Healthcare.gov Is Obamacare’s Best Feature
October 28, 2013 by Bob Livingston
Rick McKee, The Augusta Chronicle
The public face of the Obamacare deathcare disaster right now is the government website that administers program sign-ups, Healthcare.gov.
If the government’s goal in establishing Healthcare.gov, as President Barack Obama has claimed, is to allow people to view available insurance plans and sign up for them through the website, then Healthcare.gov is a colossal failure. It’s the type of failure that, had it occurred in the private sector, would have resulted in the immediate firing of the company’s chief executive officer, the head of the department overseeing the project, the project’s director and most, if not all, of the people who contributed to the project in any supervisory way — and that is only if the company was able to survive the disastrous debut.
But government is not negatively affected by failure. In fact, there is a reward for failure in government. As Representative Steny Hoyer reminded Tuesday when asked how Congress could help improve the system, “We can give them a little money.” Never mind the hundreds of millions of dollars already dumped into the boondoggle.
And so it was for the crony firm tasked with developing the website, CGI Federal. The Canadian information technology firm entered the U.S. government contracting business after buying several American IT firms beginning in 2004. It was in the right place at the right timeand got the contract despite a checkered past on similar projects; one of them, a Canadian healthcare registry for diabetes sufferers, performed so badly and CGI missed so many deadlines that the $46.2 million project was scrapped.
So apparently, government contractors aren’t affected by failure either, at least as long as they play the corporatist game and line the pockets of the Washington, D.C., criminal elected class, which CGI did to the tune of at least $800,000, according to Opensecrets.org.
And neither are government bureaucrats affected by failure. See Sebilius, Kathleen; Lerner, Lois; Holder, Eric; Boswell, Eric J.; Maxwell, Raymond; Clinton, Hillary; Napolitano, Janet, etc.
Insurance executives are warning that the Healthcare.gov website will lead to theft of private information and other forms of identity theft. And if fixes aren’t made properly, those trying to sign up can expect to see their bank accounts debited multiple times and they may still not be signed up for health insurance.
The user experience has been disastrous. ProPublica has been monitoring user feedback at Healthcare.gov/feedback and is finding that the site is misidentifying people, compromising their identities (or claiming their identities are compromised), requiring them to fill out the same information numerous times, blocking their access to their own accounts and costing insurance agents countless hours and dollars in lost time and clients.
But as bad as the Healthcare.gov rollout has been (and even Democrats are now admitting it has been a failure), Obamacare itself is actually much, much worse.
- It restricts medical choices in myriad ways. Treatment options and payment schedules will be set by a group of unelected bureaucrats under the thumbs of Big Pharma, the medical industrial complex and Big Insurance. Holistic and naturopathic treatments are not part of the protocol. Doctors are leaving over the regulations and reduced payment schedules. Many more are being dropped by the crony insurance companies. (See below.) Most doctor examinations are being replaced by examinations by nurse practitioners.
- Although its official name is the Affordable Healthcare Act, Obamacare is anything but affordable. The low-premium Bronze Plan has impossible-to-afford deductibles. The high-premium Gold Plan is unaffordable to most. According to a breakdown of premiums for each county done by The Market Ticker® the average unsubsidized premium for a 27-year-old will be $3,200 per year. For the average 50-year-old, individual premiums are about $5,434 per year. For a couple with children, the annual premium would be about $7,774. But smokers’ premiums are about twice that because of surcharges. You can see the unsubsidized premium for your county or parish here.
- As is typical of government redistribution schemes, this one picks winners and losers. Losers are most Americans who will be paying a lot more for less care and fewer choices. The workers and the healthy will be subsidizing the poor, the nonworking and sickest. The text of the Obamacare calls for government “subsidies” up to 400 percent of the poverty line (about $94,000 for a family of four). But lawsuits are in the works that will deny subsidies to those 34 States that opted not to set up exchanges. Few, if any, will choose to pay the prices for unsubsidized premiums. According to government Consumer Price Index numbers, health insurance spending is .656 percent of the family budget. Under Obamacare, a family would have to make to $1.185 million annually for a premium of $7,774 to be .656 percent of their budget.
- If the government pays for treatments, it can set treatment options. Already, the Food and Drug Administration is a fascist system that approves drug treatments will little or no independent research and it not only exempts Big Pharma from paying damages to people harmed by their drugs, it often uses taxpayer dollars to pay damages when courts mandate them. Once the government gets into the business of approving and mandating treatments, medical freedom is lost.
- Many Obamacare supporters outside the Beltway believe that Obamacare is a better system than the previous government-regulated crony system because they disapproved of private businesses making decisions about which treatments they would pay for and how much they’d pay. But Obamacare is a fascist system written by insurance companies, Big Pharma and medical-industrial lobby to their benefit, not to the patients’ benefit.
- Further evidence that Obamacare was written by the insurance companies can be seen in their rising stock prices since Obamacare’s passage. Obamacare is a boon to insurance companies who expect to see in increase in the number of customers and premium payments guaranteed by the Federal government.
- Obamacare is hastening the collapse of U.S. economic system. America is currently selling U.S. bonds to itself in order to pay its bills and running up trillions of dollars in “debts” that will never be paid by anything of substance. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of Obamacare at $2 trillion, but the law will increase the number of insured by only 40 million people at a cost of$50,000 each.
- Obamacare is turning America into a part-time workforce. Hundreds of thousands of full-time jobs have been reduced to part time so businesses can avoid Obamacare mandates.
- Obamacare’s premium structure penalizes married couples. It gives benefits more generously to unmarried couples who cohabit than it does to married couples. Cohabiting couples are 170 percent more likely to split up than married couples. Children from broken families are 82 percent more likely to live in poverty and are more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors like sexual activity and substance abuse and are more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior.
Or, to sum up, as I’ve told you numerous times, Obamacare is a deathcare trap of graft and corruption that advances medical tyranny and hastens the collapse of the U.S. economy… and that’s not even the worst of it.
As the battle over Obamacare rages in Washington, the White House is quietly using a little known provision of the law to roll out a nationwide network of free gas stations for minorities and the poor.
