OFA Obamacare ‘Success’ Stories Include Former Dem Candidate, Activist

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Wynton Hall:

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama’s political organization-turned-advocacy-group, Organizing For Action (OFA), launched a high stakes publicity campaign, complete with a new web presence purportedly featuring the Obamacare success stories of everyday citizens, in the hopes of resuscitating the President’s highly unpopular healthcare overhaul on the opening day of Obamacare coverage.

As Politico reported Sunday, “White House officials and congressional aides say they have been lining up consumers and vetting their stories so they can be told through videos, blogs, local news reports, press conference calls and Twitter feeds.” The anticipation is that “the success stories would help rebuild confidence in Obamacare and encourage millions of Americans who haven’t signed up to do so.”

Politico noted that the massive publicity campaign even included House Democratic leaders sending out a three-page guide to Democrats, instructing them on how to find and place success stories of everyday citizens. “There was one key precaution: The stories need to be ‘thoroughly vetted,'” wrote Politico reporters Carrie Budoff Brown and Jonathan Allen.

The OFA publicity push, which runs the risk of further angering the millions of middle class citizens who have lost their plans and seen their premiums and deductibles spike, features testimonials taken from news clips of Obamacare enrollees. Curiously, OFA’s Obamacare success stories page does not include the last name of each individual. Instead, it lists only their last initial.

One individual included in the OFA gallery of Obamacare winners, listed simply as “Avram F.,” a citizen of North Carolina, is quoted as saying: “Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, I am now, at age 63, covered by healthcare insurance for the first time in my adult life… Tonight I will sleep well knowing that my family and I are much more secure in life. Thank you President Obama and those in Congress who voted to pass the ACA.”

When the reader clicks on the OFA link to the original source of Avram F.’s quote, they are taken to a Black Mountain News letter to the editor written by “Avram Friedman, the Executive Director of the Canary Coalition,” an environmental activism group.

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Half of Obamacare ‘Enrollees’ Have Yet to Pay

Health insurance plans purchased through Obamacare only kick in once a customer pays their first month’s premium. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that “only about half of enrollees billed for plans offered by more than 100 insurers in 17 states had paid their first month’s premium,” according to Benaissance chief strategy officer Mark Waterstraat, whose firm serves as a third-party billing company for insurers. Another insurer, Scott & White Health Plan, told the Journal that only 35% of its enrollees have paid for the plans they applied for.

The Obama administration remains far behind its 7 million enrollment target but has recently celebrated what it calls two million Obamacare “enrollments.” Yet that figure merely reflects the number of applications submitted, not the number of paying customers who have turned on their plans by actually paying for coverage. Whether insurers in the other 33 states are experiencing nonpayment rates in the 35% to 50% range is presently unknown. If those rates extended nationally, they would mean the Obama administration’s claim that it has enrolled two million people in Obamacare would plunge to just 700,000 to one million.

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One thing to look for is letters to the editor printed in your local paper proclaiming the benefits of Obamacare. I’ve already seen a couple. The letters are of the positive experience, better coverage and lower prices the person writing now has thanks to the ACA. What the letters lack is any real detail of the coverage both before and after. It reads like a sales brochure for a product. I suspect these are planted and not real experiences as too many other letters are showing up with the opposite story.

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ObamaCare is bad.
And we keep finding out more reasons why.
Do you expect workers at your hospital next time you have to go?
Well, maybe they’ll be there, and maybe they won’t!
It begins……
More than 150 employees haven’t been paid in nearly a month.
The hospital is strapped for cash because a new Medicare payment facilitator named Novitas Solutions is taking too way long to pay out Medicare claims to the hospital.
The hospital is owed nearly $3 million in payments from Medicare and can’t make payroll…
Many smaller community hospitals like this one are in similar situations.
What organization is supposed to be making Medicare payments to these hospitals?
Novitas.
Novitas’s direct connection to Healthcare.gov stems from an emergency, no-bid contract for “financial management services” awarded in August.

Novitas did not respond to KTRK for its story, and so far has not responded to a request for comment since the story ran. In the past, Novitas has referred requests for comment to HHS.
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=9372756
Additional info:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-contractor-blamed-slow-medicare-payments-hospitals_773207.html
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-back-end-contractor-also-runs-troubled-medicare-website_771474.html
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/avoid-severe-consequences-delays-hhs-awards-no-bid-contracts-marketplaces_754032.html

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