November 30, 2013

It's the Obamacare website deadline.

What's up?
"November 30th does not represent a relaunch of HealthCare.gov," said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which operates the site. "It is not a magical date. There will be times after November 30th when the site, like any website, does not perform optimally."
Oh, right. It was a deadline, but it wasn't a deadline deadline. You must have misunderstood, but the Obama administration would like to thank you for accepting the 2-month quieting they procured by making you somehow feel there was a deadline. It's quite similar to the way they quelled opposition with the promise that if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. You are to be praised for your respectful submission to the management of expectations.

37 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Way Obama Treats America is Kinda -- what's that Term Now in Vogue? oh Yes -- Rapey.

pm317 said...

Deadline? What deadline? It is working perfectly fine, except for Koch brothers saying otherwise, didn't you read the NYT article?

and parse this, lefty idiots:
Obama : “We’re evaluating why it is exactly that I didn’t know soon enough that it wasn’t going to work”

pm317 said...

I can’t believe so many Democrats have spent the last three years trying to sell this fiasco to us. At the core of it is the idea that the people who can’t afford health insurance now because their employers don’t pay for it or they don’t get paid enough are going to become one giant pool of people who subsidize the poor and the sick. All on their own. We’ve scooped up all the people who lost out in the past decade or so and stick them in a high risk pool where they subsidize each other’s thin coverage networks that they can’t use when they’re not in that network.

No, that is not republicans saying. That is a liberal Democrat with brains and some intellectual honesty talking.

pm317 said...

Did you all know that the payment option is not yet implemented on Obama's website? (yeah, he called it my website) but the insurers get their subsidies. As someone else put it accounts payable (to cronies) is working but not accounts receivable and of course, there is no service rendered yet either.

Kit Carson said...

Strange days
under obama and the democrats, especially when they controlled Congress 2009-2010:
1. the NSA etc collect and monitor all electronic communications of Americans.
2. under Dodd-Frank, the CFPB collects records of all non-cash financial transactions.
3. under Obamacare, the government is collecting the medical records of nearly all Americans.

What sort of leverage do you think such record gathering might give them over their political opponents?

further, as we saw in the IRS scandal, the obama administration is weaponizing the bureaucracy and turning it against his political opponents. True the Vote was "attacked" by the IRS,FBI,BATF and other agencies. other people have had similar experiences. James Taranto refers to President Obama as "President Asterisk" because of these predations against his opponents in an election.

Also, we have a president who tells big fibs on a regular basis, and a media that helps him get away with it.

What's next? watch for the formation of an american STASI to put to use all this new information. Let us hope it won't happen here.

Michael K said...

The alternatives will appear in time for the folks whose insurance is cancelled to sign up. Those alternatives are probably still being developed but will probably include a new life insurance model.

But just because millions of Americans refuse to get ObamaCare-qualified coverage doesn’t mean they will be uninsured. There are policies available now that would work very well for the ObamaCare avoiders.

Some of these policies are built on a life insurance platform rather than health insurance — which, incidentally, means they are outside ObamaCare’s long arm of regulatory control.

The customer buys a life insurance policy that pays up to $250,000 upon death, which I believe is the current maximum available for this kind of policy.

Along with life insurance coverage the policy includes what’s called a “critical illness” component. If the policyholder needs, say, surgery, the insurer writes the policyholder a check based on a schedule. Let’s say, for example, it’s $10,000.

The policyholder has $10,000 in hand to pay for the medical care — or, frankly, anything else since the money belongs to the insured — but the value of his life insurance benefit is reduced by the same amount, to $240,000. Thus the critical illness component simply accelerates the benefit payout.


There are other models being designed and they will also avoid Obamacare. Will they be outlawed ? Will we wind up going to Canada for private care ? Canada has legalized private clinics, some of which are looking like hospitals.

This will mesh with the building cash medical model.

Sorun said...

I refuse to go to the website. I worry I'll start getting Democrat fund-raising spam.

YoungHegelian said...

Was there even one writer/quoted authority with experience in major software development projects that thought it would be possible to correct the egregious errors revealed on Oct. 1 in two months?

Even one?

pm317 said...

From one liberal to another, just so they can educate the idiots among them.

