A Vente Obamacare Schadenfreude With Skim Soy Milk

We know that under the current Obamacare rollout blues, millions of individuals have lost the insurance that they were paying for, and millions have signed up for new plans, either under Medicaid or, in many cases, taxpayer subsidized new plans.  On the balance though, millions of people have lost health insurance that they had been willing to maintain on their own.  Surely, among those, some bad things are bound to happen.  A million is a big number, whether it's dollars or people.

Woman Dies, Not Cancer, Not Heart Disease – Just a Fast Fever After Cancelled Insurance

A shocking and horrible thing happened to me yesterday. This does have real world consequences. I got up in the morning and got an email from a friend saying “my sister almost died because of ObamaCare.” She had been thrown off her insurance plan. Blue Shield just completely pulled out of California. A lot of insurance companies have had to just pull out, and there is no competition. There is fake competition. There are a million insurance companies, but they all have to provide under federal law, the exact same product, so, have at it. No one can compete.

Anyway, she had been thrown off her insurance. She was trying to get insurance some other way — get on ObamaCare, she couldn’t get through the website, and she started to get a fever. She didn’t want to go to the Emergency Room. She didn’t know what it was, until she got her insurance. So, she put it off, she put it off. On Thursday she went into septic shock. I was giving a speech yesterday, a lunch speech, so I went down and mentioned this during the speech, that this woman, she nearly died. She went into septic shock. Got up to my hotel room after the speech and my friend sent me an email, saying, “my sister died” from ObamaCare…

We know the Obama administration is seeking good stories about Obamacare to tout the advantages of Obamacare, and accusing Republicans for lack of sympathy, and indeed, in many cases of "wanting poor people to die." What can their response be to this tragedy? Eggs and Omelettes?

Speaking of the administration finding creative ways to tout Obamacare, the Maryland Obamacare program is writing and paying for tweets for NFL players to tweet to their followers:

Obamacare got a boost from current and former National Football League players on Super Bowl Sunday after the White House sent suggested language for laudatory tweets to a representative of the league’s players union.

Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo earned a retweet from the White House after telling his followers, “don’t forget you can affordable [sic] healthcare at healthcare.gov.”

That was the last in a series of tweets composed by Ayanbadejo about Healthcare.gov. Other messages were more grammatical, containing language copied directly from an email sent by Kyle Lierman, a liaison in the White House Office of Public Engagement, that encouraged players to promote Obamacare in the runup to the big game.
. . .
The Ravens received a $130,000 contract from Maryland Health Connection, the state’s Obamacare exchange, last year to promote Obamacare. The NFL decided toforego an agreement with officials in charge of the Obamacare rollout.

A couple of different thoughts occur here.  First, the Maryland Obamacare website is in mighty battle with the Oregon website for the title of the worst Obamacare website in the country, a low bar to be sure.  Second, doesn't the NFL see that the administration is about to begin a "war on football", ostensibly over concussion injuries, but really just as an extension of their general war on masculinity?

And that Oregon website?  Just how did it get so bad, did they hire lumberjacks to write it?  Nope, just crooks.  Criminal fraud in Oregon ObamaCare exchange?

What that meant for the Cover Oregon website was that it was able to paint a picture of a flashy website – imagine a concept car that looks flashy in the showroom but doesn’t actually run.
But documents uncovered by the KATU Investigators show Lawson hadn’t actually figured out how to build the site, even as she was promising the federal government – and her bosses – that Cover Oregon’s website was going to work.
So what, exactly, were the federal and state reviewers being shown?
In a Sept. 27, 2012 email to Bruce Goldberg – Lawson’s boss at the Oregon Health Authority, who is now in charge of Cover Oregon – she sent a link to something called “The Solution Factory,” a site hosted by software contractor Oracle.
Lawson wrote in the email that the link went to a site hosting the same demonstrations the team provided to project stakeholders.
“It demonstrates what we have built to date,” she wrote. “By watching this every month, you can see our progress in real time.”

Let’s make sure to note that this doesn't appear to be a very effective fraud, except when targeted at the truly ignorant. After all, an agency that’s certifying work for a state exchange should have the wherewithal to check the actual functionality. If a bunch of non-functioning web pages was enough to fool HHS into writing $59 million in checks, then the web pages weren't the only dummies involved here.

As any con man will tell you, it's easy to fool people who want to buy what you're trying to sell them.

