https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hpho...40073685_n.jpg
Printable View
Longtime ObamaCare Supporter Kirsten Powers Gets Unwanted Healthcare Surprise In The Mail
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=fLtu8axeX2w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=fLtu8axeX2w
Fox News Contributor and Daily Beast Columnist Kirsten Powers has been a longtime supporter of ObamaCare, insisting it will make healthcare costs more affordable. Until she got “the letter,” that is.
In an appearance on “The Kelly File” Thursday, Kirsten told host Megyn Kelly that she received “the letter” that millions of Americans across the country are receiving. Kirsten is a healthy single woman whose health insurance premiums are going to double under ObamaCare.
Kirsten also observed (correctly) that while Team Obama may now try ti argue that only the premiums of “young and healthy” Americans will increase, “that’s not the way they sold it.”Quote:
“I’m in the individual market and I got the letter, the same letter everyone’s talking about. I live in D.C., so it’s a state exchange, and I went on and I guess I can roughly get the same insurance…but it will go up from about $160 a month and a $2,500 deductible — if I want to keep a $2,500 deductible, it will go up to about $300 a month.”
[Incidentally, ask yourself this question: Why should the premiums of "young and healthy" Americans increase either? If your answer is "to offset the cost of older less healthy Americans," you fail to understand the basic premise of insurance - and does the Obama administration.]
Memo to Kirsten (whom I like, and generally see as fair): If Democrats were to try to “sell” every program they support with the truth, they would have gone out of business decades ago.
http://www.ijreview.com/2013/10/9001...surprise-mail/
So far I am lucky. Nothing changes for me as of yet. I am 50+ years old. In good shape basically but have issues and minor problems here and there. I smoke and am overweight. I am not diabetic or pre-diabetic, blood pressure, triglycerides and cholesterol are terrific. I do exercise and eat pretty healthy. I should not have to subsidize the gang bangers on the south side of Chicago or the fat ass, lazy SOB across the way nor should my healthy, active sons.
Me
‘Glitches’ hit Obamacare paper, phone applications tooQuote:
Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge
By PAIGE WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM | 10/25/13 5:34 PM EDT
Trying to sign up for Obamacare the old-fashioned way — paper, pen or telephone?
Good luck with that.
With the supposedly state-of-the-art $600 million HealthCare.gov portal malfunctioning, President Barack Obama is urging Americans to go ahead and try to get health coverage by mailing in a paper application, calling the helpline or seeking help from one of the trained “assisters.”
But the truth is those applications — on paper or by phone — have to get entered into the same lousy website that is causing the problems in the first place. And the people processing the paper and calls don’t have any cyber secret passage to duck around that. They too have to deal with all the frustrations of HealthCare.gov — full-time. “I feel like we’re sort of back in the era of control-alt-delete where we’re trying to figure out the different tricks that facilitate people’s enrollment,” said Jennifer Ng’andu, director of health policy for the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group that has been helping to publicize the Affordable Care Act.
The administration for the first time on Friday said it expected the health exchange website serving 36 states should be in good shape in about a month. “We’re confident by the end of November, HealthCare.gov will be smooth for a vast majority of users,” said Jeff Zients, the former White House aide and management expert brought into oversee the repair drive. But for now, with HealthCare.gov crippled by design flaws and a morass of messy code, the president and health officials have been using a variety of posts and announcements to urge people to try low-tech ways of enrolling. Basically they are saying while the front door is stuck, try the side.
Of course, reading an 800 number on national TV — as the president did in the Rose Garden the other day — created a flood of callers who couldn’t get through. That led to another wave of frustration and Obamacare punch lines. But Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tweeted on Thursday that HHS bulked up the call center to include more than 10,000 trained representatives.
POLITICO reporters who got recorded announcements earlier in the week — sometimes directing them to try HealthCare.gov — can now get through to the call center. Once they connect, staffers like “Justin” try to get people’s information into the online system. But “Justin” doesn’t have a fast track. Asked if the website works better for him than the general public, he responded: “No. The site does not work for us either,” he said.
Sometime, the call center staff can get in and process the application while the caller waits. If not, the staff can take the information, put it in a PDF and finish later. Even then, it’s just the application — once that’s processed, the customer still has to call back or get online to select the specific health plan they want and enroll.
People do not have to stay on hold indefinitely — a good thing because Sebelius said earlier in the week that the center has handled about 1.6 million calls.
It’s similar in the world of paper applications.