Obama Clusterfuck a compendium of the clusterfuck..

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

A Jake Tapper stand-in made the announcement this morning.

Drago said...

Michael K: " Canada has legalized private clinics, some of which are looking like hospitals."

Over time this will become a huge revenue stream for Canadian health care companies.

There are already plans in the works to make it "easy" for Americans to utilize Canadian health care services in a private, non-governmental business model.

Of course, given the inevitability of this, we will have to wait and see how the leftists in the US and Canada coordinate their legislation in order to make it impossible for individuals to utilize this looming private treatment avenue.

After all, it's always, ALWAYS, necessary for the left to use coercion to force individuals into "participating" in all the leftist "paradise" "solutions".

AmPowerBlog said...

It was a deadline!

This administration cannot keep a promise!

wildswan said...

A good movie about the Stasi is The Lives of Others

Oso Negro said...

Kit Carson - The Democratic Party IS STASI.

Kit Carson said...

Oso Negro,ergo i go.

at least they're like a prototype, an initial run, a first draft.

Sam L. said...

So, are we all co-dependent now? Enablers? Well, the NYT, WaPo, Alphabets are.

Bob Boyd said...

It wasn't a deadline for the administration. It was a deadline from the administration to their pets in the media.
If you must write a story about the website not working you'd better do it before Nov. 30th, because after that, all stories will need to be about progress, improvement and happy smiling people.

Scott said...

"It was a deadline, but it wasn't a deadline deadline."

Sort of like it not being "rape rape," according to Whoopi Goldberg.

See, I pick up the cultural references.

n.n said...

There is an "urban dictionary", where meaning is invented. Is there also a "doublespeak dictionary", where meaning is selective? Perhaps we can warble and cluck with equal efficiency.

bbkingfish said...

It's working fine for John Boehner.

Original Mike said...

When I was "buying" cath labs for the Hospital, I ran into the phenomenon of vendors shipping empty boxes. They arrive, you find them to be empty, they reply "opps". Buys them a couple of extra weeks.

MathMom said...

They are right! Yesterday I was trying to shop on Amazon.com and it wasn't "performing optimally". In fact, screens were taking like 3 or 4 seconds to load, instead of loading instantaneously as they have reliably done for the last, what? 15 years?

So there's that...

Goju said...

If you like your deadline.....

PB said...

I went to the website. I looked at plans quickly (though listing 10 at a time wastes page-space). I then created a new email address for a fictional person, registered, received the verification email and verified all fairly quickly. I then went through a fairly in-efficient process of defining a family. I didn't enter any SSNs and once it wanted to "verify" me, but it was optional, until the end when it was the last mandatory step before submitting an "application". Of course, at this point, I had no idea what sort of policies and prices were going to come back. If you take a cursory look at any of the insurers and go through their pricing, you'll find reality very different from the quick shopping feature on Obamacare.

Initial conclusion:
1. They've punted small business support and still have no payment processing so you can't actually buy anything. This seems to make Dec 1 a sure failure by definition.

2. This is a pretty standard website that collects information and inserts it into a few database tables. it is not done particularly well field formatting isn't that user friendly (haven't we solved the date field problem millions of times before?) and page design is poor.

3. With this sort of web site, scalability should not be a real problem and it floors me that they couldn't get at least this done by October 1. It would get a B grade for a sophomore comp sci project.

4. The back-end database matters break no new ground, and scalability should not have been an issue if they had competent architects.

Final Conclusion:
1. This let's people make applications, but actual buying of insurance is not finished
2. You shouldn't have to "apply" to get a policy price.
3. You shouldn't have to have your identity to price a policy.
4. this still needs redesign and they are still attempting to delay people seeing the actual prices they are going to pay.
5. there is a concern that much of this is to shunt people to Medicaid and not allow them to buy a subsidized policy by a credible insurance company.

We're now finally at the heart of the matter. Obamacare raises prices across the board and reduces the providers available, so it doesn't matter how many services they "mandate" it's going to be hard to actually receive service. this is going to lead to more people ending up in ERs.

JRoberts said...

A bumper sticker I saw a few years ago:

"OBAMA: Because everyone is entitled to benefit from your hard work"

The message on that bumper sticker seems more true now than ever.

