Spring Forward into Obamacare Schadenfreude

This is our warm day before the storm. Temperatures are climbing towards 50 F now at 9 AM, with possible 60s later, under the influence of a strong south wind.  This is scheduled to end tomorrow with the arrival of a new winter storm, which is supposed to start with an icy mix (freezing rain, sleet etc) before depositing another 4-8 inches of crystalline global warming.  Again, we're on the east/south side of the major mess, which is supposed to leave up to 12 inches into a band along interior Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. Just lovely.

Hey, who forgot to tell Old Man Winter that March 1st is supposed to mark the first day of "meteorological spring?"

Obamacare Schadenfreude lingers as well, although, I must say, today's lot is a bit thin.  You know, like - Obamacare is leading to more emphasis on treatment by less qualified (but therefore less expensive) health care workers:

60 Plus Association, the nation’s leading conservative senior advocate organization is calling on Tennessee lawmakers to oppose House Bill 555 and Senate Bill 220. These bills would allow optometrists – who are not medical doctors and do not go through surgical residency training– to inject anesthesia into the tissues surrounding the eye and perform scalpel surgery on the eyelid. The proposal to expand the legal scope of practice by non-medical eye care providers follows along a similar path that optometrists and legislators in California are currently pursuing in their implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly referred to as ObamaCare.
. . .
60 Plus supporters in Tennessee are concerned that if passed, HB 555 and SB 220 will pose a threat to patients’ surgical safety and quality of surgical eye care, particularly for seniors. “Tennesseans deserve to be treated by the highest trained medical professionals in the procedures they perform,” said Peggy Lambert, RN, BS, a 60 Plus member from Maryville, TN. Lambert, Tennessee’s National Republican Committeewoman and the RNC’s Vice Chair for the Southern region added that “while optometrists play an important role in performing vision exams and basic eye care services, Tennesseans deserve to know that when they go in for surgery under local anesthesia, they are being treated by a surgeon who has the medical background and clinical training to immediately handle a dangerous situation if surgical complications arise. That will not be the case anymore if HB 555 and SB 220 are passed into law.”

There is something to be said for having people with less expensive training and overhead do some of the simpler tasks in medicine, but when it comes to my eyes, I want the guy (or gal) holding the knife to be as expert as possible.

You'd think that with less than one month to go before the deadline to sign up for Obamacare, and with the personal penalties looming, that the states would have gotten their act together, and produced a smooth sign up experience. You'd be wrong: Long waits frustrate callers to health exchanges

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — For those trying to enroll through online health exchanges, help has long been advertised as just a phone call away.

Yet the challenge in some states has been trying to get a call through at all, never mind the multiple transfers once contact has been made.

Long wait times of an hour or more have been commonplace in some states, primarily those running their own health care exchanges. California, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada and Washington are among the states in which consumers and insurance agents have complained. One consequence is that people just give up because they are unable to wait indefinitely. . .

People have to sign up, or face a "shared responsibility payment", but they can't sign up because the websites are a joke, and the call centers are bad too.  Government competence at it's best.

Pressure rises as O-Care deadline nears

Pressure is rising on the White House as ObamaCare reaches its final month of enrollment roughly 3 million sign-ups behind its target goal. The administration hoped to enroll 7 million people in private plans during the reform's first year, but that became all but impossible after the botched launch of HealthCare.gov.

Now, with 4 million people signed up as of this week, officials are counting on a final pre-deadline rush to bolster the exchanges and raise morale among vulnerable Democrats already exhausted by ObamaCare attacks. . . But a poll released this week threw cold water on that expectation by revealing the public's ignorance about when they need to gain health coverage or pay a fine.

Three in four uninsured patients are not aware of the March 31 deadline, the Kaiser Family Foundation found in its monthly tracking survey. Only 24 percent could name the date correctly.  The finding underscores how the administration must not just convince people to sign up for ObamaCare, but highlight the cutoff date.

