Obamacare Schadenfreude on the Run

I'll try to do this one quick; I have an appointment to give blood a little later, and I'd like to do this one in one swell foop.

The administration has made a great point that by enrolling, however they define enroll, some 2 million people though Obamacare, they've decreased the problem, if problem it is, of uninsured people.  Now this word that most of the people who signed up for Obamacare were already insured:

The majority of the more than 2 million Americans who signed up for health insurance under ObamaCare through the end of December were already enrolled in employer-sponsored plans or had previously bought their own coverage, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Early data from insurers, brokers and consultants suggest that the marketplaces are popular with consumers who were previously covered elsewhere, raising questions about a law intended to expand coverage to millions of healthy, uninsured Americans to help offset costs.

A survey by management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that only 11 percent of consumers who purchased new coverage under ObamaCare were previously uninsured. The survey was based on a sampling of 4,563 consumers between November and January, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Which makes a lot of sense.  People who had coverage, and lost it due to Obamacare mandates hustled to get covered.  People who didn't think they need it are still on the fence.

Not Obamacare news as such, but a warning of what happens when the socialist take over medicine in your country:

Tens of thousands fled socialized Canadian medicine in 2013

In 2013, nearly 42,000 Canucks left their homeland to avoid long wait times and inferior care that plagues their centralized health system.

The report from the free-market Fraser Institute found that 41,838 Canadians became “medical tourists” in 2013 and sought care outside of their hockey-loving country. While there were slightly fewer people fleeing the Canadian health system in 2013 than the previous year, the number leaving still amounts to nearly one percent of medical patients in Canada.

No worries, if the democrats screw up health care completely, the Mexicans, Indians, and Chinese, with their huge bank of potential spare parts, will be more than happy to sell you healthcare with their usual high standards and accountability.

New signs of desperation in the administration that the back end of the site (you know, the part that collects the money and disperses it to the insurance companies:

Apparently, Obamacare is in a lot bigger trouble than anyone has let on — or anyone has imagined.

A document given to the contractor who replaced CGI in December shows how truly desperate is the position of the government. Accenture has been tasked with finishing the construction of the healthcare.gov website — specifically, the back end of the site which will allow the transfer of subsidies directly to insurance companies.

The document makes it clear that the reason CGI was let go was because the government had no confidence that the company could affect the changes necessary to get the payment system up and running in time to avoid disaster.

The Hill reports:

The document said officials realized in December that the need to bring on Accenture was so urgent that there was no time to go through the “full and open competition process” before awarding them with a $91 million contract.

So they just gave it to a friendly Obama donor.

“There is limited time to build this functionality and failure to deliver…by mid-March 2014 will result in financial harm to the government,” the document says.

“If this functionality is not complete by mid-March 2014, the government could make erroneous payments to providers and insurers,” it continues. “Additionally, without a Financial Management platform that accounts for enrollments and associated program costs that integrates with the existing CMS Accounting platform, the entire healthcare reform program is jeopardized.”

Amazing. We won WWII in less time than it took to build the damn website.

Shedding the layers of the Obamacare onion to get to the core:

. . .There’s more… much more. But for now, perhaps the elected leaders in whom patriotic constitutionalist adherents to the right-left paradigm place so much of their faith could stop the destruction of documentation instead of merely putting on a useless display of public outrage. After all, such records may be necessary in a criminal trial, ala Enron.

The sooner people understand that ObamaCare has nothing to do with affordable health care, the better off we’ll all be. It’s all about consolidation and control, and the enrichment of a select few on the path to subjugation. The masks of the players might change, but they are still the same players in the game of ultimate control.

and finally, from this mornings Washington Post, the Obama friendly fact checker gives Obama, and himself, three out of four possible pinocchios for this enrollment claims

Ignore claims that 3.9 million people signed up for Medicaid because of Obamacare

Look closely at this tweet by the @BarackObama account, maintained by the pro-Obama group Organizing for America. The 6 million figure comes from combining a figure of 2.1 million for people selecting a plan via state and federal exchanges, through December, and 3.9 million for Medicaid, through November. Thus the claim that “6 million Americans have already signed up for coverage thanks to health reform.”

There is much less to the Medicaid figure than meets the eye. (The exchange figure has been updated recently, to 2.2 million, but not the Medicaid figure.) Indeed, there has been vast confusion about what this figure means, especially in the news media. The Fact Checker cited the 3.9 million figure in a few recent columns, but prodded by a colleague as well as an interesting analysis by Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics, we decided to take a closer look.
. . .
Essentially, then, it is ridiculous to suggest, as the @BarackObama tweet does, that the people who have selected a health plan in the exchanges are in anyway equivalent to the 3.9 to 4.2 million who were deemed eligible for Medicaid.

Soon, CMS will release the Medicaid numbers for December. Presumably the new numbers will reveal as little about the impact of the Affordable Care Act as the 3.9 million figure. Reporters need to be very careful about using the new figure in any sentence that includes a reference to the new health-care law.

We’re awarding Three Pinocchios to everyone, including The Fact Checker, who improperly used this number or left the wrong impression about it.

Kudos for Kessler for including himself in the ranks of purveyor of bad information, but for my part, I would have given them all fours:

Whoppers.