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Gentleman_Jellyfish wrote: No guys! Everyone else is just wrong everywhere! It's working completely as intended!
Exactly!!
Why else would there be so many exemptions, updates, pushing back enrollment deadlines, and delaying parts of the law?
We're just not smart enough to see the true genius behind it all! The Obama works in mysterious ways.
The real plan is that Obamacare will suddenly be a giant mecha-robot with which we will extort the world of funding; this kind of gambit requires tactical geni--
Why is our president short, white, and chomping on a manly cigar?
CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!!!!
So good.
Homosexuality is the #1 cause of gay marriage.
kronk wrote: Every pizza is a personal sized pizza if you try hard enough and believe in yourself.
sebster wrote: Yes, indeed. What a terrible piece of cultural imperialism it is for me to say that a country shouldn't murder its own citizens
BaronIveagh wrote: Basically they went from a carrot and stick to a smaller carrot and flanged mace.
Gentleman_Jellyfish wrote: No guys! Everyone else is just wrong everywhere! It's working completely as intended!
Exactly!!
Why else would there be so many exemptions, updates, pushing back enrollment deadlines, and delaying parts of the law?
We're just not smart enough to see the true genius behind it all! The Obama works in mysterious ways.
The real plan is that Obamacare will suddenly be a giant mecha-robot with which we will extort the world of funding; this kind of gambit requires tactical geni--
Why is our president short, white, and chomping on a manly cigar?
CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!!!!
Have an Exalt
"So, do please come along when we're promoting something new and need photos for the facebook page or to send to our regional manager, do please engage in our gaming when we're pushing something specific hard and need to get the little kiddies drifting past to want to come in an see what all the fuss is about. But otherwise, stay the feth out, you smelly, antisocial bastards, because we're scared you are going to say something that goes against our mantra of absolute devotion to the corporate motherland and we actually perceive any of you who've been gaming more than a year to be a hostile entity as you've been exposed to the internet and 'dangerous ideas'. " - MeanGreenStompa
"Then someone mentions Infinity and everyone ignores it because no one really plays it." - nkelsch
WASHINGTON (AP) — You were patient with the government's kooky website, and now you have your health insurance card. That's good, since your family is expecting a new baby.
But you may have jump through more hoops to get the child formally added to your policy. The Obama administration confirms there is no quick and easy way for consumers to update their coverage under the new health law for the birth of a baby and other common life changes.
With regular private insurance, parents just notify the health plan. Insurers still must cover new babies, officials say, but parents will also have to contact the government at some point later.
For now, the HealthCare.gov website can't handle new baby updates, along with a list of other life changes including marriage and divorce, a death in the family, a new job or a change in income, even moving to a different community.
Such changes affect not only coverage but also the financial assistance available under the law, so the government has to be brought into the loop. But the system's wiring for that vital federal function isn't yet fully connected.
At least 2 million people have signed up for private health policies through new government markets under President Barack Obama's overhaul. Coverage started Wednesday, and so far, things appear to be running fairly smoothly, although it may take time for problems to bubble up. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calls it "a new day in health care."
Insurers say computerized "change in circumstance" updates to deal with family and life developments were supposed to have been part of the federal system from the start.
But that feature got postponed as technicians scrambled to fix technical problems that overwhelmed the health care website during its first couple of months.
"It's just another example of, 'We'll fix that later,'" said Bob Laszewski, an industry consultant who said he's gotten complaints from several insurers. "This needed to be done well before January. It's sort of a fly-by-night approach."
"We are currently working with insurers to find ways to make changing coverage easier while we develop an automated way for consumers to update their coverage directly," responded administration spokesman Aaron Albright.
A Dec. 31 circular from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services addressed the problem.
In questions and answers for insurers, the government said that the federal insurance marketplace will not be able to add a child until the system's automated features become "available later." It does not provide any clue as to when that might take place.
The federal marketplace serves 36 states through HealthCare.gov and call centers. The Medicare agency, which runs the government's other major health programs, is also responsible for the coverage expansion under Obama's law.
The question-and-answer circular says parents with a new baby will be told to contact their insurer directly "to include the child immediately" on their existing policy.
