Obamacare woes widen as insurers get wrong data -- MarketWatch

[bsteadman]

Obamacare woes widen as insurers get wrong data

MarketWatch
Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky
Timothy W. Martin and Joel Schectman contributed to this article.
10/18/2013

Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further than the website traffic and software issues already identified.

Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans.

The flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage.

“The longer this takes to resolve . . . the harder it will be to get people to [come back and] sign up,” said Aetna Inc. AET -0.02% Chief Executive Mark Bertolini. “It’s not off to a great start,” he said, though he believes the marketplaces are “here to stay.”

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http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oba...ata-2013-10-18

Read the full report at WSJ.com - http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...42141827109638

[bsteadman]

Obamacare troubleshooters faint from exhaustion

Website plagued with copyright violation, old technology, sky-high costs

WND
Chelsea Schilling
10/17/2013

Excerpt:

President Obama and the Democrats may have won the fight to keep Obamacare funding intact, but the president’s signature health-care takeover is self-destructing as even Healthcare.gov contractors say they are falling ill and “fainting in conference calls” because they can’t keep up with demand to fix the program’s glitches.

News of Obamacare’s imploding launch went from bad to worse Thursday:

• Soaring cost: The cost of the Healthcare.gov online insurance website soared from $93.7 million to $292 million since April as the Obama administration began pouring money into the project following concerns it was in trouble. According to Reuters, “Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the lead Obamacare agency, said at an insurance-industry meeting that he was ‘pretty nervous’ about the exchanges being ready by October 1, adding, ‘let’s just make sure it’s not a Third-World experience.’” Now the House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the technical problems and contractors who received hundreds of millions of dollars to create it.
• Copyright violation: The Obamacare website has reportedly violated licensing agreements for copyrighted software. The website failed to comply with the user agreement when it removed copyright notices from the software. The company says it will pursue action against the Department of Health and Human Services.
• Minimal testing: The site wasn’t even tested until less than a week before its launch. A person with direct knowledge of the procedures told the Washington Examiner, “Normally a system this size would need 4-6 months of testing and performance tuning, not 4-6 days.”
• Old technology: Technology experts are reporting that the federal exchange was built with “10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system.”
• Nancy Pelosi complains: The glitches have become so bad, even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi – who personally pushed Obamacare through the House when she was speaker – said the system “has to be improved,” though she claims the problems are due to overwhelming traffic. Pelosi added, “I hope that we would have some answers soon and that the answer would be: OK, we’ve found the glitch or whatever it is, it’s been corrected and here’s a demonstration of how people, when they approach it now, will be received.”
• No accountability: White House press Secretary Jay Carney tried to distance the president’s signature legislation from the troubled website, arguing, “It’s important to remember the website alone is not the Affordable Care Act.” But Carney refused to answer whether anyone would be held accountable for the botched roll-out.
• Designers distance themselves: Now even the designers who helped create Healthcare.gov have erased all references to their Obamacare-related work from their firm’s website.
• Contractors fainting: And Healthcare.gov contractors claim they’ve been working themselves sick trying to fix the glitches. “There’s a lot of frustration,” a staffer said. “People are getting sick, fainting in conference calls.”
• Navigators frustrated: Other community organizations and nonprofit groups that had been hired to help millions of Americans sign up for Obamacare are now expressing frustration over the enrollment process. (Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN, is now participating in the Obamacare “navigator” drive.)
• Tremendously low enrollment: Three weeks after the website’s launch, enrollment numbers remain very low. Washington state has only enrolled .36 percent of its population. Only .25 percent of Californians have started applications. Only .08 percent of Nevada’s population has created an account. Just .3 percent of Kentucky’s estimated population has purportedly enrolled. While 28,000 applications were submitted by Kentucky residents, page views were said to have exceeded 5.5 million. About 100,000 New Yorkers were said to have “qualified” for health insurance. Only .22 percent of Minnesota’s population has applied for coverage, but one-third of that number is said to have enrolled. Millard Brown Digital, reporting that fewer than 1 percent of the people trying to enroll in Obamacare had completed the enrollment process in the first week, released the following chart:
• Americans losing insurance: Also Thursday, Americans began tweeting their anger and surprise over insurance cancellations and the higher premiums they will be forced to pay under Obamacare.
• Sebelius won’t resign: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will not resign over the disastrous Obamacare website roll-out despite numerous calls for her to be fired, her brother says, adding, “You don’t resign in the middle of a fight.” Sebelius’ sister told the New York Times, “The White House is smart enough to know that if she steps aside or they ask her to resign, they will never get anybody else confirmed. Plus, I don’t think they hold her responsible.”
• Sticker shock: The Heritage Foundation released the following chart showing that insurance on health exchanges will cost more than existing insurance:

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http://www.wnd.com/2013/10/obamacare...om-exhaustion/

[bsteadman]

Is Healthcare.gov Designed To Register Dem Voters?

IBD
10/17/2013

Excerpt:

Corruption: The crash-prone government health-care site asks applicants if they want to register to vote as they try to sign up for ObamaCare. By sheer coincidence, a plurality of the uninsured are likely Democratic voters.

Call it Motor Voter on steroids — the piggybacking of voter registration to an otherwise unrelated government function.

Those trying to navigate Healthcare.gov, a website that looks and functions as if designed by the department of motor vehicles, are being asked if they want to register to vote just in time for crucial 2014 midterm elections that are likely to be a referendum on ObamaCare.

Indeed, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Brian Cook cites the Motor Voter law, also known as the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, as justification.

The law, he said, "requires states to offer voter registration (at) all offices that provide 'public assistance' (including Medicaid applications). Because people applying on Healthcare.gov could be eligible for either Medicaid or Marketplace coverage, we will be providing info on voter registration to people who request it."

It perhaps has not escaped the attention of an administration that used another government agency, the IRS, to harass and intimidate potential political opponents in the Tea Party and other conservative groups that the uninsured are a potential treasure trove of Democratic voters, according to an August 2012 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

It found that uninsured Americans supported Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney more than 2-to-1 (62% to 27%).

"The (website) launch has not gone well," observed Nick Novak, a spokesman for the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, who noticed the voter-registration question on the Wisconsin site. "Why are they cluttering up the site?"

And why, he further wondered, weren't applicants asked to register to vote only after they successfully signed up for ObamaCare?
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