Between the Waves of Obamacare Schadenfreude?

It's a sunny day here, with temperatures starting around 40 and headed up from there (I hope). It's a
sunny day for Obamacare Schadenfreude too, with the usual Sunday slump, and signs that the bugs, while not fixed, are at least now mostly out in the open:

From the Washington Post, news that the second wave of the Obamacare tsunami is gathering offshore:

Second wave of health-insurance disruption affects small businesses

When millions of health-insurance plans were canceled last fall, the Obama administration tried to be reassuring, saying the terminations affected only the small minority of Americans who bought individual policies.

But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through small employers by the end of 2014.

While some cancellation notices already have gone out, insurers say the bulk of the letters will be sent in October, shortly before the next open-enrollment period begins. The timing — right before the midterm elections — could be difficult for Democrats who are already fending off Republican attacks about the Affordable Care Act and its troubled rollout.

Stephen Lohman, owner of Allegheny Plant Services, a trucking company in Pittsburgh, said the Aetna PPO plan he offers his 38 employees will be discontinued at the end of this year. He said he has been offered a new Aetna policy with premiums that are 40 percent higher, and that other insurers’ rates are similar.

“We were very surprised,” he said, adding that it is “important to me personally” to offer insurance to his employees, but he is not sure he can afford the premium increase.

Hey, it's their image, not mine.

From this mornings Washington Post, news that Maryland officials were warned well ahead of time of the ineffectual State website:

More than a year before Maryland launched its health insurance exchange, senior state officials failed to heed warnings that no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan for how it would be ready by Oct. 1.

Over the following months, as political leaders continued to proclaim that the state’s exchange would be a national model, the system went through three different project managers, the feuding between contractors hired to build the online exchange devolved into lawsuits, and key people quit, including a top information technology official because, as he would later say, the project “was a disaster waiting to happen.”

The repeated warnings culminated days before the launch, with one from contractors testing the Web site that said it was “extremely unstable” and another from an outside consultant that urged state officials not to let residents enroll in health plans because there was “no clear picture” of what would happen when the exchange would turn on.

The chutzpah of these people is just astonishing.  Despite ample warnings that these sites were not working, they simply went ahead and launched them.

Maryland's failure in the Healthcare website arena, prompted the Washington Post's editors to publish a rare rebuke to the the liberals:

Maryland’s costly health-care blunder

THERE’S NOW a preliminary price tag on Maryland’s failure to roll out a functional health-insurance Web site: $5 million to $10 million. That’s an estimate of how much it will cost the state to offer emergency health coverage to people who couldn’t sign up on Maryland’s online Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace before Jan. 1. Extending last-minute coverage to these people is the right thing to do. But it’s not a substitute for a working Web site, nor for holding the state’s leaders to account.

For months, Marylanders have encountered error after error when trying to use theMaryland Health Connection, which was supposed to serve as their primary interface with the ACA. One bug gave definition to the word infuriating, freezing the site just as users were about to click the “enroll” button. The number of people who managed to sign up for private insurance through the marketplace has just surpassed 20,000, and that relatively low figure came only after recent site improvements resulted in a late increase in enrollments. It is also very far from the state’s goal of 150,000 sign-ups by the end of March.

The ACA was supposed to transform insurance shopping from confusing and opaque to simple, open and user-friendly, with the goal of encouraging lots of people to sign up and enjoy the security of health coverage. Instead, the experience was so bad in Maryland that people couldn’t complete applications, and some of them are now or soon will be on the hook for high medical costs incurred since the beginning of the year, with no way to get coverage that takes effect before next month.

But, of course, given that it is the Post, the proposed solution is always more government money, more government control over healthcare, and protecting the gains of the democrats have made in taking away our freedoms.

That’s why Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) submitted emergency legislation that would offer people inadvertently stuck without insurance the option of temporary coverage, and make it retroactive to Jan. 1. The plan would avoid any further Web site glitches by using the infrastructure of an older, established Maryland insurance program that operated independently of the ACA. Eventually, participants will have to move into a more functional marketplace. Giving uninsured Marylanders a functional bridge to the new system is only fair. State leaders must, however, make sure that it doesn’t undercut the final phase-in of the ACA.

In a tsunami, after the first wave strikes, and the water retreats, people often go down to shore to start picking up the pieces.  Then the second wave hits.