Oregon Health Exchange Yet To Complete One Enrollment… Things are so bad they are considering dumping their exchange (which cost more than any other state exchange) and using the slightly-less train wreck HealthCare.gov site. Via Free Beacon: Oregon will consider a switch to the federal health care exchange next year amid ongoing problems with its online enrollment program, Politico Pro reports: The state’s exchange, Cover Oregon, still cannot process an entire enrollment online — a problem that is not expected to be repaired until after the 2014 enrollment period ends in March. That has state officials weighing several options including scrapping its own enrollment system and moving to HealthCare.gov, the federal enrollment portal which is working better now after its own disastrous start. Switching to the federal site could be considered a significant political defeat for the state and Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber, who strongly embraced the president’s health care law and is seeking reelection this year. http://freebeacon.com/oregon-health-exchange-yet-to-complete-one-enrollment/
Old And Busted: Sebelius Say No More Obamacare Delays – New And Hot: White House Delays Yet Another Obamacare Deadline… The Imperial Presidency continues to rewrite laws as they see fit. Via The Hill: The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it was again extending the ObamaCare enrollment deadline for people with pre-existing conditions. The administration said it will extend the Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan (PCIP), slated to end January 31, until March 15. “As part of our continuing effort to help smooth consumers’ transition into Marketplace coverage, we are allowing those covered by PCIP additional time to shop for new coverage while they receive the ongoing care and treatment they need,” Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters said in a statement. The deadline was originally at the end of December, but last month the administration pushed it back through January because of the problem-plagued HealthCare.gov website. The new extension is just the latest in a string of unilateral delays the administration has implemented to buy time after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov. The Obama administration has so far delayed the premium payments deadline, delayed by one week the sign-up date for coverage beginning Jan. 1, pushed back by six weeks the sign-up date for those seeking coverage by April 1, and delayed the second-year enrollment period until after the 2014 elections. Just two weeks ago Sebelius was telling us this wouldn’t happen. (Fox News) — Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, on the eve of the ObamaCare launch, told Fox News she doesn’t anticipate any more delays for the health care law. The secretary voiced confidence in the law as her department announced what it claimed was a “surge” in enrollment. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Tuesday that more than 2.1 million people have enrolled through the federal- and state-run marketplaces. “I’m thrilled that we’re going to have millions of people for the first time that have health security, and it should be a great New Year for lots of families across America,” Sebelius told Fox News in an exclusive interview, as she left a downtown D.C. restaurant Tuesday afternoon. Sebelius acknowledged there could continue to be hiccups going into 2014. “There always are,” she said. “People change plans every year.”
Convicted Felon Working As Obamacare Navigator In Connecticut… Oopsie. Via NRO: National Review Online has confirmed at least one instance where a convicted felon is working as an Obamacare navigator. Late last year, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Congress it was “possible” convicted felons could be working as navigators, prompting concerns about privacy and identity theft. (When navigators help sign people up for health coverage under Obamacare, they have access to confidential information including Social Security numbers, financial information, and health records.) Open records obtained from Connecticut show that one navigator for that state’s exchange was allowed to work despite a Class B Felony conviction (Connecticut’s Class B Felonies are punishable by 1 to 20 years in prison). AccessHealthCT declined to disclose the navigator’s name or the charge associated with the conviction, citing privacy protections. It noted the felon navigator’s sentence had been suspended, and the criminal act had occurred more than 19 years ago. The navigator has had no convictions since then, according to AccessHealthCT. Records also showed that three Connecticut navigators had been approved to work despite prior misdemeanors in the past decade. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/368978/confirmed-one-connecticut-obamacare-navigator-has-felony-conviction-jillian-kay
Woman Spends Six Weeks Trying To Disenroll From Obamacare, “It Consumed My Whole Life”… Apparently the only thing harder than enrolling in Obamacare is trying to get out of Obamacare. Via Fox News: Think it’s hard to enroll in ObamaCare? Try getting out of it. Missouri resident Lesli Hill learned the hard way that terminating an Affordable Care Act plan can be far more difficult than navigating the website to buy one. She spent six weeks being bounced from operator to operator, calling the help line, using the online chat, blasting out emails to anyone who would listen, before ultimately driving to Kansas City last week to enlist her insurance company’s help. Only then was she able to break through the bureaucratic logjam, and cancel her policy. “It’s consumed my whole life,” she told FoxNews.com, albeit with a hint of relief in her voice as she described the Kafkaesque experience behind her. “I felt like I’d slipped into a parallel universe. … It’s just as hard to go off as it is to get on.” Hill’s experience stands as a cautionary tale to anyone who, for whatever reason, is trying to bow out of insurance they purchased on the exchanges. Hill’s troubles started last fall, after the high-risk pool coverage she had was discontinued due to the health law. For lack of options, she went on the exchange and bought a policy with a $950-a-month premium. She wasn’t thrilled about it, but at least she was covered. However, shortly afterward Hill, 62, learned she could once again purchase an individual plan — with better benefits — outside the exchange. She checked with Blue Cross Blue Shield in early December and was told she’d have to cancel her ObamaCare plan first. “At that point, I hadn’t paid my premium … so I thought okay, that’ll be easy to do,” she said. Ostensibly, yes. She tried using a simple “terminate button” on the website — but it wasn’t working. http://patdollard.com/2014/01/i-felt-like-id-slipped-into-a-parallel-universe-woman-spends-6-weeks-trying-to-disenroll-from-obamacare/
Another Obamacare Success Story: Target Drops Health Insurance For Part-Time Workers Because of Obamacare… And guess where Target is dumping them? Yup, on the Obamacare exchange. Via Bloomberg: Target Corp. said it will end health insurance for part-time employees, joining Trader Joe’s Co., Home Depot Inc. and other retailers that have scaled back benefits in response to changes from Obamacare. About 10 percent of Target’s part-time employees, defined as those working fewer than 30 hours a week, use the company’s health plans now, according to an announcement posted today on the Minneapolis-based company’s website. Target said it would pay $500 to part-timers losing coverage and a consulting firm will help workers sign up for new Obamacare plans. The U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the largest regulatory overhaul of health care since the 1960s, creating a system of penalties and rewards to encourage people to obtain medical insurance. The law known as Obamacare doesn’t require most companies to cover part-time workers, and offering them health plans may disqualify those people from subsidies in new government-run insurance exchanges that opened in October. “Health care reform is transforming the benefits landscape and affecting how all employers, including Target, administer health benefits coverage,” Jodee Kozlak, Target’s executive vice president of human resources, said in the web posting. She cited “new options available for our part-time team, and the historically low number of team members who elected to enroll in the part-time plan.” The health law requires all companies employing 50 or more people to offer health insurance to employees working 30 or more hours starting in 2015. No part-timers will see their hours cut, Kozlak said. Target, the second largest U.S. discount retailer, had an estimated 361,000 total employees at the end of the last fiscal year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-21/target-to-drop-health-insurance-for-part-time-workers.html
Tennessee Residents Losing Their Doctors Because of Obamacare, Can’t Find New Ones Who Will Take Their New Insurance… The steady drip of bad news continues. FRANKLIN, TN (WSMV) - It’s been less a month since the Affordable Care Act started providing health coverage for people who bought insurance through the exchange, and now some people who are going to the doctor for the first time are finding some complications. “We have health insurance that is worthless,” said customer Shawnna Simpson. Simpson found out last week the new insurance for which she is paying $600 a month was a bad choice for her family. Her 15-year-old daughter was hurt in a cheerleading accident, so Simpson called her family doctor only to learn they don’t take her new health plan: Blue Cross Network E. Ever since, she’s been on the phone with the healthcare exchange, looking for a family doctor in Williamson County that accepts her plan, but finding none. “We can’t use it in the county where we live,” she said. The problem is Blue Cross Network E is a micro-network – a very small network with limited doctors and hospitals. Vanderbilt University Medical Center isn’t in it, for example, and neither is TriStar Medical Center. Simpson’s problem is not isolated, as many people who are just now using their insurance are finding out. Last year, Channel 4 News interviewed David Pearce, who was excited about enrolling in the healthcare exchange. Then, he showed up for his doctor’s appointment last week. “Handed them my card, and the girl had this deer in the headlights look and said, ‘I’ll be right back,’” Pierce said. It turns out his doctor in Murfreesboro doesn’t accept Blue Cross Network E either. Simpson says the new healthcare law is not working for her family and she says other families may be in the same situation. “Obamacare is not working. A lot of people that have the same issues we have and don’t know it yet, until they try to use it,” she said. http://www.wsmv.com/story/24560302/some-finding-coverage-problems-under-new-health-exchange
That's only a small hiccup. The next stage in the development of socialized healthcare in this country is to force all healthcare professionals to accept every Obamacare health insurance.
