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.
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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
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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.

* * *

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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.

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News & Politics

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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 Demonstrates that Somewhere in North America There are Quite a Few Idiots

I recently saw a bumper sticker that read "Somewhere in Kenya a village is missing its idiot." No doubt that's true. Equally true, however, is that somewhere in North America there's a country full of idiots.


If a buyer went to a car dealer to buy car, picked one out, and asked the salesman what kind of a deal he could make, and the salesman said, "Good choice. Sign this contract and we'll get you on the road today," the buyer would probably not agree to sign. The rest of the conversation might be as follows:

Buyer: "Wait a minute. I don't know what's in the contract. Why would I sign it?"
Salesman: "That's our policy."
Buyer: "I need to read the contract. I need to know what you're asking me to sign."
Salesman: "We don't have time for that. The deal I'm offering you is only good for the next three minutes."
Because the buyer really wants the car, he considers skipping a review of the contract, and says, "At least tell me how much it is."
Salesman: "Not to worry. It's not as much as you think. As soon as you sign the contract and give me a signed check, I'll give you the keys and I'll fill in the amount later this afternoon. You'll find out what it is when you get your bank statement. Trust me, you can afford it."

No one but a fool would take this deal, and yet that is exactly what a majority of the "honorable" congressmen [they call themselves "Honorable"] did in voting for Obamacare.

The highest ranking Democrat in the House, the Speaker at the time, said that one would have to wait until the bill was passed to find out what was in it. It was 2700 pages long and threatened to impact almost 20% of the largest economy on earth. Obviously, because one could not know what the bill provided for within the week or so allotted before the vote, one could not know what it would cost. Just like the car.

Also, just like the car example, the Obamacare deal had to be sealed in a hurry. You may recall Obama on television saying it had to be signed by the end of the week.

My estimate of the time it would take to have a "working knowledge" of this bill is six months working full time. I would estimate further that it would take an additional six months to come up with ballpark cost figures. I used to read proposed and passed legislation for a living.
One might conclude from these estimates that anyone who voted for Obamacare under the conditions under which it was presented, is patently irresponsible.

Obviously, some sort of underhandedness was at work, as it always is with congress. Regardless of what was at work, if ordinary people had called their representatives and said, "Don't you dare vote for this bill," most congressmen would not have embarrassed themselves by their votes.
In order for a Constitutional Republic (what we have) to work, the voting public must be somewhat aware of the issues, must watch what its representatives do, and must be prepared to make intelligent decisions. That's what we don't have.

I won't speculate on why this is true. One might mention the high school dropout rate, the adulation of criminals and professional athletes at the expense of healers and scientists, the mindset represented by the Kardashians, and a collective morality that is self-centered.

Regardless of the reasons, when the voting public ignores its responsibility to make a democratic republic work, con-artists will fill the jobs that used to be held by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The con-artists will reflect the public at large, and just like the public, they will have no concern for the collective well-being. The con-artists will spend the entire year running for election and do what the party hacks tell them.

They will vote for bills like Obamacare, presented in haste, potentially catastrophic in its effects, ideologically motivated, designed to empower the federal government even more than it already is, and approved by a majority of congress who had not read, understood, or thought about what they were voting for, much less what it would cost largely because they were pressured by their party masters.

Politics, under these circumstances, becomes no more than looting of the federal treasury to fund ideologically based legislation that can be introduced and approved without regard to content or cost.

A Constitutional Republic cannot survive this degradation. But that's what we have.

Read more at http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/10/ob...HgI1fSv73dt.99

Okay so now tell me again why did all the politicians including "obamacare's" founding father EXEMPT themselves family and friends from it....

American Patriot added a new photo.