Even before the tech problems, the government had a private contractor, Serco, to handle paper applications, which were expected to come primarily from less Web-savvy people. On Thursday, the company’s program director John Lau told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that it had completed between 3,000 and 4,000 applications.
Lau said the company does have the capacity to handle more than what’s expected — a paper surge. But he also said the customer’s data has to be entered into the Web portal and hinted there could be problems if volume dramatically increases. Lau didn’t say how long that takes, but a customer service representative said it would take about three weeks to complete the enrollment process. “Our challenges have included coping with the performance of the portal as that is our means of entering data just as it is for the consumer,” Lau said, referring to HealthCare.gov. “With the relatively low volumes of applications we have received thus far, this has not been a problem for us.”
But Serco will be flooded with paper applications if the website glitches persist, predicted John Gorman, founder of the Gorman Health Group, which has advised some of the insurance exchanges. “Serco is going to be swimming in paper within the next two to three weeks,” he said.
Health industry experts have serious doubts about whether these quaint tools could get the Obama administration a good way toward its first-year enrollment target of 7 million Americans in the exchanges by the end of March. “There’s no way a call center can handle 7 million enrollees between now and March,” said Dan Schuyler, director of exchange technology for Leavitt Partners.
The National Council of La Raza, Ng’andu’s group, has been working with navigators and assisters, more of whom are getting certified every day to help people sign up. They’re getting the clear message from the administration — only use paper applications if nothing else works. “We’ve been strongly urged to enroll people online and the paper application is the last resort,” said Michele Cullen, manager of the navigator program for the Genesis Health System in Illinois and Iowa.
In the end, everyone trying to enroll Americans in Obamacare just wants the technology to get better. “It will be nice when that website just flows and we can get people enrolled,” Cullen said. But the approaching Dec.15 deadline to get coverage starting Jan. 1, combined with the paper and call center challenges, have left advocates trying to enroll people any way they can while keeping their fingers crossed that HealthCare.gov will improve. “At this point, we’re three weeks into enrollment,” Ng’andu said. “We’re not going to wait. … From our perspective, we need to get individuals informed. We need to get them shopping.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/1...#ixzz2iyOefDgT
Obamacare online glitches: 25 great quotes
By JOSE DELREAL and TREVOR EISCHEN | 10/15/2013
The online marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act — HealthCare.gov — has been plagued with problems since it opened two weeks ago. POLITICO looks at the most telling and colorful comments made about the “glitches” the site is facing:
http://images.politico.com/global/20...bs_605_605.jpg
Quote:
“I hope they are working day and night to get this done. When they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure that this thing was supposed to work.”
— former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner,” Oct. 14
Quote:
“A thousand Social Security numbers being sent to the wrong people is not a glitch!”
— CNBC contributor Carol Roth on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Oct. 12
Quote:
“How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?”
— House Speaker John Boehner, Oct. 10
Quote:
“Despite the widespread belief that the administration was not ready for the health law’s Oct. 1 launch, top officials and lead IT contractors looked us in the eye and assured us all systems were a go. Instead, here we are 10 days later, and delays and technical failures have reached epidemic proportions.”
— Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) in a statement, Oct. 10
Quote:
“We’re going to do a challenge. I’m going to try and download every movie ever made and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare — and we’ll see which happens first.”
— Jon Stewart to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on "The Daily Show," Oct. 7
Quote:
“It’s a new rule: If something doesn’t work, you get rid of it! If the post office is late today, let’s get rid of the post office! If the plane is late an hour, get rid of airplanes! It’s ridiculous!”
— MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Oct. 12
Quote:
“There’s so much wrong, you just don’t know what’s broken until you get a lot more of it fixed.”
— Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Oct. 14
Quote:
“They had three years to get this ready. If they weren’t fully ready, they should accept the advice Republicans are giving them: Delay it for a year, get it ready and make sure it works.”
— CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Oct. 9
Quote:
“I heard that [the website] had over 8 million hits — people that have tried to sign up — and so far they have people in the single digits that have signed up.”
— Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), Oct. 9
http://www.politico.com/gallery/2013...65-019452.htmlQuote:
“The shutdown has completely gotten in the way of the message of Obamacare not working. If there were no government shutdown, Republicans could train all their fire on the failures of the exchanges in a ‘See, I told you so’ approach.”
— Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, Oct. 1
http://images.politico.com/global/20...ap_605_605.jpg
http://images.politico.com/global/20...engrab_605.jpgQuote:
“Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.”
— President Barack Obama, Oct. 1
Quote:
“If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for Tim Cook’s head.”
— Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas in The Washington Post Wonkblog, Oct. 4
10 Sebelius quotes about Obamacare site
By JOSE DELREAL and NICK GASS | 10/23/2013
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been the target of much ire since the troubled HealthCare.gov launch on Oct. 1, with Republicans now demanding she testify before Congress and some calling for her resignation. Sebelius herself has weighed in on the website both before and after it launched:
Quote:
“As I answered before, congressman, we will be open for open enrollment Oct. 1. We are on track to meet the Oct. 1 deadline.”
- Sebelius to Rep. Kevin Brady during a congressional hearing on April 12.
Quote:
“We are on track to flip the switch on Oct. 1 and say to people, 'Come on and sign up.'”
- Sebelius in Dallas on July 28.
Quote:
“But it’s sort of a great problem to have. It’s based on the fact that the volume is so high and the interest is so high.”
- Sebelius to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Oct. 1.
Quote:
“I think the volume-related issues are ones that we welcome, frankly.”
- Sebelius to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Oct. 1.
Quote:
“We didn’t have enough testing, specifically for high volumes, for a very complicated project. We had two years and almost no testing,”
Sebelius told The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 18.
http://www.politico.com/gallery/2013...82-019675.htmlQuote:
"We had hoped they would have their A-team on the table but I'm talking to CEOs and urging them to make sure we have the talent they have available."
- Kathleen Sebelius to CNN's Sanjay Gupta on Oct. 22, when asked about the performance of Healthcare.gov contractors
so generally we have a website that has glitches that cannot handle the phone calls, paper application or web applications.
we have applications for obamacare with unknown policies, unknown costs, unknown subsidies
we have sebelius who doesn't believe she has to answer to the people who pay her salary (perhaps she thinks that obama's greens fees are paying for it when he doesn't escape to the golf course?)
we have people who have lost or are losing their medical coverage and are applying for unknown coverage at an unknown cost (if obamacare gets delayed all these people will have no health care)
we have seen a surge of medicaid applicants who will not be subsidizing healthcare but getting it for free. so who will be paying for obamacare? not the under 26 yr olds who are on mom and/or dad's free healthcare plans.......gets those printing presses warmed up
we still have some democrats who think obamacare is better than grandma's apple pie since they are living in their own lala land and still pointing fingers at the non-democrats. some of these same finger pointers have criticized ted cruz for getting free healthcare from his wife's job and not forcing the american taxpayers to shell out money for his healthcare- now where s that logic? I think it's healthcare envy............
and the people sitting back and laughing at this government and it's citizens are and will continue to get free healthcare since they are not citizens and can walk into any public hospital er and never have to pay a bill.
for which taxpayers shelled out $643 MILLION.Quote:
...so generally we have a website that has glitches that cannot handle the phone calls, paper application or web applications...
CNN Anchor Admits Team Obama 'Can Be Quite Nasty' to Deal With
By Matt Hadro | October 24, 2013
CNN's Carol Costello admitted on Wednesday that President Obama's staff "can be quite nasty" to deal with. Given Costello's propensity to be a bleeding-heart liberal, her admission is all the more striking.
The CNN segment was about the White House "Twitter mole" who was fired after a history of controversial tweets from his anonymous Twitter account. The Blaze.com's Will Cain pointed out that the Obama administration pursues only leakers who embarrass the administration.Quote:
"I felt it first hand when I was, you know, reporting on the presidential race," Costello noted. "I mean President Obama's people can be quite nasty. They don't like you to say anything bad about their boss, and they're not afraid to use whatever means they have at hand to stop you from doing that, including threatening your job."
"[T]here's a consistency in the Obama administration of going after people who embarrass the administration but not those that take shots or cover for the administration," Cain said. Costello then jumped in and built upon his statement.
Below is a transcript of the segment, which aired on CNN Newsroom on October 23 at 10:34 a.m. EDT:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matt-ha...#ixzz2iycgVfrGQuote:
WILL CAIN: There is a larger story which Jason began to touch on there. And that is the Obama administration's thin-skinned, we could call it, or he mentioned the record prosecution of leaks – there's a consistency in the Obama administration of going after people who embarrass the administration but not those that take shots or cover for the administration.
COSTELLO: And Will really does have a point. Because I felt it first hand when I was, you know, reporting on the presidential race. I mean President Obama's people can be quite nasty. They don't like you to say anything bad about their boss, and they're not afraid to use whatever means they have at hand to stop you from doing that, including threatening your job.
that they will admit to......................Quote:
Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge