Tag Archives: health care

Right-Wing Media Finally Free to Obsess About Obamacare Website

by silownie_zewnetrzne_krone Posted on October 18, 2013

Mother Jones

Rep. Mark Meadows (R–NC) was the author of a House pledge to vote against any Continuing Resolution that didn’t defund Obamacare. Dave Weigel caught up to him and asked if he planned to write another letter when the current CR runs out:

“We’re not going to need to because the president has said he’s willing to negotiate when there’s not a gun to his head,” said Meadows. “We’ll fix all the problems between now and then. I’m gonna hold him to his word—his word was that he was willing to negotiate now, and that’s what we all expect.” Obviously Meadows could change his mind in a few months, but I was struck how pragmatic he wanted to sound.

Hmmm. I’m pretty sure that Obama didn’t mean he was willing to negotiate about defunding his signature health care bill once the gun was lowered, so I wouldn’t count on anything along those lines. I’d say that ordinary budget negotiations are more along the lines of what he had in mind.

Which is too bad. There are actually details of Obamacare that I suspect Obama and his allies really would like to fix, and they might be able to give Republicans a few things they want in return. But I’m pretty sure that Republicans are still salivating over Obamacare’s imminent collapse once it gets up and running, and are entirely unwilling to do anything that might actually make it function more smoothly. So that’s probably out.

And on a related subject, remember how we all figured that once the budget shutdown was over, conservative sites would finally be freed to start banging away on the problems with the Obamacare website? Well, over at The Corner, seven of the top dozen posts right now are about exactly that. It’s the top story on Drudge. It’s at the top of the blog feed at the Weekly Standard. I count seven Obamacare stories on the front page at Fox News. Red State has two. Etc. This is what it would have been like 24/7 for the past two weeks if Ted Cruz and his merry band of own-goalers hadn’t hijacked the national conversation and made people actually start to feel kind of sorry for Obamacare.

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Right-Wing Media Finally Free to Obsess About Obamacare Website

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The Republican Defeat in the Budget Deal Was Complete and Total

by Jeff Peterson Posted on October 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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The budget deal passed by Congress yesterday did, in the end, include one concession to Republicans: a provision that tightens up income verification for Obamacare recipients. Since Democrats were insisting on principle that they wouldn’t provide Republicans with any ransom in return for keeping the government open, this seems a little worrying at first. It may not be a big ransom, but it’s not zero, either.

Today, though, Sarah Kliff reassures me. In fact, it really is zero:

The deal basically requires two submitted reports in the course of the next year. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is due to submit the first report by Jan. 1, which must detail “the procedures employed by American Health Benefit Exchanges to verify eligibility for credits and cost-sharing reductions described in subsection.” Six months later, the HHS inspector general is required to submit a report “regarding the effectiveness of the procedures and safeguards provided under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for preventing the submission of inaccurate or fraudulent information by applicants.”

….There’s nothing about the income verification measures that passed Wednesday night that will change Obamacare, aside from a few staff members at Health and Human Services devoting some hours to gathering the data and writing up these reports. And that probably explains why Democrats were okay with passing this language in the first place.

That’s it? A couple of routine reports? I take it back: The Republican defeat in this debacle really was complete and total.

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The Republican Defeat in the Budget Deal Was Complete and Total

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Conservative Group Warns GOPers on Debt Deal: "This Vote Is a Vote for Funding Obamacare"

by hrzy86j5 Posted on October 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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The deal to lift the debt ceiling and reopen the federal government unveiled by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday barely touches Obamacare. That’s a major blow to conservative lawmakers in the House and Senate who shut down the government on October 1 over demands to delay or defund President Obama’s health-care law. This deal, crafted by Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, leaves them empty-handed, with little, if anything, to show for their anti-Obamacare crusade.

More MoJo coverage of the debt ceiling crisis.


