HuffPo: Obamacare rollout has been a complete disaster.

Damn, he's taking a beating from all sides!

 

distraction to focus on crappy website

real problem is cancelled plans and spiking premiums

 

What are you paying attention to? Premiums are going down or staying the same for a great many people.

 

And the US savings rate is terrible and the financial and mortgage crisis wiped out a lot of people's savings already. There is nothing wrong with HSA's but as a widespread solution for the US health care crisis I don't see it happening.

Fair enough and I probably shouldn't base things on my own situation.

Thanks for clarifying.

 

Also premiums where spiking before the ACA.

 

I didn't want to confuse him with too many facts in one post.

 

I gotta admit some of these are pretty funny cartoons.

 

LOL @ Obama's phone in the New Yorker cover.

 

Hey Texx, are you hoping that Obamacare fails?

 

Watching conservatives continue to fail with graphics: more priceless.

But seriously, if a huge new piece of government has your own name on it, how do you not ride herd on it? Or forget ego and pride for a second: how do you not get daily updates on something this important and test the **** out of software before it goes live? How do you not put the best programmers you can find on such a thing?

I just cannot fathom how this was so shoddy. Nothing can sugarcoat it. My undergraduate computer science majors can understand the basic parameters that such a website needs to get right and what the demands will be.

I haven't heard a good argument or excuse yet -- just "we will fix it; we will work to fix it." The democrats are so so lucky that the GOP was focused on shuttering the government when Obamacare first appeared. Imagine the PR hit if the GOP had been smart and spent weeks saying "okay, let's see how this goes. You pushed it through, so let's monitor this minute-to-minute, shall we?" No, it was r****ded misuse of green eggs and ham instead. LOL.

I know I'm feeding trolls, but whatev. This is incredibly disappointing. If it is indeed fixed, people will forget, but it's just a crappy first impression, at best.

 

This is probably the most we have ever agreed in D&D. Thanks, Obama!

I would say a smart leader can anticipate the follow-through required for such an enormous endeavor. Maybe Sebelius saw the crap wave coming but given a poor start (with an underperforming major contractor) she couldn't stop it. Maybe the deadline was just too much for them, or they waited until after the supreme court verdict to spend any money, etc.

I would guess that they saw the disaster coming but they knew *any* delay in the official start date / roll out would be pounced on by, um, certain partisan factions, let's say.

 

A guy I trade with just got an insurance quote from an agent who came to the office.

Him and his wife are early 30's and they have 2 young kids. No deductible and 80% coverage was $1040/mo. I think it was $1500 out of pocket max too. Another guy, late 30's, who's got a wife and young kid is getting 90% coverage for $910/mo. Seemed like solid deals. They don't get any tax credits either.

 

Indefensible mess. The excuses and spin would be hilarious if the impact was less damaging. Unfortunately, they are not funny.

 

Haters gonna hate

Why Obamacare Isn’t Losing Popularity Even After A Month Of Really Bad Press

A new poll released on Wednesday finds that uninsured Americans are increasingly interested in Obamacare, despite the ongoing technological problems plaguing the websites that allow them to sign up for health insurance plans. The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 42 percent of Americans who currently lack insurance intend to enroll in a plan under Obamacare — a slight uptick from last month, when 37 percent of that population indicated they wanted to enroll. Overall public support for the health reform law also rose from 44 percent to 47 percent.

And that’s just the latest poll to find that Obamacare isn’t losing ground among the public, despite a month of headlines that have bemoaned its exchanges as a total disaster and warned Americans that it may cause them to get booted from their current insurance plan. At the end of last month, a Gallup poll found that Americans were “slightly more positive” about the health reform law after three weeks of its rocky roll-out than they were right before the exchanges launched. Around the same time, both a Washington Post poll and a Pew Research Center poll found that public opinion about Obamacare hadn’t taken a nosedive despite the frustrating issues with the website glitches.

