Hurricane Obamacare Shadenfreude Tuesday

Everyday I wake up expecting the flood of news regarding the hurricane that Obamacare represents to the American healthcare system to start to loose power and turn north and out to sea, but every day it continues to rage across the country, leaving wreckage in it's wake. Hurricane season is over, after all.

First, a little squall line of scahdenfreude, as CNN attempts to test the "new and improved" website, and, of course, it crashes:



To err is human, but to screw up fast over and over, a computer is big help: Health-care enrollment on Web plagued by bugs

The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who have chosen health plans through the online federal insurance marketplace contain errors — generated by the computer system — that mean they might not get the coverage they’re expecting next month.

The errors cumulatively have affected roughly one-third of the people who have signed up for health plans since Oct. 1, according to two government and health-care industry officials. The White House disputed the figure but declined to provide its own.

The mistakes include failure to notify insurers about new customers, duplicate enrollments or cancellation notices for the same person, incorrect information about family members, and mistakes involving federal subsidies. The errors have been accumulating since HealthCare.gov opened two months ago, even as the Obama administration has been working to make it easier for consumers to sign up for coverage, the government and industry officials said.

An error rate of 33%?  Mission Accomplished!  Er, not so much.

Here’s a quote from a guy who doesn’t quite get it:

“This is the equivalent of having a great item that you want to buy in the store but not being able to get though the front door,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “It sounds like the front door has been opened successfully now.”

Yay! Too bad they, um, haven’t built the cash registers yet.

The insurance companies are worried about getting paid:

While insurers will start covering people who pay their share of the premium, many insurers worry that the government will be late on the payments they were expecting in mid-January for the first people covered.

“We want to be paid,” said one executive, speaking frankly on the condition of anonymity. “If we want to pay claims, we need to get paid.”

Insurers said they had received calls from consumers requesting insurance cards because they thought they had enrolled in a health plan through the federal website, but the insurers said they had not been notified.

If you approach this, go through Althouse's link; she actually maintains a subscription to the NYT so that people who go through her links can see behind the NYT pay wall.

Now a little musical break:



 One of the fixes?  A page that tells people to try again later, instead of just freezing....

One of Healthcare.gov's "innovations" was telling people to get off the website and come back later.

You know, like all big websites do. Amazon famously tells you "come back later" all the time. Google notoriously says "we can't handle your search at this time, please wait in line to conduct your search."

That much hyped tech surge?  Six people:

“People looked like they were busy,” said Andrew Slavitt, group executive vice president for QSSI and its parent company, Optum, “but it was hard to tell what they were working on and how it fit in.”

But while the contractors were grateful to Mr. Zients for helping to create order, they saw the administration’s “tech surge” — announced by Mr. Obama in the Rose Garden a few days before QSSI took over — as mostly an exercise in public relations.

The announcement conjured images of an army of software engineers descending on the project. In fact, the surge centered on about a half-dozen people who had taken leave from various technology companies to join the effort. They included Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google who had also worked on Mr. Obama’s campaign and now draws praise from contractors as someone who is “actually making a difference,” one said.

Even so, one person working on the project said, “Surge was probably an overstatement.”

When all you are doing is making the site pretty, and fast to collect people's personal information for later processing, and you don't mind being wrong a third of the time, six people can do a lot apparently.  It might be nice, say, if you put security in there to protect people's personal data:

 No security ever built into Obamacare site: Hacker

It could take a year to secure the risk of "high exposures" of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday.

"When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn't appear to have happened this time," said David Kennedy, a so-called "white hat" hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week.

"It's really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn't built into it," said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec. "We're talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself."

Which may explain why Obama himself has not yet signed up for Obamacare as he promised he would:

President Obama has yet to make good on the administration's promises that he would sign up for health insurance on the new government exchanges, the White House acknowledged on Monday. White House press secretary Jay Carney said that Obama has not signed up for Obamacare and that he did have a reason for the delay.

A reporter pressed Carney on whether the White House would make it an open-press event if and when Obama does enroll. “I'll get back to you,” Carney replied.