A lot of people are going to be shocked to find the "shared responsibility payment" subtracted from their tax refunds.  But that won't hurt the economy at all, right?  No one counts on their tax return as a little bonus or an enforced savings plan?

The administration has gone on an underground publicity binge to promote Obamacare to the designated suckers desired enrollees:

The final month of the White House enrollment campaign isn't about daily events in Washington or speeches aimed at a national audience. Instead, Obama, Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama, cabinet members and senior administration officials are showering attention in very targeted ways on African Americans, Latinos, young people and the top 25 cities with the most uninsured Americans.

They’re hitting The View and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. But what’s less noticed is how they’re popping up on syndicated radio shows, at local enrollment events and on social media networks, hawking health insurance like product pitchmen.
. . .
The push is the last major test of the White House’s enrollment strategy, a marriage of analytics, microtargeting and messaging that suffered a serious setback after the health care website failed to launch in October — leaving the administration with a lot of ground to make up in the next month to boost the overall enrollment numbers, and the mix of young and old who are signing up.

These are the people who don't know the date, or the collection mechanism.  May God have mercy on their souls, because the Federal Government won't.

One of the Mardi Gras committees in New Orleans is helping by making a float mocking Obamacare:

The official United States clown Vice President Joe Biden took it so far as to try to sign up a Canadian:



In an attempt to appear evenhanded, The Washington Post "Fact Checker," Glenn Kessler,  has back to back evaluations of Harry Reid's outrageous claim that all the negative Obamacare stories are lies, and the stories themselves, awarding them both two Pinocchios:

Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people.

In the case of Harry Reid (whose statements are, in fact, out and out lies) he rationalizes:

Reid claimed that a “vast, vast majority” of AFP’s Obamacare ads are lies. Vast majority is an imprecise and hackneyed phrase, but presumably it is above 75 percent. We’re not sure what a “vast, vast majority” would be.

We also are not sure what would qualify as a “lie” though on balance we might reserve that for Four Pinocchio or Pants on Fire and/or False statements. (Others might add “mostly false” and Three Pinocchio statements to the “lie” pile, but personally that seems to go too far.)

But only one of the Obamacare ads vetted by the Fact Checker or PolitiFact achieved such ratings, though all had various problems and statements that went too far. Meanwhile, our colleague Greg Sargent has noted that two recent AFP ads, released after controversial Boonstra ad, appeared to go out of their way not to make statements that could be called into question.

For the ads themselves, he faults them for not giving the "context" that he would prefer:

As we have often noted, there are winners and losers under the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration erred in suggesting that everyone will be a winner and that nobody would be forced to give up a plan that they liked.

Yes, lied just became "erred."

But AFP takes it to the other extreme, highlighting a unique case to condemn the entire law. Lamb certainly faces higher costs now, and she apparently was happy with her previous state-subsidized plan. So she turns out to be one of the losers under the law, and as a one-time Obama supporter she has every right to be upset.

So Glenn Kessler, fact checker extraordinaire,  just asserts that this is an extreme, unique case.  Of course, each case is unique, and no doubt Kessler can find the excuse to find all 6 million or so of them extreme outliers.

After she had her horse-riding accident, the hospital even decided to foot much of the bill, which is a scenario that the Affordable Care Act is supposed to prevent. (That hospital didn’t just eat Lamb’s expenses; it passed them on to everyone else through higher bills.) In theory, people with insurance will no longer be charged extra to pay for the medical expenses of people with no or limited insurance.

Except that the Oregon study suggests that is likely not true, and Obamacare leaves plenty of people uninsured to fill the emergency rooms with non-paying consumers.

The trade-off, of course, for getting better coverage is that it is going to be more expensive. After all, you don’t get something for nothing.

We can’t quibble with the ad’s words–we certainly would not call it a “lie”–but the lack of context is going to earn it Pinocchios. We wavered between One and Two, but ultimately settled on Two because this is really an exception that proves the rule.

I think this is pretty obvious case of bias, overlooking the plank in Harry Reid's eye to find the mote in Obamacare's opponents.