Thread: Obamacare: Sticker Shock Hits Obama's Home Town

Obamacare: Sticker Shock Hits Obama's Home Town

Guy Benson | Oct 15, 2013



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://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybens...campaign=nl_pm

I wonder who got the pay back for this.
Feds reviewed only one bid for Obamacare website design

BY RICHARD POLLOCK | OCTOBER 13, 2013 AT 10:11 PM




Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange...Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, 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.
CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.
Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.

CGI was one of 16 companies that had been qualified by HHS during President George W. Bush's second term to deliver, without public competition, a variety of hardware, software and communication products and services.

In awarding the Healthcare.gov contract, CMS relied on a little-known federal contracting system called ID/IQ, which is government jargon for “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.”

CGI was a much smaller vendor when it was approved by HHS in 2007. With the approval, CGI became eligible for multiple awards without public notice and in circumvention of the normal competitive bidding procurement process.

The multiple awards were in the form of “task orders” for projects of widely varying size. Over the life of the CGI contract — which expires in 2017 — the IT firm can receive awards worth anywhere from the “$1,000 to $4 billion,” according to a contracting document provided by CGI to the Washington Examiner.

This is apparently the route chosen by CMS officials in awarding the Obamacare Healthcare.gov website design contract to CGI.

Between 2009 and 2013, CMS officials awarded 185 separate task orders to CGI totaling $678 million for work of all kinds, according to USAspending.gov, a federal spending database.The Obamacare website design contract was for $93 million.

There is no evidence CMS issued any public solicitation for the Obamacare website contract. TheExaminer asked both CMS and CGI for copies of any public solicitation notice for the Healthcare.gov task orders. Neither CMS nor CGI furnished any such public notice.

Linda Odorisio, CGI’s vice president for global communications insisted in an email to the Examinerthat the Obmacare Healthcare.gov project had multiple bidders.
“There were at least two bidders, we believe three, for the task order. That is all the information I have,” she said.

Similarly, CMS spokesman Tasha Bradley declined to provide a public solicitation document, saying the only way to obtain such a document would be to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.

It is not uncommon for federal officials to delay responses to FOIA requests for years, provide useless documents instead of those requested, or use the legal system to prevent public access.

The ID/IQ system provides a fast-track contract approval process, but it is much less likely than competitive bidding to secure high quality at a reasonable cost.

“Whenever you have limited competition, but certainly with a sole source or a one-bid offer, the government has to question whether it is going to get the best product at the best price,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog organization that monitors federal contracting.

Both USAspending.gov, which tracks federal spending, and the FFATA Subaward Reporting System, which specifically tracks contracts, refer to CGI as the lone bidder for the Obamacare website design award.

Each site describes the CGI contract award as the product of “full and open competition,” but CGI is the only bidder listed.

Amey suggested that CMS officials linked the “full and open competition” to the original 2007 ID/IQ process.

“They certainly could have handcuffed themselves by creating a schedule to require them to use an existing ID/IQ rather than going with a normal negotiated procurement,” Amey told theExaminer.

“By putting in tight turn-around times, creating something that was brand new in a year, they had a very tight schedule that required them to use the existing contract rather than starting from scratch,” Amey said.

But was there really competition? “In the multiple award ID/IQ world, you do worry about whether there is actual competition generally in the task order stage,” he says.
CGI is a relatively new company in the United States. Its Canadian executives grew their corporate U.S. presence through major acquisitions of U.S. companies.

The first acquisition came in 2004 when CGI purchased American Management Systems Inc. for $858 million in a cash tender offer that covered existing federal IT contracts in healthcare, financial services, and communications work.

In August 2010 CGI doubled its size again through the $1.07 billion cash tender offer to acquire Stanley Inc.

The first indication of questions of CGI performance and pricing came in February 2010 when the firm protested a $230 million CMS contract award to Computer Sciences Corp. Inc.
In a sharp rebuff to CGI in November 2010, General Accountability Office acting counsel Linda H. Gibson denied the CGI protest.

In doing so, she noted that CSC’s bid was $148 million versus CGI’s bid of $258 million. When CMS modified the terms of its proposal, CSC was still substantially lower, coming in at $223 million versus CGI’s price tag of $395 million.

Worse, Gibson noted that at the time CMS officials had only rated some of CGI's previous services as “fair.”

“The record reflects,” Gibson wrote in her 2010 decision, “that CGI's positive ratings were somewhat tempered by the fact that [DELETED] had received 'fair' ratings on one of its relevant contracts and that CGI's performance had also been rated as "fair" on another contract, which CMS deemed relevant.”

As the Examiner previously reported, CGI in Canada also suffered embarrassment in 2011 when it failed to deliver on time for Ontario province's flagship project a new online medical registry for diabetes patients and treatment providers.

Ontario government officials cancelled the $46.2 million contract after 14 months of delay in September 2012. Ontario officials currently refuse to pay any fees to CGI for the failed IT project.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/articl...WwQRGk.twitter

Liberal Blogger Furious Over His Obamacare Premiums (What The Hell Kind Of Reform Is This?)

2 hours ago | Politics, US | Posted by Michael Lotfi

You wouldn’t expect to see a headline that reads “Obamacare Will Double My Premium” on the Daily Kos website. Daily Kos is about as far left as new media news sources come. Proceeds from the website help to fuel the progressive movement within America.

Liberal blogger Tirge Caps posted the following article more than two weeks ago. However, it has only recently gone viral as those opposed to Obamacare have caught wind

“My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don’t go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe.
Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife’s rate is gong to $302 per month and mine is jumping to $284.
I am canceling insurance for us and I am not paying any ****ing penalty. What the hell kind of reform is this?
Oh, ok, if we qualify, we can get some government assistance. Great. So now I have to jump through another hoop to just chisel some of this off. And we don’t qualify, anyway, so what’s the point?
I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.
I don’t know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.
What am I missing?
I realize I will probably get screamed at for posting this, but I can’t imagine I am the only Californian who just received a rate increase from Kaiser based on these new laws.”

Caps was right- People are screaming on the liberal site. One reader writes, “Wah! Wah! I hate Obamcare! You sound like Ted Cruz.” Another tries to claim Caps is lying, “He’s probably dead wrong on the details here-” One even blames Caps’ price increase on the insurance company, “So basically Kaiser raped you on renewal and tried to blame it on ACA. If this isn’t proof that this whole industry needs reform nothing else is.”

There are a few readers who seem not to be choked by the Stockholm Syndrome of Obamacare. One reader says, “I am not looking for anything more and I don’t want to pay more. Thank you for the NEW BENEFITS but I didn’t ask for them. I am happy with our current plan. And for double the rate increase, no thank you. I came in to buy a Nissan, not a Mercedes.”

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Michael Lotfi is a Persian, American political commentator and adviser living in Nashville, Tennessee where he works as the associate director for the Tenth Amendment Center. Lotfi founded TheLibertyPaper.org, which is an online news source that is visited daily by readers in over 135 countries. Lotfi graduated in the top 5% of the country with top honors from Belmont University, an award winning, private university located in Nashville, Tennessee.





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