Debt Ceiling Crisis Averted, House Tea Partiers Express No Regrets


The Debt Ceiling Explained in 10 Short Sentences


7 Deadly Spins: A Guide to GOP Debt Ceiling Denial


How John Boehner Could Lose His Speakership


Unpacking the Dumbest Thing Said by a GOP Congressman About the Debt Ceiling


4 Things the Fed Could Do About a Default


Economist Mark Zandi: “We Will Be Dooming Our Economy and the Entire Global Economy”

Now, one prominent conservative group is telling Republicans that they cannot claim to oppose Obamacare if they vote yes on the Reid-McConnell deb ceiling deal. Those members who support the deal “can’t credibly claim they oppose Obamacare if they vote for this deal,” Rick Manning, a spokesman for Americans for Limited Government, tells Mother Jones. “This vote is a vote for funding Obamacare.”

Manning says that ALG will urge members to vote no on the Reid-McConnell deal. “This whole thing was about Obamacare,” he says. “And now this deal doesn’t touch Obamacare at all.”

The glitches marring the roll-out of Obamacare’s insurance exchanges, which opened for business on October 1, are even more reason to do everything possible to kill the law, Manning says. “We now have dramatically more evidence that this thing is a failure. Even if you like Obamacare, you can’t like what you’re getting right now.”

The Club for Growth, another heavy-hitting conservative group, is also telling members to vote no on the Reid-McConnell bill. The House and Senate are expected to vote on the bill later on Wednesday or early Thursday.

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Conservative Group Warns GOPers on Debt Deal: "This Vote Is a Vote for Funding Obamacare"

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The Obamacare Website Might Finally Be Getting Better

by DonnaWahl Posted on October 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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My timing, as always, is perfect. Last night I wrote a post wondering just how bad the problems with the Obamacare website really are. Today, Sarah Kliff reports that things are finally getting better. The site remains slow, but she was able to complete an application that included financial assistance in about 30 minutes. Her application is now “in progress,” so she hasn’t begun the actual process of choosing a plan, but this is still better than it was before. Kliff also reports that shopping for plans is fairly smooth and easy.

So….maybe the problems are more resolvable than we thought, and are in fact finally getting resolved. Stay tuned.

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The Obamacare Website Might Finally Be Getting Better

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Reminder of the Day: When It Comes to Long-Term Spending, It’s All Health Care, Baby

by nowabazaBS1 Posted on October 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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With the budget crisis now on its way to resolution, it’s worth reminding everyone that, in fact, the federal budget isn’t really in bad shape. As Ryan Cooper of the Washington Monthly notes this morning, long-term predictions of doom are essentially based on one thing: the rising cost of health care:

The CBO’s model has a factor which assumes that health care costs will continue to grow much faster than the economy forever—which means that if we get health care cost growth under control, our deficit “problem” will vanish entirely.

The conservative reply is that the way to get health care costs under control is to simply have less health care. We must “reform” entitlements; meaning raise the Medicare retirement age, cut Medicaid, etc. We can’t afford to be generous, and some people are just going to have to go endure hardship or we’re going to bankrupt the state.

But as the Monthly has long shown, this is nonsense. In fact, the United States’ world-record health care costs are driven by a combination of policy factors, both on the private and the government side….”Centrist” elites don’t seem to think that something counts as reform unless it’s punishing a poor person somewhere, but the real action is in the policy design. Health care is expensive because of inefficiency, monopoly politics, lack of research, and interest group lobbying, not because Medicare is too generous. In fact, health care cost growth has slowed considerably since the passage of Obamacare, so if the administration manages to fix its IT disaster we could be in good shape already.

Yep. The chart below shows federal spending through 2008 in order to illustrate historical trends clearly without the spike of the Great Recession. As you can see, domestic spending (“Other”) is declining; interest expense is declining; defense spending is declining; and Social Security spending is flat. It will increase a bit over the next few decades, but only by a point or two of GDP.

And then there’s Medicare, which is increasing. But Medicare is increasing because (a) the population is aging, and (b) overall health care costs are rising. We can’t do anything about aging, which means that essentially our entire long-term budget problem is caused by rising health care costs. That’s it. If you’re actually serious about this stuff, you’ll spend essentially 100 percent of your time on policy proposals designed to reduce America’s insanely high health care costs. Obamacare is a start, but there’s still a lot more to be done.