Trying desperately not to lose the race to the bottom, Maryland countered with a story about how a study to investigate the problems with it's nonfunctional website was being slowed down to help the Lt. Governor, Anthony G. Brown (D), win the governorship after the term limited Governor O'Malley leaves office in search of a larger jurisdiction to over tax.

For nearly two months, top Maryland leaders have promised to investigate what went wrong with the launch of the state’s online health insurance marketplace. But they have been vague on when or how that would happen.

Last week, legislative leaders said that instead of continuing to question health officials and request documents, they are likely to defer to a previously scheduled state audit of the exchange that is expected to begin this summer and could take a year to complete. That angered many Republicans and some Democrats who want a full accounting now.

They said that a delay could also spare Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown (D), who is running for governor, from having to publicly address more questions about the exchange before the Democratic primary on June 24 or the general election in November. Brown was tasked with implementing President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in Maryland.

Hey, at least they didn't cause a back up on the Bay Bridge for political reasons, right?

Yesterday, our confidence in the federal website was buoyed by the revelation that software developers got code from Belarus coders thought to be linked to hackers.

U.S. intelligence agencies last week urged the Obama administration to check its new healthcare network for malicious software after learning that developers linked to the Belarus government helped produce the website, raising fresh concerns that private data posted by millions of Americans will be compromised.

The intelligence agencies notified the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency in charge of the Healthcare.gov network, about their concerns last week. Specifically, officials warned that programmers in Belarus, a former Soviet republic closely allied with Russia, were suspected of inserting malicious code that could be used for cyber attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the concerns.

At least they probably know how to write good code, unlike Obama.

And more evidence that it is all just another redistribution scheme:

First, let’s crunch some numbers. Byron York flags the Brookings Institution’s conclusions on what Obamacare will do to wages. Brookings, as you may know, is no conservative outfit, but its research shows damage to wages for people in very modest income brackets and into the middle class.

A new study finds that Obamacare’s redistribution will be stunningly lopsided. Scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution have discovered that Obamacare will increase the income of Americans in the lowest 20 percent of the income scale, and especially in the lowest ten percent. But all other income groups — even people who make very modest incomes in the $25,000 to $30,000 range, as well as all income brackets above that — will experience a decline in income because of Obamacare.
In other words, Obamacare is going to cost some of the very people it was designed to help.

After a fry cook making $7.25 an hour (min wage) complains that Obamacare caused his time to be cut so that his company would not have to pay Obamacare, President Obama replied that the cure was to raise the minimum wage.  Anybody else see the problem with that argument?

Even Healthcare Giants like the Mayo Clinic are being forced to increase costs and cut back on employee benefits to accommodate Obamacare:



If the goal was to destroy employee based healthcare coverage, it's working! That's not necessarily a bad thing; it depends on what they intend to replace it with.

From the Hoist on their Own Petard Department: Court to review religious law once hailed by Democrats but now used to battle Obamacare

A law championed by Senate Democrats (including one named Joe Biden) to undermine a Supreme Court ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia has become the latest obstacle to the Affordable Care Act.

Who says Washington’s not bipartisan?

Of course, no one knew back in 1993 that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) would one day be invoked by business owners who say their religious beliefs forbid offering employees health insurance plans that cover some types of contraceptives.

When the RFRA was proposed, it had the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and religious lobbyists, rolled through Congress with near-unanimous support, and was happily signed by President Bill Clinton.

Now it is at the center of challenges against the contraceptive requirement. The Supreme Court next month will hear from arts-and-crafts giant Hobby Lobby and a Pennsylvania cabinet-making company named Conestoga Wood; owners of both enterprises say they run their businesses to reflect their deeply held religious beliefs.
. . .
The background is a 1990 Supreme Court case. After years of decisions that accommodated religious practices, the court seemed to draw a line in a case involving Native Americans who were fired for illegally smoking peyote during a religious ceremony.

The court said it would be “courting anarchy” to allow individuals to claim a religious exemption from laws that were neutral and generally applied to the rest of the population. Scalia wrote the opinion for five other members of the court.

Congress responded three years later with the RFRA. It says that government may not pass a law that “substantially burdens a person’s exercise of religion,” and it requires courts to apply strict scrutiny: whether there is a “compelling” reason for the law and whether it is narrowly tailored to accomplish the goal.

They can put that in their pipes and smoke it.