Tag Archives: health care

What Personal Data? It’s Government’s Data

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And we don’t care about its security.

Security experts worried that 35 state health exchange websites were vulnerable to hackers and were rated as “high risk” for security problems before ObamaCare’s launch….

Fears that the health law’s websites could put consumers at risk have plagued the program’s rollout from the beginning, but the administration told The Associated Press that the documents offer only a partial and “outdated” snapshot of an improving situation.

Never mind that “improving” now doesn’t alter the fact that the security failures existed at the time of the rollout.  And HHS rolled out their ObamaMart, anyway.  For example:

In order to connect to Federal computers, state and other outside systems must undergo a security review and receive an “authority to connect.”

With [Obamacare], states needed approval to connect to a new Federal data hub, an electronic back room that pings Social Security, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security to verify personal details….  The hub handles sensitive information, including income, immigration status and Social Security numbers.

[In an] email from Sept 29, a Sunday two days before the launch, Teresa Fryer, chief information security officer for the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote of the state security approvals, “The front office is signing them whether or not they are a high risk.”

…CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner approved nine states to connect although the approval document noted that “CMS views the October 1 connections to the nine states as a risk due to the fact that their documentation may not be submitted completely nor reviewed…by Oct. 1.”

The Obama view of citizens’ personal security: “Hey, we got away with it; nothing bad happened.  We think.  It’s all good.”

Annals of Obamacare Lies

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is spouting more of them.  And with a straight face, too; it’s like she actually believes what she’s saying.  Which would be even worse.

There is absolutely no evidence and every economist will tell you this, that there is any job loss related to the Affordable Care Act.

Leaving aside the well-documented instances of reduced hours, delayed (or canceled) hiring, canceled plant expansions, and so on that are occurring as a direct result of Obamacare, Sebelius is having a negative impact on jobs with her own Departmental edicts.  She’s already ordered, for instance, the Obamacare-maximum allowed cuts to funding for home health care services.

The cuts were deep enough that officials offered a damaging prediction of the impact saying, it was estimated that approximately 40% of providers would have negative margins.

In fact, those cuts put in jeopardy 498,000 jobs of home health care workers who work just for that 40% of firms that will be forced into the red—the kind of home health workers who allow Yvonne Wightman, 98, to avoid expensive hospital or nursing home stays by getting care at home.

But it’s all good: now Ms Wightman has that lowered-cost Obamacare Plan to cover those stays.  Oh, wait….

“Pass the Bill…”

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“…in order to see what’s in it….”

Here’s another of those tidbits that’s in it that Pelosi and her gang chose not to know about before passing Obamacare:

Tucked deep in the Affordable Care Act is language requiring all restaurants with at least 20 locations to list nutritional information alongside each and every item on their menu.

Sit-down restaurant chains, with their menus now required to be cluttered with “nutrition” information instead of letting their patrons see a readable menu—because Big Government knows better—are also faced, unfortunately, with a rapid-fire alteration of their menus as this “nutrition” information gets frequently “updated:” recall how rapidly the USDA’s food pyramid has been changing over the last several years.

Those places have it easy, though.  Consider the walk-/drive-in places, like hamburger joints and pizza houses, where the customer gets to mix and match from among “each and every item” to form a custom meal to buy.  As Peter Doocy put it at the above link:

Take Domino’s.  There are 34 million different pizza combinations available at the chain, when all crusts and cheeses and toppings are factored in.

Now imagine walking into a Domino’s and navigating a menu board with 34 million different options on it.

And in Domino’s case (and most pizza houses, come to that),

90% of their business comes in over the phone or online.  And none of those people ever set foot in the store, where the menu board would be.

Think about the advertising brochures Domino’s might have to send out to potential callers that included this information.  Think about how many pages on their Web site would be needed to carry this information.

Think about an utterly mendacious law that needs to be repealed, even if its replacement is the status quo ante.

Another Obamacare Health Plan

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Senators Mark Begich (D, AK), whose reelection race this fall is in real trouble, and Mark Warner (D, VA), whose reelection race is much tighter than it should be, are pushing a new Health Plan for Obamacare.

…individuals and small businesses can buy so-called copper plans.  The plans likely would have lower premiums, but purchasers would pay more of their ordinary health costs upfront.

Copper plans would cover, on average, 50% of medical costs, and while consumers’ out-of-pocket expenses would still be capped, that limit likely would be higher than the $6,350 maximum for individuals and $12,700 for families currently set by the law.

What’s the value of a health plan that requires extensive costs to be paid up front by the sick person before the plan starts covering—just a part of—those costs?

Even the CMS is having trouble seeing the sense of this.

A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says there is not much more to say beyond what Jay Angoff, head of the Department of Health and Human Services office, told the WSJ about the plan: “I’m not sure that requiring people who have insurance to nevertheless pay for 50% of their costs themselves can reasonably be defined as decent coverage.”

I’m not sure, either.

Here Come the Insurance Company Bailouts

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Humana is taking point on this one.  This from Dr Scott Gottlieb at AEIdeas:

Humana announced that it expects to tap the three risk adjustment mechanisms in Obamacare for between $250 and $450 million in 2014.  This amounts to about 25% of the insurer’s expected exchange revenue.  This money is needed to offset losses that the insurer will take as a result of slower enrollment in its Obamacare plans, and a skewed risk pool that weighs more heavily toward older and less healthy members than it originally budgeted.

And

More than half of the money will come from the $25 billion reinsurance pool that Obamacare provides (collected through a tax on employer-sponsored health plans). The other half will come mostly from the risk corridors.

Of course, President Barack Obama was counting on the “migration” of folks in the private health insurance market to the plans pushed through ObamaMart.  However, as Humana is experiencing, and as other health plan providers (I hesitate to call them insurers, anymore) are discovering, that “migration” isn’t happening, and those that are buying have the wrong demographics for the law’s operation.

We know, though, that the “migration” was intended to be a forced migration, because during the 2010 Obamacare summit which our President hosted in the run-up to its party-line passage, he told [especially the first 30 seconds] then-Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R, VA) that “8 to 9 million people…might have to change their coverage….”

And those that are “changing” still aren’t responding in the Obamacare-required demographic breakdown.

Hence bailouts.  Unless we get serious in the upcoming primaries and the fall elections.