Where Are My Keys?

Who knew?

So you got coverage under Obamacare, now what?

Last week, Salwa Shabazz arrived at the office of a public health network here with a bag full of paperwork about her new health insurance — and an unhappy look on her face. She had chosen her plan by phone in March, speaking to a customer service representative at the federal insurance marketplace. Now she had problems and questions, so many questions.

“I’ve had one doctor appointment since I got this insurance, and I had to pay $60,” Ms. Shabazz told Daniel Flynn, a counselor with the health network, the Health Federation of Philadelphia. “I don’t have $60.”

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Mr. Flynn spent almost two hours going over her Independence Blue Cross plan, which he explained had a “very complicated” network that grouped doctors and hospitals into three tiers. Ms. Shabazz, who has epilepsy, had not understood when she chose the plan that her doctors were in the most expensive tier.

“None of that was explained when I signed up,” she said. “This is the first I’m hearing it.”

Many people who signed up for private coverage through the new marketplaces had never had health insurance, and even the basics — like what a premium is and why getting a primary care doctor is better than relying on the emergency room — are beyond their experience. Others have a sense of how insurance works but find the details of the marketplace plans confusing, especially if they signed up without the help of someone who understood them.

When it comes times to renew, do you thjink most people in this situation will do their homework, or just let their policies lapse, knowing they can pay a fine, and get coverage when they truly need it?

Ms. Shabazz’s mother, Waheedah Shabazz-El, who had accompanied her to the appointment, shook her head as her daughter wiped away tears. “There are so many layers to this,” Ms. Shabazz-El said.

Not quite the way it was sold to you by the President, Ms. Shabazz?

So does the rest of the World..

Americans tell CNN they wish Romney had won:

Americans are so down on President Obama at the moment that, if they could do the 2012 election all over again, they'd overwhelmingly back the former Massachusetts governor's bid. That's just one finding in a brutal CNN poll, released Sunday, which shows Romney topping Obama in a re-election rematch by a whopping nine-point margin, 53 percent to 44 percent. That's an even larger spread than CNN found in November, when a survey had Romney winning a redo 49 percent to 45 percent.

Two years ago, Obama won re-election with about 51 percent of the vote.

2 1/2 times more Denverites signed up for Medicaid, than for private insurance..

Disgusting and unsustainable:

In Denver, 2½ times as many people enrolled in the taxpayer-funded Medicaid program from October through the first quarter of 2014 as those who signed up for private insurance through the state exchange, state figures show.

And in Colorado and nationwide, Medicaid enrollments outpace private insurance registrants.

Colorado ranked 11th in the nation of states with the highest percentage of Medicaid enrollments compared with private insurance subscribers through marketplaces as of the end of February, a Denver Post analysis of federal numbers shows.

State Sen. Kent Lambert, a Colorado Springs Republican who serves on the Joint Budget Committee, said the Medicaid figures show that the Affordable Care Act was more about expanding government-funded health care than getting more people covered by private health insurance.

"It's a huge burden on taxpayers," Lambert said. "Colorado made a decision, the governor made a decision under Democratic leadership to expand the criteria for Medicaid to a much larger population, and the federal government also expanded Medicaid."

So we forced lots of folks onto a taxpayer-funded program, that is already overburdened.  Obviously that means taxes will have to go up, to meet the new demands.

Nice program, Mr. President.

Even those that were willing to pay for their own coverage, were surprised to learn they get it for free:

Denver resident Patrick Jones tried to sign up for private health insurance through the state exchange after quitting his job to return to get more work training, but he said he was directed to Medicaid.

"I was shocked," said the 27-year-old who left an Internet marketing job to learn programming through an online course. "I was ready to pay for insurance, and I was shocked when I was told you are going to receive Medicaid."

But Jones is happy because he gets insurance coverage with no monthly premium at least until he starts a new job and gets employer coverage or makes too much to qualify for Medicaid.

 

This could never happen with Obamacare..

When faced with a backlog, the VA destroyed Veterans medical records:

“We just didn’t have the resources to conduct all of those exams. Basically we would get about 3,000 requests a month for [medical] exams, but in a 30-day period we only had the resources to do about 800. That rolls over to the next month and creates a backlog,” Mitchell said. ”It’s a numbers thing. The waiting list counts against the hospitals efficiency. The longer the veteran waits for an exam that counts against the hospital as far as productivity is concerned.”

By 2008, some patients were “waiting six to nine months for an exam” and VA “didn’t know how to address the issue,” Mitchell said.