After the federal system is ready to process changes, parents will have to contact the government to formally bring their records up to date. Albright said parents will be able to add a new child to their policy for 30 days.
Having a baby could increase a family's monthly premiums, but it could also mean that the parents are eligible for a bigger tax credit to help with the cost. Under some circumstances, it could make the child or the family eligible for Medicaid, a safety-net program that is virtually free of cost to low-income beneficiaries.
"Add it to the list that shows HealthCare.gov is not done," Laszewski said.
Barack Obama told a Notre Dame audience in 2009 that his health care plan would respect the beliefs of pro-life Americans.
How is this...
“Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion and draft a sensible conscience clause. And make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded, not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics.”
...a promise that "...his health care plan would respect the beliefs of pro-life Americans."?
I think at this point, everyone has seen for themselves what crap Obamacare and pretty much anything associated with it is. If the Republicans aren't stupid(small chance, I know), all they need to do is let that turd fester and wait for the elections.
Then again, this could be a good year for third parties.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/01/04 19:53:59
Gentleman_Jellyfish wrote: No guys! Everyone else is just wrong everywhere! It's working completely as intended!
Exactly!!
Why else would there be so many exemptions, updates, pushing back enrollment deadlines, and delaying parts of the law?
Surely if they weren't introducing these exemptions and updates as and when they're needed, it would be even worse?
I can understand having problems with ACA, but complaining that they're tweaking the legislation in order to fix it is a bit silly surely? would you rather a problem was found and they left the problem in place and refused to fix it?
Gentleman_Jellyfish wrote: No guys! Everyone else is just wrong everywhere! It's working completely as intended!
Exactly!!
Why else would there be so many exemptions, updates, pushing back enrollment deadlines, and delaying parts of the law?
Surely if they weren't introducing these exemptions and updates as and when they're needed, it would be even worse?
I can understand having problems with ACA, but complaining that they're tweaking the legislation in order to fix it is a bit silly surely? would you rather a problem was found and they left the problem in place and refused to fix it?
The problem with this Goliath is that most of these "tweaks" requires Congressional Authorizations... thus, it can be argued that these tweaks are illegal.
djones520 wrote: Conceivably, all Republicans should have to do is say "We tried to stop this, we tried and tried and they called us Nazi's. Now look what you've got."
They're waiting for the election cycle to begin in earnest.
Gentleman_Jellyfish wrote: No guys! Everyone else is just wrong everywhere! It's working completely as intended!
Exactly!!
Why else would there be so many exemptions, updates, pushing back enrollment deadlines, and delaying parts of the law?
Surely if they weren't introducing these exemptions and updates as and when they're needed, it would be even worse?
I can understand having problems with ACA, but complaining that they're tweaking the legislation in order to fix it is a bit silly surely? would you rather a problem was found and they left the problem in place and refused to fix it?
But they haven't fixed the problems. More than double those who signed up for the ACA lost coverage. People who liked their cover have not been able to keep it. The website is full of security holes. People don't know if they are in fact covered under the ACA. Legal challenges to the law, from many quarters, are gathering pace. The Administration unilaterally amended the legislation in the hope of getting their party past the 2014 elections, not correct the problems that they caused with their legislation.
djones520 wrote: Conceivably, all Republicans should have to do is say "We tried to stop this, we tried and tried and they called us Nazi's. Now look what you've got."
Yes, in Republican districts I'm certain such a message will carry, much as it carried in Republican districts in the 2012 elections.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: People don't know if they are in fact covered under the ACA.
Many people didn't know whether or not they were covered prior to the passage of ACA.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2014/01/05 05:51:09
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: The Administration unilaterally amended the legislation in the hope of getting their party past the 2014 elections...
Let's not mention the fact that these actions have been called unconstitutional.
And as mentioned earlier, before the shutdown the Republicans asked for the individual mandate to be delayed. They were told no; that it was the law of the land, that it was unconstitutional, and because it was an election pledge it was the will of the people. When the shutdown happened they were then called terrorists.
Now the Democrats have indeed delayed parts of the act, shifted deadlines, and made unilateral amendments as they see if.
