Thread: Do you support Obama Care ?

THESE ARE THE FACTS, and the news keeps getting worse:

Obamacare brings higher premiums.

Obamacare forces EVERYONE—even young, healthy people—to purchase insurance and hold specific coverage, even if they don’t want or need it. If you are a women, 65, without female reproductive organs, you still must pay for pregnancy coverage – even MEN MUST PAY FOR PREGNANCY CARE! Equal after all is equal!

Obamacare is forcing doctors and hospitals to close their doors, leaving you with limited options for care.

Obamacare will, by nature, create “death panels” of government bureaucracy who will dole out instructions to you and your loved ones. Maybe you will be deemed worthy of treatment; maybe you won’t. Washington will decide.

Obamacare ushers in at least 20 new or increased taxes.

Obamacare is causing businesses to cut down employee hours or layoff people altogether, meaning fewer and fewer Americans can afford to pay for this “affordable” healthcare debacle!

Obamacare sends millions of dollars to far Left “community organizations” that will put your tax dollars to work electing the next generation of Democrats who push for socialist causes!

Congress, Obamacare hurts way more people than it claims to help. It must be delayed, defunded and repealed immediately. The federal government has no business forcing Americans to purchase health insurance and they certainly have no business taking over private markets.

We are already in a high risk financial situation and if we allow Obamacare to be implemented, well … We may not be able to recover from the costs of failure!

Privacy? Forget about it! A visit to the doctor—if you can get in to see one—is now going to consist more of an interrogation than a visit to a care-giver. The doctor will be responsible for getting information about whether you own guns, what kind of sex partners you have, or if you are depressed.

This information is confidential and is supposed to be protected, between you and your doctor. No more. Your answers will be uploaded into a database and various agencies will be able to comb through the intimate details of your life, putting together a Big Brother narrative that will follow you wherever you go.

The Kentucky exchange site warns, ““Users (authorized or unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy. Any or all uses of this system and all files on the system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized state government and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.”

When you sign up for Obamacare through the Maryland Health Connection, you are greeted with a “privacy policy” that warns, “Any information that you provide to us in your application will be used only to carry out the functions of Maryland Health Connection. The only exception to this policy is that we may share information provided in your application with the appropriate authorities for law enforcement and audit activities.”

And then it goes on to say that if you EMAIL them with questions or comments, “we use the information you send us to respond to your inquiry. E-mail correspondence may become a public record. As a public record, your correspondence could be disclosed to other parties upon their request in accordance with Maryland’s Public Information Act.”

Government agencies will have the power to tap into your data at a moment’s notice. Audits, fines, harassment, privacy intrusions and chaos will ensue. Do you TRUST this government?

This is the moment to end Obamacare before it destroys the best healthcare system in the world. Congress needs to be reminded day and night that the people do not want Obamacare and we are prepared to hold them responsible if they do not vote to get rid of it.

This is our right and our duty as American citizens, to end legislation that will hurt America.

http://www.conservative-daily.com/20...ame-socialism/

Dave Ramsey lays out the facts of Obamacare for both Democrats and Republicans

"You’re not exempt from math if you’re a Republican,
and your not exempt from math if you’re a Democrat."

This video is an excellent resource for anybody who’s struggling to understand what Obamacare means for their pocket book. Dave lays it out as only Dave can.

Here’s the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=IsVqOe07cdY



Kudos to Dave Ramsey for not falling into the “loudest voice in the room wins” trap. I highly encourage our readers to share this with their friends and family. Share it on Facebook on Twitter and help spread the facts about the Affordable Care Act.

Duuuude: Obamacare enrollment success summed up in a single, painful graphic

http://twitchy.com/2013/10/15/duuuud...inful-graphic/

Obamacare's Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn't Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are
10/14/2013 @ 11:39AM - Avik Roy



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 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...27783931191264

“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?

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.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3iP3...layer_embedded

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 cost “$0″ or “$30″ instead of explaining that the plan really costs $200, and that 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 today detailing 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 never have arisen. But that would require admitting that the “Affordable Care Act” was not accurately named.

The White House knew that its 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.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapoth...ns-true-costs/

UPDATE: Ezra Klein interviews Bob Laszewski, a consultant to the insurance industry. Bob tells Ezra that “the Obama administration has been really paranoid about…rate shock,” and that the problems could take “three or four or five months” to fix: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...of-the-rocket/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapoth...ns-true-costs/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapoth...ns-true-costs/


UPDATE: Ezra Klein interviews Bob Laszewski, a consultant to the insurance industry. Bob tells Ezra that “the Obama administration has been really paranoid about…rate shock,” and that the problems could take “three or four or five months” to fix: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...of-the-rocket/

“They were paranoid because Obamacare was under siege. I understand that. If they were open with their partners there would’ve been criticism, but it would’ve been constructive criticism. None of us had any idea that the government Web site would require security sign-ins before browsing. Why did that have to be a secret? No one will read a newspaper article about that. If it had been transparent I think most of this would’ve been caught upfront. That really hurt them.