VA Greater Los Angeles Radiology department chief Dr. Suzie El-Saden initiated an “ongoing discussion in the department” to cancel exam requests and destroy veterans’ medical files so that no record of the exam requests would exist, thus reducing the backlog, Mitchell said.

Audio from a November 2008 meeting obtained by TheDC depicts VA Greater Los Angeles officials plotting to cancel backlogged exam requests.

It'll be different with Obamacare.  We'll always have plenty of doctors, no backlogs, and it will be super easy to get in to see your doctor. So nothing to worry about.  Absolutely okay to have the Government in charge of your health.

Rand Paul steps up..

Doing what should have been done long ago with President Obama:

The class-action lawsuit will be filed against Obama, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the National Security Agency Keith Alexander and FBI Director James Comey.

The complaint? “I am filing a lawsuit against President Barack Obama because he has publicly refused to stop a clear and continuing violation of the 4th Amendment,” Paul said in a statement. “The Bill of Rights protects all citizens from general warrants. I expect this case to go all the way to the Supreme Court and I predict the American people will win.”

Cuccinelli, acting as lead counsel, said he’s “excited” about the opportunity “to get the courts to affirm the rights protected by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.”

“We have assembled a legal team and we expect to be opposed by the vast resources of the federal government, yet I am optimistic that we will prevail, because we are seeking to protect a cornerstone of the Constitution,” added Cuccinelli, who was defeated in the Virginia governor’s race last fall by Terry McAuliffe.

“This class action suit isn’t about Republican versus Democrat, or progressive versus conservative. This is about defending the basic civil liberties of every American from a government that has crossed the line. FreedomWorks is participating in this suit on behalf of our community of 6 million citizens nationwide, along with any American who has a phone,” Kibbe said. “If you use a phone, you should care about this case. Never in American history has there been such a warrantless gathering of citizens information. We believe it is time to put this before the courts. ”

Sometime tomorrow after the suit is filed, we'll learn from many Democrats and MSMers why Paul is racist.

I don't think he understands what the word "mandate" means..

Another day, another delay (and law ignored):

The Obama administration announced Monday it would give medium-sized employers an extra year, until 2016, before they must offer health insurance to their full-time workers.

Firms with at least 100 employees will have to start offering this coverage in 2015.

By offering an unexpected grace period to businesses with between 50 and 99 employees, administration officials are hoping to defuse another potential controversy involving the 2010 health-care law, which has become central to Republicans’ campaign to make political gains in this year’s midterm election.

Even the nation’s largest employers got a significant concession: They can avoid a fine by offering coverage to 70 percent of their full-time employees in 2015 and 95 percent starting in 2016. Under an earlier proposal, employers with at least 50 employees would have been required to offer insurance, beginning 2015, to 95 percent of those who work 30 hours or more a week, along with their dependents.

The regulation finalized by the Treasury Department involves one of the biggest issues surrounding the Affordable Care Act: how the law’s employer mandate plays out in practice. The mandate has enormous ramifications for how businesses classify their employees and how much these men and women work.

Initially, these requirements — which affect firms employing 72 percent of all Americans — were supposed to take effect this year, at the same time that most individuals faced a new obligation to obtain health insurance or risk a tax penalty. Last July, the administration announced it would delay the regulation for a year after many employers and some unions complained about the law’s reporting requirements and classification system for workers.

A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the proposal on the condition of anonymity because the rule was not yet public, said the Treasury Department decided to allow medium-sized businesses more flexibility because they “need a little more time to adjust to providing coverage.”

Businesses that fail to offer coverage face a fine of up to $2,000 for each employee that is not covered, though workers are not required to sign up for the benefits.

Laws are for the little people.

When will someone on the Hill have the guts to challenge this fraud in the White House?

The next bailout..

It's not a question of "if", but of "when":

Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.”  How can this be?  Because insurance companies won’t bear the cost of their own losses—at least not more than about a quarter of them.  The other three-quarters will be borne by American taxpayers.

For some reason, President Obama hasn’t talked about this particular feature of his signature legislation.  Indeed, it’s bad enough that Obamacare is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to funnel $1,071,000,000,000.00 (that’s $1.071 trillion) over the next decade (2014 to 2023) from American taxpayers, through Washington, to health insurance companies.  It’s even worse that Obamacare is trying to coerce Americans into buying those same insurers’ product (although there are escape routes).  It’s almost unbelievable that it will also subsidize those same insurers’ losses.

