Rainy Tuesday Obamacare Schadenfreude

A cloudy, rainy day here with at least one more to go.  Appropriate for yet another story about the failed Oregon Obamacare website.

Oregon Make it official, dumps non-performing website in favor of Federal one

The Oregon board overseeing the state’s deeply flawed health insurance exchange unanimously approved the Obama administration’s plan Friday to take over the marketplace, making Oregon the first state to drop its enrollment Web site for HealthCare.gov.

Directors of the exchange, Cover Oregon, voted Friday to drop its enrollment Web site, which hadn’t fully recovered from a failed launch Oct. 1. Oregon, which was awarded $305 million in federal grants to build the exchange, remains the only state not allowing full online enrollment in Affordable Care Act health plans.

Well, you can't expect loggerd to make a working website, can you?



The actual song starts around the 2 minute mark.

Following yesterday's story (or was the the day before?) of how Obamacare is destroying the one doctor practice.  A Doctor's Declaration of Independence - It's time to defy health-care mandates issued by bureaucrats not in the healing profession.

. . .The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services dictates that we must use an electronic health record (EHR) or be penalized with lower reimbursements in the future. There are "meaningful use" criteria whereby the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tells us as physicians what we need to include in the electronic health record or we will not be subsidized the cost of converting to the electronic system and we will be penalized by lower reimbursements. Across the country, doctors waste precious time filling in unnecessary electronic-record fields just to satisfy a regulatory measure. I personally spend two hours a day dictating and documenting electronic health records just so I can be paid and not face a government audit. Is that the best use of time for a highly trained surgical specialist?

This is not a unique complaint. A study commissioned by the American Medical Association last year and conducted by the RAND Corp. found that "Poor EHR usability, time-consuming data entry, interference with face-to-face patient care, inefficient and less fulfilling work content, inability to exchange health information between EHR products, and degradation of clinical documentation were prominent sources of professional dissatisfaction."
. . .
We could change the paradigm. We could as a group elect not to take any insurance, not to accept Medicare—many doctors are already taking these steps—and not to roll over time and time again. We have let nearly everyone trespass on the practice of medicine. Are we better for it? Has it improved quality? Do we have more of a voice at the table or less? Are we as physicians happier or more disgruntled then two years ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago?

At 58, I'll likely be retired in 10 years along with most physicians of my generation. Once we're gone, who will speak up for our profession and the individual physician in the trenches? The politicians? Our medical societies? Our hospital administrators? I think not. Now is the time for physicians to say enough is enough.

We're from the government and we're here to help you. But first, fill out this thousand page form, and sign it under penalty of perjury.

Rove not happy with Obamacare white flag

AUSTIN, Texas – Caught on a flight from Washington to Texas Sunday, Karl Rove, the guru of the GOP political establishment, was not pleased with a statement by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, a member of the House Republican leadership team, which sounded like a surrender in the fight to overturn Obamacare.

Asked if the comment by Republican leadership acquiescing to the continuation of the Affordable Care Act was helpful to GOP chances in November, Rove said, “It doesn’t. It absolutely doesn’t.”

Rove had not had a chance to read the article in the Spokane Spokesman-Review that quoted McMorris Rodgers as saying it is unlikely Republicans will kill the Affordable Care Act should they take the Senate and hold the House in November. He indicated he tried to read it when he saw the headline on the Drudge Report but could not access the story because the paper’s servers were overloaded.

“If she’s saying that there are some provisions of the law that are worth keeping, like pre-existing conditions, that makes sense,” said Rove. “Nobody is talking about scrapping everything. There are some things worth keeping.”

A hundred monkeys typing 2000 page just might write something worth keeping, too.