Obamacare Schadenfreude in Single Digits

The edges of the polar vortex arrived last night as predicted.  The thermometer on the deck reads 2.9 F, the one upstairs 7, in agreement with the one on the Bay at Cove Point.  The pond has at least 2 inches of ice, as did the bird bowl, before I brought it in and thawed it.  Obamacare Schadenfreude is running pretty cold, too.

Snowed Frozen In? Sign Up, Says HHS

On Friday evening, at the end of a “snow day” in the Northeastern United States, the Health and Human Services Department posted the following “get covered” reminder aimed at the Facebook crowd:

"SHARE THIS: A snow day is the perfect day to #GetCovered"

“Not Going Anywhere Today?” says the caption on a photo showing a snow-covered car and home. “Visit Healthcare.gov to #GetCovered.”

You'd better take any time you can to do it, if you intend to, because it still isn't working very well.

Paul Rand says the the Kentucky Obamacare website is so messed up, it put his son on Medicaid:

Paul -- a doctor who left the medical profession to join Congress in 2010 and whose base Senate salary is $174,000 -- says he makes enough money that he doesn’t need Medicaid, which helps low-income families.

Nevertheless, the Kentucky exchange put his son into the Medicaid program after Paul went online to register him for ObamaCare, he said.

“I actually tried to get my son signed up through the Kentucky exchange, you know, that the Democrats have said is so good,” Paul told ABC’s “This Week,” while holding up what appeared to be Medicaid card. “We didn't try to get him Medicaid. I'm trying to pay for his insurance. But they automatically enrolled him in Medicaid.”

 My experience with government websites such as govtrip.org, suggests that this was an unusually accurate outcome. At least he got his son's card.  Some people weren't so lucky; their Medicaid cards were mailed to people in other states:

North Carolina health officials said Friday that they had inadvertently disclosed the personal information of tens of thousands of children receiving Medicaid coverage, but were tight-lipped about precisely what caused the massive privacy breach.

The state Department of Health and Human Services issued a written release saying that new Medicaid cards for nearly 49,000 children were mailed on Dec. 30 to the wrong people. The information on the cards includes the children’s names, Medicaid identification numbers, dates of birth and the names of their primary care doctors — personal medical data that is supposed to be tightly protected under federal law.

When the state finally has all your personal data, there will be no need for privacy, right?

In my own state, in some cases, the Federal website is skipping  the busy work of sending people's Medicaid cards to other states and just sending them to other states websites to enroll:

Marylanders who use the federal health reform site to search for navigators who can help them enroll in health plans in-person are getting directed to agencies in other states.

The problem lies with a glitch in the federal website that occurs when Marylanders type in their zip code. The website directs users to navigators in Pennsylvania, Virginia and other states.

Dori Henry, a spokeswoman for Maryland's website, said state officials are "aware of the problem and we've reached out to (Health and Human Services) to ask them to get it fixed as expeditiously as possible."

And the Maryland State website is going so well, Maryland officials are considering begging the Feds to let them drop it and use the Federal one:

Democratic and Republican critics of Maryland's troubled health exchange urged state officials on Monday to consider other options to signing up state residents for health care plans.

Rep. John Delaney, a Democrat, formally asked the state's health secretary for a specific assessment of the idea of switching to the federal health exchange while Maryland's exchange is being repaired. He wrote in a letter to Dr. Joshua Sharfstein that Maryland could make the switch in whole or in part or on a temporary basis.

All of which is rather amusing when you think that back in September, before the roll out mess, Preznit Obama cited Maryland as a state in which the website was going to be  great, because ..., well, because Republicans are evil:

Folks in different parts of the country will have different experiences. It’s going to be smoother in places like Maryland where governors are working to implement it rather than fight it. (Applause.)

Obamacare Can't Fail ... 

... because the White House won’t stop watering down its definition of success.

The standard of success for the Affordable Care Act keeps getting weaker.

Whether in enrollment numbers, federal savings, or the workings of its website, the White House has repeatedly lowered the bar for the law when it has missed expectations, replacing initial standards with ones that are lower, squishier, or nonexistent.

Just a few months ago, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said success would entail covering 7 million people this year. Now, the White House has disowned that standard for enrollment—and it hasn't come up with a new one.

President Obama touted HealthCare.gov, the main portal to shop for coverage, as the "Amazon" or "Expedia" of health insurance. Now the administration is calling it a win for the site to be "functional for the vast majority of users," and even that standard has been watered down since its debut.

And when the law passed, it was expected to reduce the federal deficit by about $210 billion over a decade. Now the projected savings are about half that, largely because one big program proved unworkable.

At this point, the White House's definition of success seems to basically boil down to "not failure"—a standard that falls far short for a law that used up so much political capital and was sold with such grand promises.

WELL, THAT WAS ALWAYS THE PLAN:

“Under Obamacare, I went from being a successful, self-sustaining small businessman,” Zack told me, disdainfully, “to now signing my kids up as dependents of the state.”

He asked if I’d seen Michael Moore’s latest op-ed in the New York Times. “I loved the title,” he said, “‘The Obamacare We Deserve.’ Here you have a liberal writer saying ‘Of course Obamacare is a failure.’ And the reason it’s a failure is that it still has some corporations involved. What we really need is a single-payer Canada-like plan.”

And yes, as fully expected, the democrats and media (but I repeat) have already begun to use the failures of Obamacare, rammed through Congress on only Democrat votes, as an excuse to implement single-payer health care:

Now That It's Safe to Do So, Left Begins Admitting that Obamacare is a "Sneaky Way" to Press for Single Payer

I’m old enough to remember when it was a sign of utmost wingnuttery to suggest that ObamaCare was but phase one in a government takeover of health care, but three years later, now that the law’s momentarily out of political danger, we’ve got HHS ordering insurance companies every other week to change their business practices willy nilly and lefty pundits babbling excitedly about how this is all really just a stepping stone to bigger and better statist interventions. (Some liberals will object that the wingnuttery lies in believing that liberals designed the law to fail. Fair enough — although Scheiber’s own language is revealing, describing O-Care at one point as “a deceptively sneaky way” to get single-payer and saying of GOP efforts to play up the law’s problems that “Republicans are in some sense playing into the trap Obamacare laid for them.”) This, not “if you like your plan,” is the real Big Lie of O-Care. This is where we’re at we’re six days into full implementation.

Profits from Student Loans used to prop up Obamacare's costs: Funny money: How student loan profits make Obamacare look good 

Cato education scholar Neal McCluskey revealed how a little-reported feature of the Affordable Care Act uses shady accounting to hide its overall cost.

“The change in student loans was part of Obamacare — and why was it part of Obamacare?” McCluskey said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller. “So that the profit they were supposedly making from the student loans could then be plugged into how much money would come from Obamacare, so it didn’t look like it cost as much.”

In the last days of Obamacare’s formulation, the projections had student loans folded into them to make them not seem so expensive.“At the last minute, they said, ‘Look, let’s take what was then called the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, make it part of healthcare and then we can make the budget numbers come out right… [W]e will take these projected profits from the student loans, and we will say that’s part of Obamacare.’”

Did you find the pea under the shell yet? The plan always was to get younger, healthier people into the system to pay for older and sicker people, and this is one way to do it, as least as far as accounting for it's effects on the budget.