The Glade 4.0

From USA Today:

Congress defined “affordable” as 9.5% or less of an employee’s household income, mostly to make sure people did not leave their workplace plans for subsidized coverage through the exchanges. But the “error” was that it only applies to the employee — and not his or her family. So, if an employer offers a woman affordable insurance, but doesn’t provide it for her family, they cannot get subsidized help through the state health exchanges.

That can make a huge difference; the Kaiser Family Foundation said an average plan for an individual is about $5,600, but it goes up to $15,700 for families. Most employers help out with those costs, but not all.

“We saw this two-and-a-half years ago and thought, ‘Has anyone else noticed this?’” said Kosali Simon, a professor of public affairs at Indiana University who specializes in health economics. “Everyone said, ‘No, no. You must be wrong.’ But we weren’t, and that’s going to leave a lot of people out.”

It’s almost as if no one carefully read the bill that was passed. After all, this is hardly the only instance in which the text of the statute does something different than what the supporters had hoped.

If I'm understanding it correctly, they can't opt out and use the Gov't offering if the employer offers "affordable" (9.5%) plans. The rule was intentional, the consequences aren't.

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

Mandatory insurance from a private company scares me more than anything. Once you have that in play, they can just start sociopathically refusing to pay any valid claim where cost of claim > chance you'll sue * chance you'll win * amount you'll get on a win. Car insurance companies already do this. When you're required to buy their product, they don't have to care about their reputation.

Got any actual evidence for this?

That said, I don't disagree with one of the core premises: mandatory purchase of private goods is "scary." And by scary, I mean retarded and antagonistic to liberty.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

Has anyone seen someone run the numbers on the cost per person when you add in the taxation? I keep seeing the out-of-pocket unsubsidized price but no one is telling me how much more in taxes this is per person to arrive at a true cost.

Obamacare exchange leaks data of 2,400 unsuspecting customers

8:59 PM 09/14/2013


An employee of Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, MNsure, sent an unencrypted file to the wrong person and left 2,400 people’s private information at the mercy of a nearby insurance agent.

One exchange staffer’s simple mistake gave insurance broker Jim Koester access to an Excel document of Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other personal data for whole a list of insurance agents. Luckily for the 2,400, Koester was cooperative — and unnerved.

“The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” Koester told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”

While MNsure officials called Koester and ensured the data was deleted from the insurance company’s hard drives, such an easy breach of confidentiality before the Obamacare exchanges have even gone live heighten the security concerns many have already raised about the law.

Obamacare’s Federal Services Data Hub has received heavy criticism for insufficient security and delayed testing. The data hub will centralize and route private information of every Obamacare participant through an endless list of federal and state agencies and related businesses, but lawmakers are worried about privacy as the deadline approaches.

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Pat Meehan, who has been leading the charge to delay the data hub, criticized the security breach. “Obamacare’s data hub hasn’t even gone live yet, and already there are massive data breaches,” Meehan said in statement. “What more has to happen to convince this administration that the data hub is not ready for prime time?”

Obamacare exchange officials aren’t the only agents that will have access to private consumer data in the data hub. Along with any federal or state officials working with Obamacare, program “navigators” will have access to consumer information in order to help them make decisions about what insurance plan is the right choice.

Navigators will only receive 20 hours of training before having access to consumer data, a policy which turned heads at a tense congressional hearing. Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry pointed out, “It takes 1,250 hours to become a barber in Pennsylvania, but to navigate insurance, these folks are going to be advising us with 20 hours?”

The data sent in the Minnesota email did not have any increased cybersecurity efforts attached to it. “The gorilla in the room is that they sent me something that’s not even encrypted. It’s unsecured, on an Excel spreadsheet,” Koester told reporters. “They’ve got to realize they have a huge problem.”

The completion date for cybersecurity testing on the data hub has been delayed until September 30, the day before Obamacare exchanges open for business.

MNsure issued a statement maintaining that “MNsure has a data privacy policy in place, and this employee’s action was a violation of this policy.”

But Meehan was not convinced. “It’s time to delay the data hub, now,” the congressman concluded.


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Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/14/obama ... z2gZa2b6ox

We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.

The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose. The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the “single digits,” according to the Washington Post.

We, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

The reason for this nationwide headache apparently stems from poorly written code, which buckled under the heavy influx of traffic that its engineers and administrators should have seen coming. But the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

The exact cost to build Healthcare.gov, according to U.S. government records, appears to have been $634,320,919, which we paid to a company you probably never heard of: CGI Federal. The company originally won the contract back in 2011, but at that time, the cost was expected to run “up to” $93.7 million – still a chunk of change, but nothing near where it ended up.

