Obamacare Schadenfreude, 6/3/14

Warmer, and more humid today, and still mostly sunny.  A front way out in West Virginia, Western Maryland and Pennsylvania threatens to bring us rain sometime this afternoon or evening. 

Obamacare gave President Obama a nervous tic:

The ritual started in earnest last fall in the midst of the biggest humiliation of Barack Obama’s presidency, the failure of the health care website. Anytime he heard a sliver of good news, the president reacted the same way: He knocked on the polished cherry wood table in the Roosevelt Room.

It’s a small thing, almost a nervous tic, but Obama’s habit of knocking on wood during Obamacare meetings had become notable, something that close advisers talked and even joked about among themselves.
...
When Obamacare fixer Jeffrey Zients told the president for the first time that the website would finally hold up under a rush of visitors, Obama joined his senior aides in a round of knocking. When the insurance marketplace finally functioned as it should, they knocked. When enrollment numbers picked up in March, they knocked.

In interviews with more than 60 people who have had close dealings with Obama — his aides, lawmakers, friends, historians, critics and outside advisers — the portrait emerges of a president shadowed by a deepening awareness that his time and power are finite, and that two-thirds of his presidency is already in the past tense.

Certainly the most scientific administration in history.  There's nothing he can't fix with a signing statement and an executive order.

This one's not directly Obamacare Schadenfreude, but since it's the direction health care is going under Obamacare, I think it's worthy:

Citing Expense, Medicare Officials Pass on Investigating Fraud

Medicare lost 6.7 billion dollars to fraud and error in 2010, according to a new inspector’s general report. Something close to that number is likely lost every year, and NPR explains how this happens: of the claims examined overall, more than half “were billed at the wrong rate or lacked documentation to justify the service.” Moreover, the investigation found that while some doctors bill for procedures cheaper than the ones they actually provided, many more billed for procedures that were more expensive than what they provided.

In light of the report’s findings, the inspector general’s office suggested that CMS should investigate those doctors who charge for more expensive procedures than they actually deliver. And how did the CMS respond to this shocking report?

But in its reply to the findings, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Medicare, said it doesn’t plan to review the billings of doctors who almost always charge for the most expensive visits because it isn’t cost-effective to do so.

To put it simply: Medicare knows some doctors are ripping off taxpayers but lacks the ability or will to find out how bad the problem is, much less put a stop to it. If this is the glorious health care system we are building, God help us all.

The people ripping off Medicare are a constituency, and no government can profit from hurting a constituency, unless it's to benefit a larger constituency.  Tax payer should count, many of them are part of the constituency.  And the snake keeps eating it's own tail.