Paul said...

Now is the website up FULLY or is the inquiry mode the only part up?

See if you can't fully buy insurance from it then what good is it?

Unknown said...

Well, what can one expect from some ignorant jackass whom has been given a free ride his entire life, an ignorant jackass whose accomplishments are exactly nothing. When you have never accomplished anything, you can never have failed and never had to admit that you were wrong. Until now, when every boot licker and ass kisser excuses his every mistake. The boot lickers and ass kissers will go to their graves covering for this dipsticks mistakes and denying the damage he has done. The cult of support and admiration for this clown is mind numbingly asinine.

Anonymous said...

Deadlines, schmedlines, campaign promises are for sissies. The future is here, and it may take decades, dozens of executive actions, and billions of your dollars to actualize.

Take your medicine!

Drago said...

Paul: "Now is the website up FULLY or is the inquiry mode the only part up?"

To even ask the question reveals your racist nature and lack of belief in the teh Won.

I would make sure my taxes are in perfect order if I were you....

westwing said...

Obamacare is the progressive's government paternalism on display. They could have made it easy to shop, compare and buy. But the Obama crew had to treat Americans like children, hiding the real costs from those who visit the website. Instead of listing the pricing up front, which would have revealed the unsubsidized costs, they had to verify your identity and cross check IRS records to verify income before revealing your subsidized premium costs after the application of the premium tax credit. It's true anyone with income up to 4x poverty won't really pay the list price but will pay the net of the premium after the tax credit is subtracted. The insurer gets the tax credit up front so the insured doesn't see that cost or have to pay it and wait for a tax return. This system is extremely unwieldy.

What's worse is that anyone with income under 2.5x poverty gets a customized insurance plan, i.e. the copay and deductibles are significantly reduced or eliminated. But Obama's team doesn't even want the shopper to know that their policy actually only covered 60% or had a $2200 deductible. Those details might scare the buyer off. Instead those details are hidden until identity and income is verified through an unprecedented linkage of government databases. Only then is the "insurance plan" revealed to the shopper. This is excessively complex because Obama is intentionally treating American citizens as children...too dumb to make decisions, unable to handle the knowledge of how much their coverage is really costing the taxpayers.

This is the real scandal about Obamacare's rollout.

Jason said...

DAS WAR EIN BEFEHL!!!!!!!!

David-2 said...

"They say they have eliminated a host of glitches in the software so that pages now load incorrectly less than 1% of the time."

Do you have any idea how many people at Amazon.com would get fired if they launched a site for a new country, or a heavily promoted "store", and nearly 1% of the page loads were incorrect a month after launch?

By the way, Amazon.com measures performance at the TP99.9 level, which means, they only look at the trends for the 0.1% (1 in 1000) worst performing loads of a page. You take all of your page loads per minute or per hour and if the worst performing 0.1% suck, then your whole site sucks and pagers go off. Some of their services are measured at TP99.99 (1 in 10,000), and not just page loads - response times for parts of a page, or for computing the arrival date of an expected shipment, or of communicating with the warehouses, or anything thing and everything that could impact the customer in any way whatsoever: it is all measured and it is all fixed as soon as it fails to meet SLA. TP99 (that's your 1% worst cases) is for nonessential wimpy services, like
tagging an item, or commenting on a review.

Or, in this case, for buying mandatory insurance on a government site.

Hagar said...

If you do not go on their website, do they put your ID and tax returns and medical records out there for the insurance companies, etc., to look at anyway?

Anonymous said...

The Lying Sack of America strikes again. We have a pathological liar in the White House. You can't rely on a thing he says. This is very dangerous.

Anonymous said...

Web development always takes three times longer than anyone thinks it will; it is ongoing and anyone who puts a deadline deadline on is in for a surprise.

(Former web developer)

gk1 said...

Wonder how they are going to polish this obamacare turd after their self imposed website fix deadline came and went. By their own admission the back end hasn't even been built yet so how will anyone actually enroll and do a transaction on this p.o.s?I can't wait to see the next milestone they set for themselves (and then bungle)

Paul said...

So we need a new term for these fake deadlines. How about Obamalines?

To set an Obamaline is to just shoot for 'hope some of it works'!

Yea, Hope and change.