Obamacare Schadenfreude - Let It Snow!

Another lovely day here in slower Maryland.  Another storm, the so called "Cajun Clipper", a mass of moist air rapidly sliding up from Louisiana and interacting with a mass of cold air to produce a classic coastal type storm here, with snow to the north and west, and rain to south and east.  So far, the snush line (the pink band on the radar that signifies some sort unhappy mixture between rain and snow) has stayed to our north, and we have received cold rain amounting to about 1 inch.  However, the pink band is steadily drifting southward, and the precipitation is starting to look a little more solid than liquid.  I wish it would just switch to straight snow and be done with it!

Now, about that Obamacare Schadenfreude.  So, you've lost your old policy, but you've managed to find a new one, hopefully, since there's no way to know if you're really signed up yet since the "rear end" of the program that actually enables you to pay the insurance doesn't work yet, and somewhere between 10 and 30% of the policies were issued erroneously anyway.  You had to pay extra, and maybe a lot extra, to keep your doctor, due to the "Doc Shock".

Now comes the "Drug Shock".  The drugs the doctor would like to prescribe for your chronic condition might not be covered under the new policies:

The nation’s new health-care law says insurers can’t turn anyone away, even people who are sick. But some companies, patient advocates say, have found a way to discourage the chronically ill from enrolling in their plans: offer drug coverage too skimpy for those with expensive conditions.
...
As the details of the benefits offered by the new health-care plans become clear, patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases also are raising concerns, said Marc Boutin, executive vice president of the National Health Council, a coalition of advocacy groups for the chronically ill.

“The easiest way [for insurers] to identify a core group of people that is going to cost you a lot of money is to look at the medicines they need and the easiest way to make your plan less appealing is to put limitations on these products,” Boutin said.

Insurers say that such accusations are unfounded, and that the drug coverage is more than adequate, with many plans exceeding the minimum levels required by the Affordable Care Act. But they acknowledge that to keep premiums low, they must restrict the use of some costly drugs if there are alternatives. And they say that when high-priced medications must be used, it’s reasonable to expect patients to pick up more of the cost.

Well, like Mom always said, if you can't do anything right, at least you can always serve as a bad example:  PR firms cash in on ACA rollout woes.

It may have been a debacle, but there is one upside to the glitch-plagued rollout of the health care website: It’s become a powerful case study for crisis management consultants and their clients of what not to do.

In Chicago, H + A International, a communications firm, delivered its customers a 15-point diagnosis of the administration’s handling of the crisis. That led one of its clients to temporarily halt the introduction of a new software product for engineers at a recent trade show of 30,000 people. . .

Multiple State Obamacare sites may be vulnerable to wi-fi hacking:

According to Mark Lanterman, the CEO and chief technology officer of Computer Forensic Services who ran the simulated attack for KSTP, state-run exchanges in Minnesota, Hawaii, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, Maryland, and the District of Columbia are vulnerable to it.

Lanterman tested at least a dozen of the state-run exchanges to determine if they had the vulnerability. Kentucky, Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, and California did not. HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange, also is not vulnerable to the attack.

MNsure, Minnesota’s exchange, insists that its website does not have a problem.

KSTP also reports that during the period that HealthCare.gov was hosted by servers owned by Google, the tech giant appeared to be capturing MAC addresses—reporter Nick Winkler characterizes them as “computer fingerprints”—which can identify individual computers.

Speaking of unresponsive government, the troubled California branch of Obamacare released massive quantities of personal information: Covered California gave consumers' contact info to agents:

Raising concerns about consumer privacy, California's health exchange has given insurance agents the names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who went online to check out coverage but didn't ask to be contacted.

The Covered California exchange said it started handing out this consumer information this week as part of a pilot program to help people enroll ahead of a Dec. 23 deadline to have health insurance in place by Jan. 1.

State officials said they are only trying to help potential customers find insurance and sign up in time. But some insurance brokers and consumers who were contacted said they were astonished by the state's move.

Which would, of course, be illegal if done by a private group.

And now, a long lecture on why governments routinely fail to deliver on their promises:

...In the marketplace, scarcity guarantees that people compete for resources. In that environment, the price system and the risk of losses, combined with the prospect of potential profit, are powerful signals that guide people’s decisions to prudently buy, sell, invest, and save.

But unlike in the marketplace, the incentives for good management in government are very weak. For instance, even though lawmakers are expected to pursue the “public interest,” they make decisions that use other people’s money rather than their own. This means that their exposure to the risk of a bad decision is fairly limited, and there is little to no reward for spending taxpayers’ money wisely or providing a service effectively or efficiently.