But that’s exactly what it will do—unless Republicans take action.  As Laszewski explains, Obamacare contains a “Reinsurance Program that caps big claim costs for insurers (individual plans only).”  He writes that “in 2014, 80% of individual costs between $45,000 and $250,000 are paid by the government [read: by taxpayers], for example.” 

In other words, insurance purchased through Obamacare’s government-run exchanges isn’t even full-fledged private insurance; rather, it’s a sort of private-public hybrid.  Private insurance companies pay for costs below $45,000, then taxpayers generously pick up the tab—a tab that their president hasn’t ever bothered to tell them he has opened up on their behalf—for four-fifths of the next $200,000-plus worth of costs.  In this way, and so many others, Obamacare takes a major step toward the government monopoly over American medicine (“single payer”) that liberals drool about in their sleep.

Laszewski adds, “The reinsurance program has done and will continue to do what it was intended to do; help attract and keep more carriers in Obamacare than might have otherwise come.”  Thus, Obamacare is being aided by having taxpayers subsidize big insurance companies’ business expenses.  (Who could ever have guessed that big government and big business might be natural allies?)

But, amazingly, it doesn’t stop there.  Laszewski writes that Obamacare also contains a “Risk Corridor Program that limits overall losses for insurers.”  So insurers not only don’t have to pay out all of their costs; they also don’t have to swallow all of their losses. 

Laszewski explains that if an insurance company expects its costs in a given year to be X, and those costs end up being more than X plus 2 percent, taxpayers will come to that insurance company’s rescue—thanks to Obamacare.  In fact, once an insurance company covers that initial 2 percent in unexpected costs, taxpayers will cover at least 80 percent of any additional costs the insurer accrues.

Single-payer is here.

Have you stocked up yet?

Incandescent bulbs are almost extinct:

In 2007, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law an energy bill that placed stringent efficiency requirements on ordinary incandescent bulbs in an attempt to have them completely eliminated by 2014. The law phased out 100-watt and 75-watt incandescent bulbs last year.

Proponents of government-imposed efficiency standards and regulations will say, “So what? There are still plenty of lighting options on the shelves at Home Depot; we’re saving families money; and we’re reducing harmful climate change emissions.”

The “so what” is that the federal government is taking decisions out of the hands of families and businesses, destroying jobs, and restricting consumer choice in the market. We all have a wide variety of preferences regarding light bulbs. It is not the role of the federal government to override those preferences with what it believes is in our best interest.

Families understand how energy costs impact their lives and make decisions accordingly. Energy efficiency has improved dramatically over the past six decades—long before any national energy efficiency mandates.

If families and firms are not buying the most energy-efficient appliance or technology, it is not that they are acting irrationally; they simply have budget constraints or other preferences such as comfort, convenience, and product quality. A family may know that buying an energy-efficient product will save them money in the long term, but they have to prioritize their short-term expenses. Those families operating from paycheck to paycheck may want to opt for a cheaper light bulb and more food instead of a more expensive light bulb and less food.

Forcing the Carriers to do what the Obamacare website cannot..

It came out late tonight that the Obamacare website is even more screwed up than thought.  While the Administration has been celebrating how great things are since the "reboot", the reality is that there is no mechanism in place to actually pay the insurance carriers the subsidies for low-income folks.

The solution put forth by Obama?  Let the insurance companies tell the Feds how much the US Government owes in subsidies, and then sometime down the road, the two sides will get together and "true up" the numbers.

Think of all the things that can go wrong here.

What if the Carriers say the Feds owe them $10 million this month, and the Feds come back and say "nope, we only owe $5 million"?  Who eats the shortfall?

What if an enrollee claims a larger subsidy then he/she is entitled (in other words, lies on their application)?  Whose responsibility is it to verify subsidy amounts?  Will the Carriers have the ability to look at an enrollee's tax information to determine subsidy amounts?

What happens to the up to 30% of folks that have enrolled, but don't actually have coverage when they show up to the doctor or the hospital come January 1st?

And do I even need to bring up the security risks with the Obamacare website?

A clusterfuck all the way down.

Surely a coincidence..

Obamacare critics get IRS audit letters on the same day:

Arlen Williams of the Gulag Bound blog interviewed C. Steven Tucker about the audits. 

Incredibly, according to Tucker, he and Elliot, (the cancer patient) got their audit letters on the very same day. 

Tucker: "That date was Monday November 25th. Bill’s letter informed him that is being officially audited in the spring of 2014 whereas the IRS sent me a letter simply demanding $4,000 from me for the year 2003 and $2,000 from the year 2010 which must be received at their offices no later than December 26, 2013. Merry Christmas from the IRS."