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Reminder of the Day: When It Comes to Long-Term Spending, It’s All Health Care, Baby

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Just How Bad Is the Obamacare Website, Anyway?

by SherlynHa Posted on October 15, 2013

Mother Jones

I’ve been corresponding with a friend about the problems with the federal Obamacare website, and I have to admit that I’m having second thoughts about my initial reaction. Back on October 2, it looked to me like the problems were serious, but nothing all that out of the ordinary for a big software project. My conclusion: “Before long, the sites will all be working pretty well, with only the usual background rumble of small problems. By this time next month, no one will even remember that the first week was kind of rocky or that anyone was initially panicked.”

That might still be the case, and certainly one of the lessons of big software rollouts is that you always reach a point when you’re finally convinced that you really are well and truly doomed—and that’s often the point when things start to get better. Maybe that’s where we are now. But the reporting we’ve seen recently about the nature of the Obamacare problems certainly suggests otherwise. The bugs seem deep and profound. So why has this turned out to be so much worse than I thought it would be?

My guess is that I didn’t take schedule slippage into account. I’ve worked on several projects that seemed disastrous at the time, but part of the disaster was the very fact that everything was late. It simply took much longer to build the product than we thought, so we ended up shipping months after we’d originally planned. Even at that there were still plenty of bugs, but they were mostly tractable. Bad, but tractable.

With Obamacare, however, they weren’t allowed to slip the schedule. They had to ship on October 1. Period. And so now I find myself thinking back to some of those difficult projects. What would have happened if instead of slipping the schedule, I had been forced to ship on the original release date? Answer: the software flatly wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t just have been bad, it would have been an existential catastrophe. And it would have taken many months to fix, not many weeks.

So perhaps that’s where we are with the Obamacare site. I hope not, but it’s sure starting to look that way. And if things really are this bad, I really, really hope there a Plan B. Beefed up phone banks. Paper and pencil. Something.

Alternatively, maybe the reporting on this stuff has now swung around to being too pessimistic. Maybe the biggest problems will get sorted out in the next few weeks and everything will be OK. Stay tuned.

POSTSCRIPT: And while I’m at it, I have to add my voice to all those who are sort of agog over the missed chance on this from Republicans. Under normal circumstances, this stuff would be front-page news, with the Obama administration hunkered down and taking hailstorms of flak from all directions. Instead, the shutdown has sucked all the oxygen out of the room and has even provided a built-in excuse for all the website problems. For a party that has dedicated nearly its entire existence to trashing Obamacare, Republicans sure have scored an own goal here.

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Just How Bad Is the Obamacare Website, Anyway?

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Surprise! Support for Obamacare Is Up Sharply Over the Past Month

by rikkiqlyons Posted on October 10, 2013

Mother Jones

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is just an endless horror show for Republicans. Obama’s approval is up; Republican Party approval is down; confidence in the economic recovery has plummeted thanks to the budget standoff; and voters blame Republicans for the government shutdown by a margin of 53-31. Virtually everyone who’s not a hardcore dittohead blames the GOP. What’s more, 73 percent of the public thinks the shutdown is a serious problem and 31 percent have been personally affected.

But none of that is a big surprise. Here’s something that is: After a week of 24/7 media coverage about the problems with the rollout of Obamacare, its popularity has gone up. It’s still not doing gangbusters or anything, but it’s pretty interesting that an awful lot of people who previously had no opinion are now feeling pretty positive about it. Is this because they or someone they know has actually gone on line and discovered that there are pretty good deals available? I don’t know. But something has changed their minds.

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Surprise! Support for Obamacare Is Up Sharply Over the Past Month

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Obamacare Isn’t the First Program to Have Opening Day Headaches

by Robert Michaels Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s easy to get alarmed about the widely-reported problems with the Obamacare website. People can’t log in; can’t create accounts; and have to endure crashes and software failures once they do finally get on. It’s a mess. And it’s an embarrassing mess.

