Se Habla Obamacare Schadenfreude?

AP: The Spanish ObamaCare website is just about as awful as the English version

What was initially supposed to be what Spanish-speaking Americans were assured was a trifling delay of merely three weeks soon became a delay of more than two months, and the Spanish-language version of HealthCare.Gov didn’t end up opening for business until December 6th — less than a few weeks before the deadline to obtain January-1st coverage. Much like the debut of the English version of HealthCare.Gov, however, Spanish speakers have been encountering their own slew of functionality problems in the very belatedly available opportunity to signup online, via the AP:

And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read “for the caution of health.”

“When you get into the details of the plans, it’s not all written in Spanish. It’s written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them,” said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami. …

Para un plan de cuidado de la salud pésimo, caro, haga clic aquí!

It's working about as well as we expected: Help! I can't use my Obamacare benefits

Patterson's journey started New Year's Day, when she landed in the emergency room for a stomach ailment. The Independence policy number she received didn't work and the hospital required her to sign a form saying she would pay for care herself, though it agreed to bill her later. She then received an ID card for her HMO plan in the mail a few days later, so she made an appointment with her primary care doctor and a gastric specialist for follow up.
But when the 59-year-old went to her doctor last week, she was told he couldn't see her because she hadn't designated him as her primary care provider. If she wanted to be treated, she'd have to pay for the visit and lab work and request reimbursement. She spent an hour on hold with Independence trying to fix the problem and left the office without care.
Patterson, who has previously always had insurance, said she was not told she had to designate a primary care provider in Independence's system before seeing the doctor. When she got home, she went online and did that, but learned she'd have to wait until February to make an appointment.
That was too long a delay. So, she called Independence three or four times a day, spending more than an hour on hold each time hoping to get a representative to waive the waiting period. But she would hang up before reaching anyone.
"I can't get a person no matter what I do," said Patterson, who is unemployed and lives with her husband in Drexel Hill, Penn.

You know a liberal solution is in deep doo-doo when even the New York Times acknowledges it has problems.

NYT: Yeah, ObamaCare has made the healthcare system a mess in 2014

The Associated Press first reported this developing and completely predictable problem earlier in the week. What happens when you pass a law that (a) causes the health-insurance cancellation for millions and then (b) forces them and millions more to use a disastrously-built web portal as a middeman to replace that coverage? Answer: You end up with millions of people flooding into providers without any idea whether they have coverage or whether their doctor will accept it.
The New York Times confirmed this issue … for its Saturday edition, of course:

In addition to the difficulties many face in proving they have coverage, patients are also having a hard time figuring out whether particular doctors are affiliated with their health insurance plan. Doctors themselves often do not know if they are in the network of providers for plans sold on the exchange.
But interviews with doctors, hospital executives, pharmacists and newly insured people around the country suggest that the biggest challenge so far has been verifying coverage. A surge of enrollments in late December, just before the deadline for coverage to take effect, created backlogs at many state and federal exchanges and insurance companies in processing applications. As a result, many of those who enrolled have yet to receive an insurance card, policy number or bill.
Many are also having trouble reaching exchanges and insurance companies to confirm their enrollment or pay their first month’s premium. Doctors’ offices and pharmacies, too, are spending hours on the phone trying to verify patients’ coverage, sometimes to no avail.

Next thing you know, they'll be admitting to the Stalin era famines.

Some new information has come to light on Accenture, the offshore company that administration has tapped to take over CGI's job of ruining America's healthcare.  Turns out that they are big Obama campaign donors:

On Friday it was reported Accenture, a global consulting firm, obtained the $45-million contract to run the Obamacare health insurance website. The company is taking over from CGI Federal, one of two contractors that originally built the problematic HealthCare.gov portal, with CGI’s contract set to expire on Feb. 28.

Unmentioned in the scores of news articles covering the successful Accenture bid is that Obama is the top all-time recipient of the firm’s many financial contributions, with the president taking in a total of $286,168 from Accenture employees, family members and its political action committee.

No. 2 for Accenture’s donations is former Republican New Jersey State Sen. Bob Martin, and No. 3 is former President George W. Bush at $164,250. Mitt Romney received $73,085 from Accenture. Hillary Clinton raked in $50,515 in contributions from the firm, with John Kerry accepting $45,853.

Obama has a further connection to Accenture. The chief scientist for Obama’s 2012 campaign’s data analytics team, Rayid Ghani, worked at Accenture for 10 years before leaving the firm to take up the position with the president’s reelection team.

You've got to prime that pump, you must have faith and believe...



Meanwhile, evidence continues to accumulate that the "Death Spiral" is starting to pick up rotational velocity...

Critics of Obama's Affordable Care Act say the market won't attract enough young people to keep it financially viable, putting more pressure on government funds to compensate for any insurer losses.

Data from seven states and the District of Columbia, which are running their own marketplaces, show that of more than 200,000 enrollees, nearly 22 percent are 18 to 34 years old, according to a Reuters analysis.

The administration had hoped that over 38 percent, or 2.7 million, of all enrollees in 2014 would be 18 to 35 years old, based on a Congressional Budget Office estimate that 7 million people would sign up by the end of March.

"The whole insurance relationship is counting on them signing up," said Dale Yamamoto, an independent healthcare actuarial consultant. "Otherwise rates will have to increase.

Wombat-Socho has this week's Rule 5 Sunday post "Under the Wire" in, well, under the wire.