Today, the weather in Southern Maryland, well, to put it bluntly, sucks. The thermometer on the back porch staunchly insists it is 31.7 F, but it raining slowly but steadily. Many of the counties around us are closing schools and governments due to freezing rain, but ours is just out salting the roads heavily, hoping to keep traffic moving. Obamacare Schadenfreude has also dwindled to a cold drizzle as well, only four articles came to me in the last day.
The signup process continues to show signs of distress, with applicants having problem knowing whether or not they are insured, and who has copies of their records.
Government officials say the problem is real but under control, with orphan records being among the roughly 13,000 problem cases they are trying to resolve with insurers. But insurance companies are worried the process will grow more cumbersome as they deal with the flood of new customers who signed up in December as enrollment deadlines neared.
More than 1 million people have signed up through the federal insurance market that serves 36 states. Officials contend the error rate for new signups is close to zero.
Insurers, however, are less enthusiastic about the pace of the fixes. The companies also are seeing cases in which the government has assigned the same identification number to more than one person, as well as so-called "ghost" files in which the insurer has an enrollment record but the government does not.
But orphaned files _ when the insurer has no record of enrollment _ are particularly concerning because the companies have no automated way to identify the presumed policyholder. They say they have to manually compare the lists of enrollees the government sends them with their own records because the government never built an automated system that would do the work much faster.
And support for the program among the public at large continues to circle the drain:
48% Want Obamacare Repealed
The promise: “I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”
The reality:
Nearly half of all Americans with employer-based health insurance plans say more money is being taken out of their paychecks for health insurance compared to a year ago, and 44 percent are facing higher out-of-pocket expenses, including deductibles and co-payment, according to a report by the Princeton Survey Research Assocs. International and Bankrate.com...
The survey shows that 48 percent of Americans would choose to repeal the Affordable Care Act, compared to 46 percent in September. Currently, only 36 percent would choose to keep it.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to juggle the numbers to try to make them "better", in the case of Colorado, by redefining the word cancellation.
Udall’s office pushed back hard on number of health care cancellations
At the height of controversy surrounding President Obama’s promises on the federal health care overhaul, U.S. Senator Mark Udall’s office worked assiduously to revise press accounts that 249,000 Coloradans received health care cancellation notices. Because the 249,000 figure was produced inside the Colorado Division of Insurance, Udall’s office lobbied that agency to revise the figure, or revise their definition of what qualified as a cancellation.
From an email inside the Colorado Division of Insurance (DOI), Director of External Affairs Jo Donlin bluntly stated to her colleagues:
Sen. Udall says our numbers were wrong. They are not wrong. Cancellation notices affected 249,199 people. They want to trash our numbers. I’m holding strong while we get more details. Many have already done early renewals. Regardless, they received cancellation notices. . .
I suppose readers would not be shocked to learn that college professors are using their pedagogic pedestal to promulgate Obamacare:
My German Professor Made Verbal Love To Obamacare
. . .Now that my grade is securely documented on my transcripts, I feel safe sharing my recent experiences inside the classroom, during which lessons on the German language frequently morphed into soliloquies on the benefits of universal health care.
Instructor John Benjamin, a man in his early 30s with a thick beard and a fondness for donning sweaters, often used his course as a platform to tout liberal ideologies on Obamacare.
The Berkeley- and Princeton-educated professor, for example, turned grammar lessons on the intricacies of the German language into claims that universal healthcare, or “allgemeine Gesundheitsversorgung” (a phrase Benjamin took many opportunities to write on the board), as the savior of the American public. According to the professor, Obamacare will insure and take care of the poor, viewed by Benjamin as a group of people utterly neglected in America.
One day, when he was in one of his particularly brazen and jaded moods, Benjamin went so far as to have students raise their hands if they planned on signing up for the exchange – adding that students’ answers will not impact their grades.
When the room was left with idle, stationary hands, Benjamin appeared shocked and a bit speechless. He told us: “You might want to take a little longer and examine the great benefits of Obamacare before you make decisions. That’s all I have to say.”
I'm sure you would be equally shocked to find that the professor also used his podium to pronounce the perniciousness of the Tea Party:
During last fall’s special Senate election to fill the late Frank Lautenberg’s seat, (D-NJ), Benjamin bemoaned to the class how disturbed he was that the election results produced such a slim, final margin between winner Democrat Cory Booker and loser Republican Steve Lonegan.
He suggested members of the Tea Party who voted for Lonegan had to be “old” and “very moronic,” adding the Tea Party as a whole is laughable and run by inept know-nothings. That Gov. Chris Christie continues to be catapulted to victory by this voting bloc, he added, is a truly unfortunate circumstance indeed.
As if all this wasn’t enough, he once praised the Occupy Wall Street crew, in German, of course – noting the movement was truly beneficial in exposing the one percenters who rule this country.
But there is one bit of good news...
I’d made a note to myself to have a friendly little conversation with the good professor after the semester ended. But alas, Benjamin abruptly left his job after finals and moved to England.
Perhaps he’ll finally get his wish, to be closer to socialism, and maybe I’ll get mine too – for the university to hire a scholar who leaves their political rhetoric at the classroom door.
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