Co'tor Shas wrote: I agree with you in basis, but I wonder how long until someone starts to abuse this idea. Or, in other words, "Taxes are against my religion!"
Then let that person state their religion, let us see if it is in fact a religion as recognized by law, and show how taxes are not compatible with their religious beliefs.
Last week the liberal documentary-maker Michael Moore prompted indigestion across the progressive wonk community by pronouncing Obamacare “awful.” In a New York Times op-ed, he bemoaned the way the president’s law preserved the health insurance industry rather than replacing it with a Medicare-for-all style single-payer system. The good news, Moore conceded, is that the previously uninsured (and often previously uninsurable) can get finally get coverage. The bad news is that their coverage will often be lousy and pose an enormous financial burden. He ended by calling for activists to lean on state politicians in an effort to beef the law up.
I happen to agree with Moore’s basic sentiment. For-profit health insurance is on some level morally offensive—at least when it’s practiced the way we Americans practice capitalism. With a few tantalizing but mostly unrepresentative exceptions, the longstanding aim of health insurers has been to weed out sick people, and to weasel out of paying for treatment if they somehow get insurance, so that the companies could boost their share price, lavish income on their executives, and plow money into annoyingly saccharine TV ads. To its everlasting credit, Obamacare genuinely tries to whip the insurers into shape—making it illegal to deny coverage to sick people, or to withdraw coverage when healthy people get sick, among other much-needed reforms. But you still have to be skeptical of middlemen who historically spent a mere 60 cents of every dollar individual policy-holders sent them on, you know, health care.1
And yet I’m still much more sympathetic to Obamacare than Moore. He thinks it’s awful. I consider it a deceptively sneaky way to get the health care system both of us really want.
How? Allow me a brief digression: In 1991, Congress created the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, which funded screenings for women who earn up to 250 percent of the poverty level. What Congress didn’t do is provide money to pay for treatment if the tests came back positive. The policy seemed sadistically cruel: Suddenly thousands of women would discover they had a life-threatening illness while realizing they could do nothing about it. Both Moore and I would have surely denounced the law. But it soon proved to be a shrewd, if unintentional, opening move. “Almost from the moment it was implemented, there was pressure to take the next step,” says Harold Pollack, a professor of social policy at the University of Chicago. “They constructed a sympathetic and organized constituency … with an actionable grievance.” Congress approved the money for treatment in 2000.
In some sense, Obamacare is the breast-and-cervical-cancer story writ large. In order to move the law through the Senate, the White House had to make all sorts of noxious compromises, like keeping the overall spending under $1 trillion, which limited the subsidies available to people buying insurance. Hence the kind of horror-stories Moore cites in his op-ed: A 60-year old couple with an annual income of $65,000 who could end up spending $25,000 on health care in a single year. And that’s with Obamacare. (This is something of an outlier, but not that much of one.) But the flip side is that the law also created potentially millions of hard-working Americans who will have some health insurance; just maddeningly insufficient health insurance. What are the chances politicians stand up and take notice when these Americans complain?
In the heat of the political back-and-forth with Republicans bent on the program’s destruction, this whole Obamacare adventure can feel a little hopeless. But when you look at the big picture, the underlying political logic is clearly toward more generous, more comprehensive coverage over time. Once the previously uninsured start getting insurance, the natural upshot of cataloguing the law’s shortcomings isn’t to give them less insurance, as my colleague Alec MacGillis pointed out last fall. It’s to give them more. Republicans are in some sense playing into the trap Obamacare laid for them. And a few of them seem a bit concerned about it.2
Medicaid expansion is a case in point. Under Obamacare, uninsured people who earn up to 138 percent of the poverty level (just under $16,000 for a single person in 2013), can qualify for Medicaid, at least in states that opt into the law.3 This has a few key political consequences, as Pollack notes. First, it transforms the political constituency for the program. Historically, Medicaid has served extremely poor, frequently minority, patients who either don’t vote or support Democrats when they do. That meant the GOP had no hang-ups about squeezing it. But there will likely be millions of white working-class voters on Medicaid in the coming years. (Even in some conservative states, like Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia.) Once that happens, something tells me Republicans will become more charitably-disposed to the program.
