image courtesy The Daily Gator
The doctor can’t see you if you can’t sign up.
It looks like the best thing the GOP can do is stand back and let Obamacare stumble along into oblivion. The problems are not getting better, they’re getting worse.
The Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, was for a while reported to have cost over $600 million– more than the original iphone, LinkedIn and Spotify. It turns out that the actual cost for the digital disaster was closer to $500 million.
But the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.
Whew. That’s much better.
It seems that IT companies in the US were so busy that the Obama regime had to outsource the creation of Obamacare website to a Canadian firm! Apparently Obama didn’t think America needed those jobs. The Canadian firm, CGI, was handed a no-bid contract for $93 million and it blew up to $500 million and no one wants to talk about it.
Today, Pollock details the murky path HHS officials followed to give the Healthcare.gov project’s $93 million design project to CGI.
“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,” Pollock reports.
Obama’s signature achievement is driving everyone nuts and could actually be harmful. Insurance companies are being given bad and wrong information:
Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further than the website traffic and software issues already identified.
Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans.
The flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage.
It works, says the Obama regime, but insurers are told to shut up:
“We know that people are enrolling in coverage and the system works. As individual problems are raised by insurers, we work aggressively to address them,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said Thursday.
Health-department officials have pressured insurers to refrain from commenting publicly about the problems, according to executives at four health plans, who asked not to be named. The HHS declined to comment.
how many have been enrolled? They’re not saying.
It would be wise for the GOP to hold hearings and put the spotlight on the sheer incompetence of this regime:
But the persistence of the technological problems could force a steeper political price for the Obama administration as Republican lawmakers redirect their focus. The GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee announced Thursday night it would hold a hearing next week on the rollout of the law and called on HHS to “voluntarily” make officials available after the secretary’s staff said she couldn’t come. Ms Peters, the HHS spokeswoman, said the department intended to be “responsive” to the request.
There is some good news- Obamacare will be creating jobs- fixing the screw-ups Obamacare creates:
Scott & White Health Plan in Temple, Texas, has received 25 enrollees from the federally run exchange so far. “There are some missing data elements that are requiring a lot of research on our part,” said Allan Einboden, the health plan’s chief executive. “If we’d received 5,000 and they all had to be worked, that’s a lot of extra administrative costs,” said Mr. Einboden, who said he expects the problems to be fixed.
The deep-rooted trouble with Obamacare could actually jeopardize lives:
Tara Seidenberg, a 48-year-old paralegal from suburban Houston with multiple sclerosis, says she is likely to put up with all kinds of hurdles to buy coverage. After days of failed attempts to sign up on healthcare.gov, she is taking a break to wait for the glitches to resolve. She takes medications that cost $4,600 a month and her current coverage won’t be available next year. “I’m pretty much guaranteed to try it again,” Ms. Seidenberg said.
A reminder of the promises:
You can keep your doctor
You can keep your plan
Your health care premiums will go down 3000%
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoV0NeHNklk[/youtube]
And this beauty from Nancy Pelosi:
“And everybody will have lower rates, better quality care and better access.”
As this the smoke from this clusterfrak dissipates, expect a lot more liberal memory loss as suffered here by poor Nancy :
“I don’t remember saying that everybody in the country would have a lower premium…”
You could die trying to sign up. Hey, that’s one way to control costs!
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.