At the same time, it’s easy to overreact. Today, Stephanie Mencimer reminds us of what it was like during the early days of the Massachusetts program that served as a template for Obamacare:

After the law went into effect in Massachusetts, state offices were totally overwhelmed by the number of people clamoring to sign up for insurance, or what the state’s Medicaid director dubbed the “stress of success.” Lost paperwork, computer glitches, confusion over who was eligible for what, and not enough staff to handle the workload meant that in those early days, consumers could wait several months after submitting an application to finally get coverage….In the first two months, only 18,000 of more than 200,000 potentially eligible people had successfully signed up through the connector, according to Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who helped design the Massachusetts system and served on the Connector board.

….But guess what? Eventually the kinks got worked out and people got covered. Enrollment opened in October 2006, and by the deadline for getting mandatory coverage, July 1, 2007, the Boston Globe reported, 20,000 more people had signed up for insurance on the exchange than the state had expected—12,000 of them in just the two weeks before the deadline. Total enrollment went from 18,000 in December 2006 to 158,000 a year later, says Gruber.

Read the whole thing for more. None of this means that we should be dismissive about the technical problems with the exchanges. At the same time, most of the state programs are already working pretty well, and the federal program is slowly but surely getting better. There’s still plenty of time to sign up; phone banks are accessible in addition to the website; and the navigator program is just starting to get underway. Within a few weeks, things will be working tolerably well and people will begin signing up in large numbers. By January 1, we’ll likely have millions of satisfied customers signed up via the exchanges, and the early hiccups will be forgotten.

And look at the bright side: for all of Obamacare’s problems, it’s already working better than Congress. And unlike Congress, it’s almost certain to get better.

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Obamacare Isn’t the First Program to Have Opening Day Headaches

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Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

by pwbqczv Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a 16-year-old could not get the abortion she wanted because she “was not mature enough to make the decision herself.” The Court’s ability to force the teen, a ward of the state known only as Anonymous 5, to carry her unwanted child to term is a direct result of the state’s 2011 parental consent law that requires minors seeking an abortion to get parental approval.

But Nebraska is not unique: similar rulings could happen in most other states across the country. Laws that mandate parental involvement in teens’ abortions offer anti-choice judges new opportunities to limit abortion access. And while it is unclear whether such parental involvement legislation affects minors’ abortion rates in general, Sharon Camp, former president and CEO of Guttmacher Institute, wrote in an article for RH Reality Check that such mandates can put teens at risk of physical violence or abuse and “result in teens’ delaying abortions until later in pregnancy, when they carry a greater risk of complications and are also more expensive to obtain.” The case of the Nebraska teen also shows that parental involvement legislation overlooks wards of the state, leaving pregnant young adults who have no legal parents at the behest of the court system.

Here’s a map of parental consent laws across the United States:

According to Guttmacher, “only two states and the District of Columbia explicitly allow” all minors to consent to their own abortions. On the other hand, a whopping 39 states require some kind of parental involvement in a minor’s decision to have an abortion.

There are two major types of legislation mandating parental involvement in their child’s decision to have an abortion: Parental consent and parental notification laws. Parental consent laws mandate that a minor who has decided to get an abortion first get the OK from either one or both of her parents (or her legal guardian). Parental notification laws, on the other hand, require that a parent or legal guardian be notified of a child’s decision to get an abortion, either by the minor herself or by her doctor. Eight states, including Nebraska, mandate a notarized statement of consent from a parent before the abortion is performed. And in Arkansas, the Governor recently signed a law making it a crime to assist a minor in obtaining an abortion without her parent’s consent, “even if the abortion was performed in a state where parental consent is not required.”

Almost all states with parental involvement laws include some exceptions to the rules. Many states allow exceptions in medical emergencies or in cases of abuse, assault, incest, or neglect. Only a handful of states extend their consent or notification laws to other adult relatives, like grandparents.