Furthermore, because each voter bears a very small part of the cost of these bad decisions, and they have their daily lives to manage, voters lack the incentives to sufficiently monitor the government. And, as Shaw explains, voter ignorance can be quite rational:

Even though the result of an election may be very important, an individual’s vote rarely decides an election. Thus, the direct impact of casting a well-informed vote is almost nil; the voter has virtually no chance to determine the outcome of the election. So spending time following the issues is not personally worthwhile for the voter. Evidence for this claim is found in the fact that public opinion polls consistently find that less than half of all voting-age Americans can name their own congressional representative.

That is not, of course, the case in the private sector. Consumers have great incentives to make sure the car or the house they buy is worth the price they will pay for it. Employers also have great incentives to make sure they hire the best employees, as there is a high and direct cost for employing someone who can’t perform the job he or she is hired for.

Yet lawmakers—however well-intentioned—face serious difficulties in making the right decision. Many factors come into play, but it is worth highlighting the following two. First, the government does not have better information than private agents operating in the market, whether this be the health care market or any other market (financial, housing, etc.). Making matters worse, government decision-makers are usually insulated from market signals, and thus often lack important information about the problem at hand and the market itself.

Second, the resources government provides are often so enticing that companies may switch their focus from meeting the needs of customers to meeting the wishes of government officials—thus producing a less effective outcome. . .

And yet another rube comes out of the closet:

I like my insurance plan but I can’t keep it under Obamacare

I am among millions who are getting a much worse deal under the Affordable Care Act, writes guest columnist Andrew Reding

FOLLOWING mass cancellations of existing health policies by insurers, President Obama has apologized for promising, “If you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you.”

He has accordingly modified the rules to allow insurers to extend existing policies another year. But he is still arguing that, “For the fewer than 5 percent of Americans who buy insurance on your own, you will be getting a better deal.”
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I am in that 5 percent. Checking the Washington state health-insurance exchange, I found I am among millions who are getting a much worse deal — much higher premiums with higher deductibles and less choice of doctors, and ineligible for the Affordable Care Act tax credit.
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Americans lack transparent and competitive pricing for health care. On other purchase decisions, we see and compare prices first. With health care, we sign a blank check before service. Is it any wonder the U.S. has the world’s highest prices for health care?

Andrew Reding, a Bellingham resident, is a senior fellow of the New York-based World Policy Institute.

But the desperation on the left is starting to get weird. MSNBC's Melissa Harris Perry Likens "Derogatory Term" Obamacare To The N-Word:

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY, MSNBC: I want to talk today about a controversial word. It’s a word that has been with us for years. And like it or not, it’s indelibly printed in the pages of American history. A word that was originally intended as a derogatory term, meant to shame and divide and demean. The word was conceived of by a group of wealthy white men who needed a way to put themselves above and apart from a black man. To render him inferior and unequal and to diminish his accomplishments.

President Obama has been labelled with this word by his opponents. And at first he rose above it, hoping that if he could just make a cause for what he achieved, his opponents would fail in making their label stick. But no matter how many successes that he had as president, he realized there were still many people for whom he’d never be anything more than that one disparaging word. A belief he knew was held not just by his political opponents, but also by a significant portion of the American electorate.

And so he decided, if you can’t beat them, you’ve got to join them. And he embraced the word and made it his own, sending his opposition a message they weren’t expecting -- 'if that’s what you want me to be, I’ll be that.' Y’all know the word that I’m talking about. Obamacare. That's right! I said it and I’m not ashamed and neither is President Obama. Because he knows that of all his victories over two terms in office his legacy is ultimately going to be remembered for this one single word.

So it was anti-Mormon bias that caused liberals to call the Massachusetts health care plan "Romneycare"? You may not have to be crazy to be an MSNBC commentator, but it's clearly a plus.

And other "unanticipated consequences" keep surfacing, although "unanticipated" should only apply to the liberals, we conservatives understood that any program this massive would have far reaching consequences:

Obamacare could force THOUSANDS of volunteer fire departments to close

Volunteer fire departments all across the U.S. could find themselves out of money and unable to operate unless Congress or the Obama Administration exempts them from the Affordable Care Act.
. . .
The U.S. Department of Labor takes the term 'volunteer' literally, but the IRS says volunteer firefighters are technically employees if they're on the job more than 30 hours per week, making them subject to Obamacare's employee-mandate rules.

Since the Obamacare law doesn't specifically carve out an exemption for them, fire departments where 50 or more people work – either as volunteers or officially as employees – are expected to provide health insurance for every one of them.

In towns with more than one volunteer fire department, all the staffers will likely be lumped together for tax purposes, pushing many municipalities above the 50-worker threshold.

That could cost departments of life-savers hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Those that dump their volunteers into the federal insurance exchanges would still have to pay an annual $2,000 fine for each 'employee' after the first 30.

But the good news! It stopped raining here, and started snowing!







Wombat-Socho got the master Rule 5 Sunday post up on "Rule 5 Monday" this week.