecure or not. It is insecure – 100 percent.

Before the hearing, Kennedy told Reuters what is wrong with the site:

The government has yet to plug more than 20 vulnerabilities that he and other security experts reported to the government shortly after HealthCare.gov went live on October 1. Hackers could steal personal information, modify data, attack the personal computers of website users and damage the infrastructure of the site.

Teresa Fryer, the CMS chief information security officer, claimed that the Obamacare website underwent end-to-end security testing on December 18 and that all industry standards were met:

“The (federal marketplace) is secure. In many instances, we have gone above and beyond what is required, with layered protection, continuous monitoring and additional penetration testing,” Fryer said.

Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made an excellent point:

It seems to defy common sense that a website plagued with functional problems was, in fact, perfectly secure by design.

Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!”

http://www.activistpost.com/2014/01/...ctor-lose.html

OMG America added a new photo.

The D.C. Clothesline added a new photo.

Employees react to ObamaCare

The results are in folks and they aren’t good!

Posted by Joe For America on Jan 30, 2014 in


video at link below

Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2014/01/emp...K3Wfcihj4gS.99

Representative Tom Graves (R-GA) tells Sean Hannity Obamacare is No Laughing Matter

By Onan Coca / 3 February 2014

During the State of the Union, President Obama used the disaster that is Obamacare to try to earn a few laugh lines. The blissfully ignorant President doesn’t realize that with the average American his “big joke” falls flat – because for us, our healthcare is a very important personal matter. Obamacare has destroyed the healthcare of millions of Americans and hasn’t even touched the people it was supposedly designed to help. As recent studies have shown, the vast majority of those who have signed up for Obamacare already have healthcare! The same studies also find that Obamacare has actually increased the number of uninsured in America!
Obamacare is a disaster and Representative Tom Graves (R-GA) doesn’t think the President should be joking about the mess he’s made.

Rep. Graves is 100% correct.
President Obama and the Democrat Party have dealt callously with the American people on a subject that is vitally important to every family. The Democrats will lose and lose BIG in November, and they deserve to. They have made a laughingstock of our nation and our political system. Whether it’s President Obama’s illegal executive action, or the Senate’s decision to go nuclear and destroy the way our legislature has operated for over 200 years. Every major decision Obama and the Democrats have carried out has served to weaken us in the world and here at home.
It’s high time we send these laughing idiots home – they don’t deserve the honor of “representing” us in Washington.