In all of that polling, respondents tend to agree that it’s been a bad roll-out. So why isn’t support for the law completely tanking?

One of the Ipsos pollsters, Chris Jackson, offered up a plausible theory: Americans are finally having a personal experience with health reform. “The launch of the exchanges, that’s the first real world event for a lot of people,” he told Reuters. “There’s been this sense that once people got familiar with it, public opinion would start to move in its direction.”

At least so far, that point about health reform has seemed to hold true. Since “Obamacare” has become a politically-charged buzzword, the law doesn’t really poll well as a whole, and most Americans say they don’t like it. But they do like its individual provisions — often without initially realizing those benefits are a direct result of the health reform law they hate so much. Once they figure out what Obamacare can do for them, even some of the law’s most passionate opponents have ended up changing their minds.

People with employer-sponsored health insurance have already interacted with some of the benefits put in place by Obamacare, like no-cost preventative services and increased consumer protections. But the beginning of the exchanges’ open enrollment period was a massive expansion of the pool of people who stand to directly benefit from health reform, which has allowed even more Americans to have that “personal experience” that Jackson referenced. It makes sense that’s preventing Obamacare’s approval from plummeting, despite a roll-out that’s been widely panned.

The Republicans who continue to crusade against Obamacare are well aware of this reality. On Wednesday morning, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) — who has taken one of the most hardline stances against health reform, continually introducing measures to repeal the whole thing — acknowledged that the people in his state probably aren’t ardently opposed to Obamacare. “The charts that I’m seeing show that Iowa is one of the states that has some of the lowest percentage premium increases… And so the intensity of our pushback here will probably be in proportion to the premium increases that we get,” he noted. In other words, they like it because they’re having a positive experience with it so far.

And those positive experiences with Obamacare are certainly happening, even if the media isn’t trumpeting those stories. As the New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait notes, the mainstream media has somewhat obsessively focused on the Americans who are have negative things to say about the law — the people who are locked out of the website because of glitches, and, most recently, the people who have received cancellation letters from insurers and will need to enroll in a new plan under Obamacare. Chait points out that headlines about individual, negatives stories (“Florida Woman Facing Higher Costs”) are always more attractive to the press than less personal accounts of success (“Millions Set to Gain Low-Cost Insurance”).

The apparent disconnect between media coverage and public opinion may also be driven by the fact that the media tends to use “Obamacare” as a shorthand to talk about the law’s insurance exchanges. Over the past month, President Obama has reiterated that the law is bigger than a website — and it’s actually bigger than the exchanges themselves, too. The expansion of the Medicaid program to cover additional low-income Americans is another huge component of Obamacare, and one that’s been running a lot more smoothly so far than the exchange sites. Many of the Americans who have had the best experiences with Obamacare so far are the poor people who have been locked out of the insurance industry altogether until this point. But in general, as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting notes, those Medicaid success stories aren’t getting told in the press — or they’re told from a negative angle.

Of course, that’s not to say there aren’t serious problems with the exchanges’ bumpy roll-out. There are, and the website glitches are frustrating many of the uninsured Americans who are currently attempting to enroll in plans. But even those people haven’t indicated that the website problems are leading them to give up on health reform altogether — most of them say they want to keep trying to sign up. Assuming the websites actually improve and they eventually manage to do so, they’ll likely add to the growing number of Americans who have something positive to say about Obamacare. And public support could keep ticking up, confounding the Republicans who are insistent on declaring the whole thing to be a hopeless train wreck.

 

I have to agree. And, I'm left wondering why they didn't take the opportunity Cruz gave them with the default crisis to delay the launch. They must have known (or should have known) months and months ago that the implementation wasn't going well and that the launch would be a failure. I suppose he didn't want to concede anywhere, but this project needed the time for triage and he could have had it.

 

A few passages from a recent WaPo article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...3fba42-426b-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_print.html

Yes, the WH displayed a ridiculous amount of pusillanimity, but it cannot be denied that Repub opposition also played a huge role in this debacle.