But one exception in particular has increased the role of the courts in the personal decision-making of teens. As a result of a Supreme Court ruling that parents cannot have complete veto power in determining whether their child gets an abortion, almost all states offer a “judicial bypass” to their parental involvement laws. The bypass allows minors to go to the courts to waive their state’s involvement laws; but in effect moves the power to veto a teen’s abortion from her family to the courts.

And here is where the Nebraska case comes in. In this case, the biological parents of Anonymous 5 had previously been stripped of their legal parental rights after physically abusing their daughter and, as a result, the pregnant teen had no legal parents and was instead a ward of the state. With no parent to consent to her abortion, she was forced to ask permission from the courts, who then denied her request, essentially finding her mature enough to carry a baby she doesn’t want but too immature to consent to her own abortion. Instead of offering an alternative to parental consent, the courts serve as just another barrier between teens—especially wards of the state—and access to safe abortion services.

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Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

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Jon Stewart Roasts Kathleen Sebelius, Calls Her a Liar

by qdj9iiiej Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

From First Read:

If you’re a Democrat and you’ve lost Jon Stewart, you have a problem. And that’s exactly what happened when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius went on the “Daily Show” last night to talk about the glitches with the Obamacare website. “As the secretary sat down to begin the segment, Stewart opened a laptop on his desk. ‘I’m going to attempt to download every movie ever made, and you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first’”….We said it yesterday and we’ll say it again: The last thing you ever thought would happen is that Team Obama would have a website issue. These were the folks who pioneered how campaigns interact with voters over the internet.

Obamacare’s website issues are obviously serious, but at the same time: give me a break, folks. I’m pretty sure the First Read team is well aware that Obama wasn’t allowed to just call up his favorite web guru and tell him to get the old campaign team together and set up the Obamacare site. It had to go through the usual government procurement and bidding process, and was designed and created by whichever outside consultants won the job.

The NBC news team knows this, right? So why do they act like they don’t?

As for Stewart, I’m not sure what to say. I watched his interview last night, and I thought Stewart was easily as big a problem as Sebelius. He decided to ask about the conservative talking point that it’s unfair to delay the empoyer mandate while leaving the individual mandate in place, and Sebelius clearly tap danced a bit. But the big problem, as near as I can tell, is that Stewart was his usual unprepared self for this interview. Frankly, I couldn’t tell throughout the interview if he even understood what the employer mandate was. This happens all the time, usually with conservatives knocking Stewart around because they know what they’re talking about and he doesn’t. This time it happened to be a liberal, but the result was the same: an incoherent interview in which he couldn’t drive home his point because he wasn’t really sure what his point was.

Following the interview, he made a gag about still not understanding what was going on, and then suggested that maybe Sebelius had been lying. That was really beneath him. Sebelius didn’t do a great job of answering the question, but I sure didn’t catch her in any lies. She basically told him that the employer mandate applied only to businesses with more than 50 employees (true); that most of these businesses already offer their employees health coverage (true); and that the number of people affected by the delay of the employer mandate was pretty small (true). RAND estimates that the delay will affect 1,000 firms and 300,000 people, about 0.2 percent of the population.

Now, is delaying the mandate fair? That’s hardly a question with a factual answer, so I’m not sure what kind of reply Stewart expected to get in the first place. This was just another example of Stewart on his high horse again, and it’s always been his least attractive persona, regardless of whether it’s prompted by liberal or conservative outrage. Sebelius obviously tried to put the best face on the Obamacare rollout, just as all politicians do, but she didn’t lie.

POSTSCRIPT: And why was the employer mandate delayed? The truth is that we’ve never gotten a definitive explanation. The basic answer is that the regulatory requirements turned out to be more complex than anticipated. The deeper answer is roughly the one that Sebelius gave: it was possible to grant the delay because the effect was tiny and didn’t affect anything fundamental about Obamacare. Conversely, the individual mandate isn’t especially complex and does fundamentally affect Obamacare. It can’t be delayed without doing serious damage to the entire law. This answer might or might not be satisfying, but it’s roughly the truth.

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Jon Stewart Roasts Kathleen Sebelius, Calls Her a Liar

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