One thing the Obama administration has been really paranoid about is rate shock. When someone like me says there’ll be rate shock they say you have to net out the subsidies. That is a fair point. But I think what happened was when they designed their system they were so paranoid about that that they wanted to make sure people browsing got the lowest price. That required signing in so you could see subsidies. And my theory is that’s why they went to the architecture they did even though the IT systems people wanted to go another way…

The problem with the Obama administration keeping this open is its five times harder to fix something like this on the run. If it would’ve taken a month to fix it during the shutdown, it’ll take three or four or five months to fix it while it was running.

Obamacare Web Program Developed By =} CGI (No-Bid Contract) Who Own =} SIlver Oak Solutions Who Developed =} PRISM Cyber Collection For =} NSA As Revealed By =} Edward Snowden

Posted on October 15, 2013

Now that we have affirmation on WHY the website does not work. Lets take a look at how it’s put together and follow the network. (HatTip Fantasia for some links)

Sometimes looking into the engineering side of the new Obamacare Cyber Construction (Rabbit Hole) makes you wonder…..

In 2010 when the ACA (Obamacare) was passed it was 2,700 pages, 381,517 words, formulating a bill that no-one read before it was voted on; and “we’d have to pass it to see what’s in it”.

In 2013 Obamacare, and the accompanying regulation which compromise it’s construct, is now 10,535 pages long (11,588,500 words). Thirty times larger than the initial construct and so massive that no-one knows what it all means in totality.

So a website to sign people up for it needed to be constructed.

Where did the feds turn? To a previously authorized cyber engineering firm, CGI, who held a very special status - “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.” As the Washington Examiner outlined: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/...s-30x-long-law

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. [...]

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.

But who exactly is CGI and how do they relate to the U.S. Federal Government?

CGI owns another company called Silver Oak Solutions (SOS) which specializes in business construction platforms which take advantage of large government contracts. Seemingly innocuous until you look into what SOS controls under their proprietary development.
http://www.triple-tree.com/transacti...lutions-by-cgi

Through the development of its own proprietary Spend Management offerings called PRISM®, [SOS] grew from under $1 million in revenue in 1999 to over $23 million in 2005. During this period, Silver Oak Solutions emerged as the pioneer and clear market leader in the government / public sector, which represents a $100 billion total market opportunity.

“PRISM®” might be familiar to you because of NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden. This UK Guardian article is from July 2013 and was one of the first to reveal the NSA super-secret cyber spying program on Americans.

PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers

Silicon Valley executives insist they did not know of secret PRISM program that grants access to emails and search history.

[...] Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants’ servers.

The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on “legally-compelled collection” but operates with the “assistance of communications providers in the US.”

Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.

However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency.

The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled “direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple“. ( http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...sa-data-mining )

So let me pause before moving forward. The “international” company who was quietly awarded a no-bid contract to build the Obamacare website is the same company who operates the PRISM® platform which the NSA uses to gather phone, data, telecommunication, social media, and e-mail transmissions for review. Got it?

Okay, lets move forward.

Forward, because recently it has come to light the NSA is doing a little more than just “gathering” innocuous information. As the Washington Post outlined just yesterday: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...d8f_print.html

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally - The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/pag...n-problem/517/ provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...459_story.html

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/pag...n-problem/517/

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.

Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.” http://www.dni.gov/index.php

The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the acquisition, use and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...d8f_print.html

So a mandatory taxation program (Obamacare) which has the enforcement arm of the IRS, and an additional 16,000 approved IRS agents, yet contains no baseline “income verification” within the legislation, is being implemented by a data registry/collection platform which also provides the National Security Agency with data intelligence on American citizens.

Well at least now we know why CGI is operating out of Canada. Because so long as the data collection is “international” the extent of the data mining by the NSA is unlimited.

And subsequently why would you need pre-registration income verification when every single aspect of your life, employer wages, income, banking, purchases, as well as e-mail and e-billing are just a few mouse clicks of inter-agency data bank assembly away from review?

Think about it.

Apparently, and factually, it is all well connected.

http://theconservativetreehouse.com/...dward-snowden/

Still "celebrating" Obamacare ?