Given the complicated nature of federal contracts, it’s difficult to make a direct comparison between the cost to develop Healthcare.gov and the amount of money spent building private online businesses. But for the sake of putting the monstrous amount of money into perspective, here are a few figures to chew on: Facebook, which received its first investment in June 2004, operated for a full six years before surpassing the $600 million mark in June 2010. Twitter, created in 2006, managed to get by with only $360.17 million in total funding until a $400 million boost in 2011. Instagram ginned up just $57.5 million in funding before Facebook bought it for (a staggering) $1 billion last year. And LinkedIn and Spotify, meanwhile, have only raised, respectively, $200 million and $288 million.

Government has a long history of spending money unnecessarily. But in an age when the U.S is home to the world’s largest, most successful Internet companies, how is it possible that we can’t even manage to build a functional website without blowing through hundreds of millions of dollars?

The best answer I’ve found comes from the Department of Better Technology, a private company that builds software for governments – a competitor, in other words, to CGI Federal, which specializes in building software solutions for major industry sectors including defense, energy and environment, financial and, of course, healthcare. Still, biased though it may be, the argument makes a lot of sense.

As one of the company’s authors wrote in a recent blog post, the failure of Healthcare.gov isn’t because the people in our government are inept mouth-breathers who regard the work as a meaningless burden, but because the factors that play into which companies receive government contracts, a process called “procurement,” are fundamentally broken.

“Contracting officers – people inside of the government in charge of selecting who gets to do what work – are afraid of their buys being contested by people who didn’t get selected,” writes the author. “They’re also afraid of things going wrong down the line inside of a procurement, so they select vendors with a lot of ‘federal experience’ to do the work.”

When things still go wrong, they simply throw ‘more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem.’ And when things still go wrong, they simply throw “more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem.” Considering the frustrating bunch we have in Congress at the moment, this assessment seems particularly believable.

Unlike some Americans, I actually want the Obamacare exchanges to succeed. I’ve given the state-specific options a try (there are 15 of them, including Washington D.C.’s) and they seem to greatly simplify the process of buying healthcare. And the rates do appear to come in far lower than what many people without health insurance from an employer have had to bear until now. It’s not government-run healthcare. There are no death panels. And, from what I can tell, the world will not end if more people have health insurance – quite the opposite, in fact.

What I cannot stand is a nation that has vast technological resources in its citizenry spending $600 million of our collective money to slap together a product that, thus far, has only managed to waste people’s precious minutes. So the next time our government comes up with any bright idea that relies upon a massive website, let’s all be sure to ask how they plan to build it. Because the standard operating procedure at the moment is just plain sick.


Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/ob ... z2hJv2KWaH

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

You were given a bad Bill of Sale; he lied to you; he manipulated you; and he played you.

Look ...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the largest single tax increase in human history. It provides exactly 0 measurable health benefit to ANYONE in this nation. 0. The intent was never to cover anyone. The non-compliance fine/fee is now a tax. Starting January 2014, it will be $45 a month, not the original $250 annually. That $45 will be issued as a garnishment on your paycheck and withholding. In 2015, that $45 a month changes to 2.5% of your Adjustable Gross Income. In 2017, when Obama is conveniently out of office, it will jump to the affordability cap of 9.5% of your AGI.

I don't know who here still supports it or Barack Obama, but I know you posters are out there.

You were given a bad Bill of Sale; he lied to you; he manipulated you; and he played you.

This bill decreases access to healthcare. This bill decreases the availability of healthcare. And this bill taxes you for the privilege of subsidizing people who were already better covered under previous laws and requirements.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

It helps no one in any way, shape, or form, Xequecal. No one. The underemployed cannot afford the exchange plans; they're a minimum of 175% pre-reform costs nationwide. Colorado is literally the only state where coverage costs remained "flat". They went up in all 50 states and the Exchange plans are stupidly expensive. One of my assistants makes $34,000 a year. The exchange plan to cover HER is $300 a month, north of the 9.5%. However, she's now got additional $2400.00 in taxable income a year, because her previous $200/mo for her family of 4 was pre-tax. That went away 2 weeks ago. She's one of those people you're talking about ...

Your $130 a month was $1660 dollars in come that was not considered taxable in 2010. Under Obamacare, your employer simply has to provide a policy that meets the 9.5% AGI calculation, but loses it pre-tax sheltering, because any policy that expensive is a cadillac policy. Oh wait, that's right ...

Your $130 a month was probably 30% of the $433 total premium cost since your Employer was certainly kicking in some cash to self-fund. So ...

Hmmms, you'd lose a whole lot of tax sheltered income that likely exceeded your 9.5% AGI Cap.

Wouldn't have helped you one bit, Xeq.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

Xequecal:

Because that $992 is only for her. The other $2600 a year is now what she has to pay to cover her family, whereas before, she covered her entire family for $1400 a year (and that $1400 included herself).

Xequecal:

Because that $992 is only for her. The other $2600 a year is now what she has to pay to cover her family, whereas before, she covered her entire family for $1400 a year (and that $1400 included herself).