Montreal-based CGI Group Inc, the company that received a $74 million contract to develop and maintain the Hawaii Health Connector web portal, will be awarded another year-long state maintenance contract despite the ongoing problems with the site.
The money comes from a $204 million federal contract the state received in 2012 to set up the Obamacare network in the islands.
This is the same crowd that had so much fun with the ObamaMart failure in 2013.
Hmm….
If you liked your doctor, you could keep your doctor. Maybe. If you were lucky, and your Obamacare Plan still had him on its cut-rate, cut-service list of acceptable (to the government) doctors.
Or, if you like the hospital that now employs him (which doesn’t guarantee you get to see him; the hospital will make that decision). After all, the government’s Obamacare
architects believe that doctors, to better bear financial risk, need to be part of larger, and presumably better-capitalized institutions.
Because, of course, these Progressive Democrats know better than doctors how to provide medical care, know better than you stupid voters how to choose doctors, and know better than either of you how to conduct the business side of any doctor-patient relationship.
In addition to that bit of Gruber-esque dishonesty and dark transparency, Scott Gottlieb, at the above link pointed out this consequence:
Local competition between providers, who vie to contract with health plans, is largely eliminated by these consolidated health systems. Since all health care is local, the lack of competition will soon make it much harder to implement a market-based alternative to ObamaCare. The resulting medical monopolies will make more regulation the most obvious solution to the inevitable cost and quality problems.
This is not at all an unintended consequence. Aside from Democrat disdain for free markets and competition, it’s long been an open goal of the Democratic Party to move our health coverage and our health provision industries into a one, linked, single-payer program—carefully run by government for our benefit, of course.
Start queueing up things to be remembered in 2016: the Democratic Party needs to be swept into history’s dustbin so this damage, among all of their other damage to our country’s weal and global standing, can be repaired.
The sweeping also should be presented as a warning to the Republican Party.
…aspirin, and call your doctor in the morning. If you can find one.
Actually, this Take Two is an Obamacare second year look. I went to healthcare.gov to see what was what, after I’d done a couple of comparisons last year.
The good news is that the Web site works much more smoothly now. The bad news is that the Web site works much more smoothly now.
Taking advantage of that smoothness, I looked at some Gold plans offered in my area. As before, I selected Gold because that coverage comes closest to what I get through my wife’s employer. The failures of these plans still exist: coverages I don’t want and don’t need are forced on me (I told my doctor at my last annual that I wanted my IUD. I was paying for it, and I wanted what I was paying for. I told her that it didn’t matter where she stuck it, it was likely to fail, and I’d be back in a couple of weeks for a replacement. She chuckled over that.)
Every Gold plan offered—all seven of them—had premiums plus deductible plus out-of-pocket caps totaling in the neighborhood of $17k per year. Every year. I’d pay all of premiums and deductibles before any plan paid a single penny of my expenses, and I’d still have those caps. Certainly, that’s down from last year’s nearly 27 stacks, but still…. Those costs also are for only one person, even though I’d told ObamaMart that I was looking for coverage for two.
I can’t get a Catastrophic plan in my area anymore. Recall that last year, I could get one that—after premiums plus deductible plus out-of-pocket caps—would generously pay 60% of my costs. No more.
I looked at the down-rated Silver plans, too; there are 11 offered in my area now. Total costs ran from $19k to $23k. For coverage of one person.
There are 7 Bronze plans for me; these cost in the neighborhood of $20k. ‘Course, the folks buying these are likely to be subsidized, so they won’t be paying those 20 stacks. You and I will. In addition to the $17k-$23k (depending on our plan) we’ll pay for our own coverage.
It just doesn’t get any better than this. At least while Obamacare is in the way.
That’s the title of a Jim Angle article on Fox News.com. RTWT, but what interests me are a couple of comments he quoted in his piece.
The first comment is this one, by John Goodman, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute:
[I]if you repeal it, you’re going to have to replace it with something. And repeal and replace is just another way of saying we’re going to change ObamaCare into something different and better.
Of course. Free market solutions would work. “Change Obamacare” into…? Sure, if keeping the name proves tactically sound, that’s fine. Calling white black in order to get the black replaced with something better may be politically necessary, but it still won’t be black anymore. I’d prefer a better collection of names for the collection of smaller policies (rather than one large policy) that should replace this monstrosity, but that can come later.
Then there’s this bigger bit of nonsense from Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center:
[Y]ou need to not only say you’re against the ACA…, but you’re going to need to have a replacement plan to show people you have a better way of providing people with health insurance coverage.
That’s partly right. The upcoming Republican Congress does need to have a replacement plan. However, it’s not government’s job to “provid[e] people with health insurance coverage.” It’s the job of the market place and the private citizens interacting in it to provide people with the coverage they want—including no coverage at all. Government has no role in this whatsoever beyond its role of ensuring an honest market place.
A couple days ago, one of Obamacare’s primary architects, Jonathan Gruber, said this about the need for the tactics used in order to get the thing passed.
This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed…. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.
Despicable as that is, though, what really bothers me are two other things.
In a subsequent interview with MSNBC‘s Ronan Farrow, Gruber had this exchange with Farrow regarding those remarks:
“Do you stand by the comments in that video?,” MSNBC host Ronan Farrow asked Gruber, referring to a video of Gruber explaining how a lack of transparency helped Obamacare pass into law.
“The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”
Notice that: Gruber regrets the remarks, but he does not at all regret the underlying principle he espoused. He stands by his claim that Americans are too stupid to understand the issues at hand, and he stands by his claim that it’s entirely appropriate to lie to us in order to get his way.
The other thing that bothers me is the lack of senior Democratic Party officials’ repudiation of Gruber’s underlying principle. I’ve not seen even any rank and file Democrat repudiating it. Apparently, this is a principle of the Democratic Party at large—we’re dumb, and it’s OK to lie to us to get past the impediment to their policy enactment that our dumbness presents.