Pearl Harbor Day Obamacare Schadenfreude

According to Ed Schultz, God Loves Obamacare

I supposed the recent retirements of "God hates c_ck s_cking faggots" Alec Baldwin and "Somebody should sh_t in Sarah Palin's mouth" Martin Bashir from commentariat role at MSNBC leaves Ed Shultz as the next most likely person to understand God's Will.

This leave Reince Priebus to restate the obvious: Obamacare Intended to Burden the Young

The Affordable Care Act is "intentionally designed to screw over young people" who are being forced to pay higher premiums, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says.

"It wasn't a mistake. This thing was not an accident," Priebus told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV on Thursday.

"Obamacare was intentionally designed to screw over young people so that young people pay for everyone else's stuff.

which I guess it what God loves.

After the website gets working and it will, the next big issue will be the "Doc Shock"

Come January, when some number of Americans have bought insurance on the new health exchanges and are starting to use the services, you can expect another controversy to arise when many of them find out just how few doctors and hospitals they have access to. Call it “doc shock,” though the biggest outcry will not come when people try to schedule an appointment with their physician, but when someone gets sick and they learn they cannot go to whatever top-notch hospital they want, only to the hospital that is included in their plan.


The problem varies across the country. In Washington, where I live, it basically won’t be a problem at all; exchange policies have mostly the same provider networks as regular policies from those insurers. On the other end of the spectrum, in California, where the exchange put heavy pressure on insurers to keep premiums low, most exchange policies have bare-bones coverage that excludes top-tier hospitals such as UCLA and Cedars-Sinai. The industry calls these “narrow network” plans, but consumers are likely to have some more pungent names for the stripped-down provider offerings.

Doctor's in California are so happy about the low reimbursements the law gives them that 70% are threatening to drop out:

An estimated seven out of every 10 physicians in deep-blue California are rebelling against the state's Obamacare health insurance exchange and won't participate, the head of the state's largest medical association said.

“It doesn't surprise me that there's a high rate of nonparticipation,” said Dr. Richard Thorp, president of the California Medical Association.

Thorp has been a primary care doctor for 38 years in a small town 90 miles north of Sacramento. The CMA represents 38,000 of the roughly 104,000 doctors in California.

“We need some recognition that we’re doing a service to the community. But we can’t do it for free. And we can’t do it at a loss. No other business would do that,” he said.

I'm puzzled at American's attitudes towards doctors.  They show more respect to reality TV show stars.

The story is going around, based on White House visitor logs, that HHS Secretary Sebelius met with Obama only once during the creation of Obamacare.  But it may not be true, since White House visitor logs are subject to manipulation.

My question here is whether the smart play for Obama is to claim that he was deeply involved with it's implementation behind the scenes, and it was a debacle as a result or to admit he didn't really give a rat's ass about how Obamacare was implemented as long as it was?

But don't they know it's settled law? Young Americans Expect Obamacare to Be Repealed

The young Americans the Obama administration so desperately needs to help make the Affordable Care Act function are the ones most likely to believe the law is endangered, suggesting that sustained House Republican efforts to repeal and undermine the law are bearing some fruit.

More than half of 18-to-29-year-olds who were surveyed in the most recent United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll say it is likely the law will be repealed in 2014, even though the chances of that actually occurring are remote.

According to the poll, 18 percent of respondents in this age group said it was "very likely" Obamacare would be repealed by Congress next year, while 33 percent said it was "somewhat likely" the law would be done away with. The survey has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

But they're supposed to be rushing the sign up site, and crushing it!  Wait, they'd rather gamble at online casinos:

Young people will soon figure out that the tax penalty for not buying insurance starts at only $95 and can be collected only if the IRS can match records sufficiently to dock someone’s tax refund. Unless the enforcement penalties are ratcheted up severely, many young people will reject buying the lemon of a product Obamacare is offering them. It’s not as if many of them have a lot of discretionary income. As Katrina Trinko of NRO points out:

Young adults don’t have much going for them financially. Many college graduates are saddled with student loan debts. In 2013, student loan debts average $35,200, according to a May Fidelity survey. They’re facing a dismal job market.

In fact, there is some evidence that young people may be more willing to gamble with their future than to buy Obamacare. I live in New Jersey, where Internet gambling has just been legalized. Each of Atlantic City’s twelve casinos can operate up to five gambling websites so long as they screen out customers from out of state. Peggy Holloway, senior credit officer for Moody’s Investors Service, says the new sites will “appeal to a younger, more Internet-savvy demographic that might lack the discretionary budget to travel to one of Atlantic City’s 12 casinos.” And indeed, fifty thousand people signed up online for New Jersey’s gambling sites in the first week. That compares with 741 who signed up for Obamacare during all of October. Yes, the Obamacare website has been plagued with problems, but the disparity between the two programs is still eye-popping.

Dr. Jeff Singer, a surgeon and scholar at the Cato Institute, told Fox News that the gambling boom shows “younger and healthier people are making the decision — rightly or wrongly — that they are getting a better value by using some of their money, for example, in a gambling site than they are for buying health insurance which is covering things that they don’t need.”

And they're not alone; according to Gallup a majority of Americans want major changes in the law:

Closer to home, the head of the Maryland branch of Obamacare has resigned in the wake of the failures in the rollout of the state's sites.

The Maryland official who directly oversaw the rollout of Maryland’s health insurance exchange resigned Friday amid continuing technical problems that have hampered the state’s online enrollment efforts.

After an emergency session Friday night, the board of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange accepted the resignation of Rebecca Pearce, its executive director, and thanked her in a statement for working “tirelessly and with tremendous dedication” for more than two years.
. . .
The technological problems with Maryland’s exchange have been particularly problematic because the state was among the earliest and most aggressive in embracing the health-care law.

Meanwhile, Congressional staffers (the people who probably actually wrote the law, while their Senator was speechifying) were having their own fun with the Washington D.C. site:

Capitol Hill gets crash course in signing up for new health-care law

Officials from the District’s new health-care exchange set up three computer workstations in front of the long dais, and in seats where the public and the news media usually sit, Senate aides sat and waited for help figuring out how to enroll in new health-care plans.

One described the experience as “incredibly stressful.” Some complained about the two-hour wait. Others reported that it went well.

The level of difficulty and frustration seemed to be largely dependent on staffer’s political party; a kind of political Rorschach test for aides who have listened to their bosses and the country debate the merits of the law for years. Republicans generally gripe about long wait times or getting booted off the Web site, while some Democrats boast that they will save significant sums of money as part of the exchange.