Then there’s the likelihood that, one day soon, especially if Medicaid becomes more generous, the working-class person who makes 175% of the poverty level will look at his working-class neighbor making 130% of the poverty level and think, wow, his health insurance seems a lot better than my private Obamacare plan. How long can it be before most people earning 175% or 200% of the poverty level are allowed to buy in, too?4
The same goes for Medicare. Many health-care reformers believe some version of Obamacare—government-subsidized private insurance—will eventually replace Medicare, something that will surely become more likely if voters feel warmly toward Obamacare and demand to keep it when they turn 65. But if private Obamacare plans stay stingy, the opposite may happen: As people age out of Obamacare and into that single-payer program we all love and support, their fondness for Medicare will only increase. Before long, their slightly younger friends and family members will be clamoring to join Medicare, too. How long before some opportunistic pol proposes that everyone on Obamacare who’s 55-and-up can enroll in Medicare? Not very long, I’d guess. In wonk terms, progressives are likely to get their beloved public option one way or another, and probably not too far in the future.
The basic point is that, by pooling millions of people together in one institutional home—the exchanges where customers buy insurance under Obamacare—the Affordable Care Act is creating an organized constituency for additional reform. And since threadbare coverage is the only affordable option under Obamacare for many of these people, the law is giving them a whole set of grievances to get exercised about.
Granted, all this prophesizing assumes the exchanges will work, something Republicans seem determined to prevent. (For that matter, so did the Obama administration for a few months last year.) If the sick and old make up the overwhelming majority of enrollees, or if the back-end of HealthCare.gov never gets ironed out, the whole project could collapse. But if we do clear those thresholds in the next year or so—and the recent data points are encouraging—the relentless logic of the exchanges will be hard to stop. More and more people will be covered through the exchanges. (And not just the uninsured: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that three million people will move from employer-based coverage to the exchanges over the next five years.) Which means the constituency demanding better insurance will get bigger and more powerful each year.
In the end, I’ll bet liberals like Moore develop a grudging respect for the administration on this front. (And believe me, I understand the tendency to second-guess.) Moore writes as though Obama created a complete dog of a program, then shrugged off any responsibility to improve it: “Obamacare can’t be fixed by its namesake. It’s up to us to make it happen.” But flawed as Obamacare is, it has at least one great virtue: laying the groundwork for its own fixing.5 That’s not bad for such an “awful” piece of legislation.
Wanna bet we're going to see a bunch more of this in the future?
Relapse wrote: They keep touting these great numbers who signed up for Obamacare, but how many have paid anything?
i havent paid anything yet, I signed up for coverage from blue cross at the start of Dec, coverage was suppose to start 12/31, I havent received any actual insurance info, no bill, no member id....nothing
Relapse wrote: They keep touting these great numbers who signed up for Obamacare, but how many have paid anything?
i havent paid anything yet, I signed up for coverage from blue cross at the start of Dec, coverage was suppose to start 12/31, I havent received any actual insurance info, no bill, no member id....nothing
Relapse wrote: They keep touting these great numbers who signed up for Obamacare, but how many have paid anything?
i havent paid anything yet, I signed up for coverage from blue cross at the start of Dec, coverage was suppose to start 12/31, I havent received any actual insurance info, no bill, no member id....nothing
That's okay. Hospitals take cash.
They might be able to take payment in organs while you're under the knife anyway
Relapse wrote: They keep touting these great numbers who signed up for Obamacare, but how many have paid anything?
i havent paid anything yet, I signed up for coverage from blue cross at the start of Dec, coverage was suppose to start 12/31, I havent received any actual insurance info, no bill, no member id....nothing
That's okay. Hospitals take cash.
Actually... you can "negotiate" your price with the hospitals if you do pay cash. Oftentimes, it's usually less than half than what the insurances are charged for... that's because paying cash bypasses the red-tape.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: So they should be forced to do/provide something that goes against their fundamental beliefs?
They should be forced to pay their staff per the law of the land. Whether staff choose to use the health coverage provided to access services the employer finds immoral is simply no business of the employer, just as its no business of the employer if the employee chooses to use the cash they are paid to buy alcohol, gamble, or do anything other legal thing that might not fit the employer's morality.
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