FLASHBACK: Pelosi Says Obamacare Will “Create 4 Million Jobs, 400,000 Almost Immediately”… Surreal listening to her gush over Obamacare before it was passed, literally everything she says did not come true, in fact, the exact opposite happened. <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QJKGWEkkE7E?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0"></iframe> From today: CBO Report Finds Obamacare Will Push 2 Million Workers Out of Labor Market Over Next 3 Years
Joe Wilson Was Right: Obamacare Recruiting Illegal Aliens To Sign Up <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/qgce06Yw2ro?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0"></iframe> Via Breitbart: In 2009, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) apologized profusely to the White House for shouting, “You lie!” as President Barack Obama told Congress that Obamacare would not cover illegal immigrants. Now it would appear that the White House owes Wilson an apology, as Covered California–the flagship of state Obamacare exchanges–is recruiting illegal (“undocumented”) immigrants to sign up for the program, regardless of their eligibility. The Covered California website includes a special page entitled: “No temas si eres indocumentado/a y quieres inscribir a tu familia en un seguro médico” (“Fear not if you are undocumented and want to enroll your family in health insurance”). The website goes on to explain that information shared with Obamacare cannot be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It does not explicitly warn that illegal aliens are ineligible. “According to the laws and implementing regulations,” the website says, “the information provided by individuals for coverage can not be used for purposes other than ensuring the efficient functioning of the insurance market ( Covered California) or administration of the program, or to verify certain eligibility determinations including verification of the immigration status of these people.” If you look at the nature of who the Obamacare navigators are, you can see who the outreach is geared toward, and it isn’t primarily the young and healthy ones that would sustain the system. Virtually none are geared toward universities or youth-oriented areas. Most are geared toward minority and poor populations, particularly black and Hispanic populations. So what does that tell you about their orientation, or the intent to actually be a self-sustaining system?
Update: 4 1/2 Months Later And Oregon’s $304 Million Obamacare Exchange Still Hasn’t Enrolled A Single Person… Oregon sets the bar high when it comes to failure. Via The Hill: Republicans are launching investigations into three state-run ObamaCare exchanges that are failing disastrously. Lawmakers are setting their sites on exchanges in Oregon, Maryland and Massachusetts where Democratic governors embraced the healthcare law, and are demanding to know why their expensive online portals remain useless more than four months after launch. On Wednesday, four Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting a review of the $304 million in federal grants that Oregon received to build its broken website. “The catastrophic breakdown of Cover Oregon is unacceptable, and taxpayers deserve accountability,” wrote the group of lawmakers led by Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.). The scrutiny of the state enrollment portals is a shift from October, when the federal site HealthCare.Gov was out of service but state-run exchanges in California, New York and even red Kentucky appeared to be humming along. But several states are having major problems with their ObamaCare sites. In Oregon, not even one person has yet to enroll online, leaving the state completely reliant on paper applications. Walden and the other lawmakers are laying the groundwork to claw-back some of the state’s $304 million in grants if Oregon decides to abandon its state-run exchange and join the federal system. http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/198474-republicans-open-investigations-into
IRS Describes Obamacare Individual Mandate As A “Shared Responsibility Payment”… Yeah, that’s a tad creepy. Via ATR: President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service today quietly released a series of Obamacare “Health Care Tax Tips” warning Americans that they must obtain “qualifying” health insurance – as defined by the federal government – or face a “shared responsibility payment” when filing their tax returns in 2015. The term “shared responsibility payment” refers to the Obamacare individual mandate tax, one of at least seven tax hikes in the healthcare law that directly hit families making less than $250,000 per year. In “Four Tax Facts about the Health Care Law for Individuals” the agency writes: Your 2014 tax return will ask if you had insurance coverage or qualified for an exemption. If not, you may owe a shared responsibility payment when you file in 2015. In “The Individual Shared Responsibility Payment- An Overview” the agency warns Americans they must prove they were covered each and every month of the year: For any month in 2014 that you or any of your dependents don’t maintain coverage and don’t qualify for an exemption, you will need to make an individual shared responsibility payment with your 2014 tax return filed in 2015. http://www.atr.org/irs-warns-obamacare-tax-must-paid-a8164