Read more at http://eaglerising.com/4451/represen...7F5Lmd2Z8CE.99

Cantor takes mission impossible


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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is taking the lead on crafting the GOP’s Obama-Care replacement proposal.
The extraordinarily tough task faces many obstacles and is complicated by election-year politics and an unruly GOP conference.
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But Cantor believes the Republicans must shake their “party of no” reputation, and passing an ObamaCare replacement bill is part of that strategy.Most, if not all, Democrats will reject whatever Cantor produces. To pass a bill through the House, Republicans will need to keep defections to about 20 or fewer. That will be a tall order.
For years, Republicans have promised a “repeal and replace” strategy on ObamaCare, but have never coalesced behind one plan. President Obama has repeatedly mocked the GOP for not delivering an alternative.
Cantor intends to move a repeal-and-replace bill before the midterm elections in November, according to a source familiar with the situation. He broached the issue at the House GOP retreat in Cambridge, Md., late last week.
“I think it is very likely that we’re going to have it before the election, we’re going to give the people — or at least we are going to try to give the people — a clear distinction of who we are versus who the Democrats are,” Florida Rep. Tom Rooney (R) said.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is on board with that goal, though he has his hands full on putting together an immigration reform bill — another top priority for the year.
This is not the first time Cantor has tried to move an ObamaCare fix bill. In April of last year, the Virginia Republican tried and failed to pass a bill that would shift money for the Affordable Care Act to boost high-risk insurance pools. Conservatives balked at the measure, and the bill was pulled from the floor.
Nearly a year later, some Republicans contend that the House GOP conference is in a different place now, having learned lessons from what was an ugly 2013.
Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman Steve Scalise (La.) told The Hill he finds it “encouraging” the House will vote on a replacement bill.
“You’re finally seeing leadership move that way, which is encouraging, because if you look at it, maybe six months ago they weren’t interested in having a single alternative and now they are actually open to it,” said Scalise, who helped write the RSC’s American Health Care Reform Act.
The Louisiana lawmaker noted that the RSC bill has 124 co-sponsors, a majority of the House GOP. He added that it doesn’t matter who gets the credit for the alternative as long as the House majority offers it.
House GOP leadership aides said it is unclear if the effort would entail one single replacement bill or a handful of proposals.
Cantor intends to gather committee chairmen and key GOP lawmakers to cull through the dozens of Republican healthcare alternatives introduced to date.
“We have an embarrassment of riches. There’s so many great ideas that are out there that I think what you will see is coalescing around these larger themes of empowering patients. In terms of who’s authoring which bills, that’s a leader [Cantor] question,” Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) told The Hill.
GOP Rep. Tom Price (Ga.), a sponsor of an alternative and co-sponsor of the RSC legislation, pointed out that more than 150 GOP bills call for changes to ObamaCare. GOP Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) recently unveiled an alternative in the upper chamber that could factor into the House GOP’s yet-to-be seen proposal.
A source close to Cantor noted the similarities of the plans and general agreement among members of the party that an alternative should include the ability to purchase insurance across state lines, the creation of high-risk pools for individuals with pre-existing conditions and medical malpractice reform.
At a time when Obama’s numbers have sunk to the lowest in his presidency — in part over his signature healthcare law — House Republicans believe it is imperative to offer an alternative ahead of the midterm elections.
Scalise said, “I want to repeal ObamaCare and the American people don’t like ObamaCare. I think they get that [House Republicans] are against it, and for a lot of people that is enough. There’s still a percentage of the country that doesn’t like ObamaCare, but they want to see what we are for.”

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Watch Nancy Pelosi Look Ridiculous

By Onan Coca / 5 February 2014 /

Nancy Pelosi appeared on Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week and it’s a good bet she didn’t expect what ended up happening. Things got pretty tense, pretty quick, when Stewart tried to get the minority leader to explain why government seems to function so ineptly. Pelosi went to her go-to move… Blame the Republicans.
“Right now, we have a school of thought in the House Republican caucus that is anti-government, anti-science, anti-Obama. They have a trifecta that just enables them to vote against everything.”
The problem for Pelosi is that Stewart wasn’t buying it. Even he realizes that the Democrats held big majorities in both chambers during the early Obama years and that the Democrats are still in charge with their command of the Senate and the White House.
Watch the train wreck interview – it will make you smile.

Video at link below

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/th...4/nancy-pelosi

Stewart said that Democrats are then required to make a stronger case. He said that Democratic governance now appears “chaotic” and their execution of legislation appears to “lack efficiency.” When Pelosi again blamed Republicans for this condition, Stewart became even more agitated.
When he asked why it was so difficult to get a company to execute the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchange website “competently,” Pelosi replied, “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? How do you not know?” Stewart asked laughing.
He laughed in her face. Amazing.
Even some Democrats are getting tired of Pelosi’s hackneyed act. Former Clinton aide Lanny Davis wishes that Pelosi would just grit her teeth and apologize already. The disaster that is Obamacare is wholly the Democrat Party’s fault, and they need to come to grips with that. They wrote it, they rammed it through without ironing it out, and they implemented it like a bunch of drunken monkeys.

It’s all their fault and they should accept responsibility for its failure.

2nd video about the Pelosi video the first you have to go to the link to "see it"!!!! Sounds about right!!!!

Pelosi and the rest of the Democrat leadership are a joke. One big joke. It’s nice to see the guy with the clown nose finally taking them down a couple of pegs.

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