Shortly after Obama signed the new health care law in March 2010, a White House official said the president planned to walk the walk and sign up for the insurance exchanges his law created. “The president will participate in the exchange,” an administration official told USA Today at the time.

It's been clear for some time that Obama has some personal information he's gone to great lengths to keep concealed.  While I don't subscribe to the worst of the "birther" beliefs, I suspect there's something there that he saw as potentially damaging or even disqualifying if it were released at the wrong time.  My guess is it has something to due with his "sojourn" in Indonesia, and coming back as a foreign national and taking advantage of that status.

Obamacare explained as a Starbucks franchise:



According to Politico, we're just too stupid to understand the brilliance that is Obamacare:

Choosing health coverage is particularly challenging. Humans have difficulty making optimal choices under conditions of uncertainty, when weighing probabilities of long-term risks and benefits, and when analyzing complex products with multiple components of unclear relative values. We’re bad at assessing the likelihood of low-probability events, like winning the lottery or getting in a car accident. We overestimate our ability to repay loans and spend more with credit cards than we would with cash. We struggle with decisions about how to invest our retirement savings and are highly susceptible to the number and types of 401(k) plans we’re offered. In short, we have trouble with precisely the types of issues involved in choosing the right health coverage.

Under these circumstances, a buffet of choices can quickly lead to “choice overload”—when people with more choices make suboptimal decisions, are less satisfied with those decisions and might refrain from deciding at all. In one famous behavioral science study, researchers set up a stand with either six or 24 flavors of jam in a grocery store to test how customer preferences changed when more choices were offered. The results were striking: While somewhat more people stopped to taste when 24 jams were displayed, customers were 10 times more likely to actually select and buy a jam when six jams were shown. Having a vast array of choices can pique interest, it seems, but it also can dull customers’ motivation to actually buy the product.

The conclusion being, of course, that we need the majesty of Obama and his advisers to tell us what to do.

Yahoo finance is blaming the Republicans; if they'd just play ball and support Obamacare, everything would magically be wonderful: How Complainers Wreck the Economy

Here’s one example: Obamacare is obviously a hugely divisive issue that contributes to that wrong-track feeling a lot of people have. Consider this, though: Only 19% of American say the law has harmed them in any way, while 9% say it has helped and 69% say it hasn’t affected them at all. That 19% is too high, but it’s a good bet that number will go down and the percentage helped by the law will go up. As the feds work out the kinks, more people enroll and the initial fear factor (along with the partisan attacks) wear off. For something that has generated so much hostility and concern, Obamacare may end up not changing all that much for all that many people.

So harmful effects exceed beneficial effect 2:1, and we're just supposed to shut up and enjoy it.

And it that doesn't work, find some staffers to toss under the bus:  Democratic Operatives, Former Administration Officials Say Obama is Not Being Well Served By His White House Staff

The first former official singled out Pfeiffer for criticism in the handling of that blunder, which led to repeated apologies by Obama as the White House struggled with the story.

“The thing that I hold Pfeiffer accountable for is, ‘If you like your plan, you can keep it,’ ” the former official said.

Because, of course, Obama repeating that line dozens of times doesn’t reflect on him. Someone has to take the blame for that mess.

“I don’t know where the breakdown occurred on that, but it’s Obama’s ‘no new taxes’ moment,” the official said, referring to the broken promise that is widely seen as having cost President George H.W. Bush a second term.

The official said it was “hard to be polite” about the rollout: “It still escapes me how they f—ed up this badly on the president’s and the Democratic Party’s biggest legacy item in 20 years.”

New York is expecting to see Medicaid signups increase by 300,000:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget office is bracing for a wave of Medicaid recipients due to Obamacare. In one year, New York’s Medicaid rolls are predicted to jump from 5.3 million to 5.6 million members, The New York Post reported Friday.
...
New York currently has roughly 1 million who are Medicaid-eligible, The Post said. Within the next few years, one third of the state’s population could be part of the program, which is largely funded by the federal government.

Not quite 47%, but close enough. The more you know about Obamacare, the less you like it:

This debacle brought to you by low information voters...