Nevada May Have To Pay For Health Exchange Errors Obmacare is clogging the courts in more ways that one. Las Vegan Larry Basich paid the premium on his Nevada Health Link insurance plan in November, but as of Feb. 25, it wasn’t clear who was covering Basich. The retired civil engineer had a triple bypass on Jan. 3 and now has $407,000 in medical bills. Via LVRJ Consumers are getting restless. And wherever there are unhappy consumers, lawsuits often follow. Whether they are frightened of going without medical care, angry about not receiving their insurance cards or trying to prove a point, Nevadans increasingly say they are weighing legal action over the rollout of Nevada Health Link, the state exchange through which they can buy coverage to comply with the federal Affordable Care Act. The exchange’s glitch-riddled website has prevented thousands from enrolling in plans. Other consumers who have made it through the system say they have paid premiums but received no verification of a plan, and can’t see their doctor as a result. Courts nationwide already are clogged with Obamacare-related lawsuits ranging from whether tax credits apply to consumers who bought on the federal exchange to whether the law’s employer mandate is constitutional. A growing number of legal challenges relate to how the law is affecting consumers. A California legislator is suing the Covered California exchange because he said the agency has forced cancellation of more than a million existing policies. Also in California, two consumers have sued for being persuaded to switch to new coverage when they didn’t have to. New York’s attorney general is investigating on behalf of patients who enrolled through the state’s exchange but have been left without coverage. The wave of lawsuits hasn’t washed over Nevada yet, but it’s a matter of time. “A class action suit is just waiting to happen. I definitely see it happening,” said Pat Casale, a Las Vegas insurance broker with Pat Casale &Associates. “Eventually, people’s claims will be paid, but eventually isn’t good enough,” said Casale, who has had clients go without care after coverage mix-ups in plans bought on the exchange. “Pretty soon, phone calls are going to be coming in from providers for payment, and the pressure is going to be on.” Richard Harris, managing partner of the Richard Harris Law Firm in Las Vegas, said his firm has received calls from disgruntled patients. Harris said he knows of no lawsuit filed in Nevada, though that could change if the exchange doesn’t improve soon. “The question is whether you’re wrongfully denying people coverage which they’re entitled to. You could make a case for tort liability in the abstract, yes. There’s technically tort liability for the state,” Harris said. How liable the state might be is the question. First, some background on the issues exchange users face. Start with the smaller cases. Lori Friel-Frame has reached out to the Review-Journal several times to share her woes. Friel-Frame most recently wrote to say she was “going to have to contact an attorney for some action.” Here’s why: Friel-Frame signed up for coverage through Nevada Health Link on Dec. 17. She said the exchange mistakenly deducted her $945.72 premium twice. What’s more, she never received any plan information, and discovered any coverage she did have excluded her doctor from its network, even though the provider was listed on the exchange website. http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada-may-have-pay-health-exchange-errors
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Here is the 2,700 page Obama Care Law condensed to 4 sentences... 1. In order to insure the uninsured, we first have to un-insure the insured. 2. Next, we require the newly un-insured to be re-insured. 3. To re-insure the newly un-insured, they are required to pay extra charges to be re-insured. 4. The extra charges are required so that the original insured, who became un-insured, and then became re-insured, can pay enough extra so that the original un-insured can be insured free of charge. __________________