Category Archives: Health care

“Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” –Henry Chao, HHS, of the ObamaCare Federal Exchange

“Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” –Henry Chao, HHS, of the ObamaCare Federal Exchange

UPDATE “Credit Reporting Agency Hired to Verify Incomes for Insurance Subsidies” — and lambert scooped the world at Naked Capitalism. The Times, 2013-07-17…

Will the state Exchanges launch on time? Even if the Exchanges (now also called “marketplaces”) will only cover 7 million of the 56 million uninsured in 2014, this answer to this question is still important to some; and the political fortunes of the Democratic nomenklatura are not necessarily their first concern.

Katiebird writes:

[T]his implementation issue is not a trivial thing. Many, many, many people are counting on it. They expect to have access to health insurance and for that health insurance to give them access to actual health care. I repeat: This is not trivial. It is not a game.

In Part I, we looked at the first Google hangout organized by HHS, with Julie Bataille, Director of CMS’ Office of Communications, and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Executive Director/CEO and Co-Founder of MomsRising, at #HCgovHangout. We concluded, after categorizing and color coding the twitter stream, that the event was a public relations debacle. Today, we’re going to color code the transcript, helpfully provided, on virtually no notice, by the transcriber: Bataille and Rowe-Finkbeiner in their own words. Let’s break out our color-coding Magic Markers…..

By lambert strether of Corrente

On Tuesday, Pravda informed us that the White House was “ramping up” its efforts to market ObamaCare, and that among those efforts would be “a Google hangout Wednesday to promote its enrollment Web site,” www.healthcare.gov [sic*]. Some of us also received a mail blast giving the event details, and inviting us to submit questions via twitter to #HCgovHangout. Needless to say, many of us noted the date and submitted questions, and when the time came, we were not disappointed…. I grabbed the live stream off Google[‘s proprietary site]; here it is:

By lambert strether of Corrente. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow As ObamaCare inches painfully closer to its October 1 launch date, we’re getting more and more detail on how the exchanges (or “marketplaces”) will actually work. By design, ObamaCare doesn’t treat health care as a right, […]

By lambert strether of Corrente.

And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

When talking about ObamaCare, single payer advocates sometimes hear “But the ACA helped me,” or “the ACA helped my sister,” and so on. Of course, a program as large as ObamaCare is bound to help somebody; it’s just that single payer advocates want everybody to be helped in the same way that you or your sister were. And that’s the problem with ObamaCare: It doesn’t treat health care as a basic human right that should be guaranteed for all. Instead, ObamaCare uses a complex and intricate Rube Goldberg-esque system of eligibility rules to throw people into various buckets by past (and projected) income, age, existing insurance coverage, jurisdiction, family structure, and market segment. In a system so complex, people will inevitably be thrown into the wrong buckets, or land between buckets, because their personal circumstances don’t mesh well with the Rube Goldberg device.* Some citizens get lucky, and go to Happyville; others, unlucky, end up in Pain City. The lucky are first-class citizens; and the unlucky, second class. In an earlier post, I gave three examples of the whimsical and arbitrary distinctions that ObamaCare makes between citizens who should be treated equally; in this post, I’d like to give three more.

By lambert strether of Corrente. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow One of the things I hate most about ObamaCare is the vicious and relentless way that it creates first- and second-class citizens. ObamaCare does this by construction, of course: ObamaCare’s central concept of eligibility — the […]

By lambert strether. Originally published at Corrente.

Rahm’s little brother Zeke has an Opinion piece in the Journal on ObamaCare. First, the state of play on the health insurance exchanges:

In this post I’m continuing the analysis of the final version of the basic application for ObamaCare that I began here. I’m going to look at how ObamaCare “nudges” citizens consumers into “opting” to renew their eligibility automatically for five years, instead of fewer years, or not at all.

By lambert strether of Corrente. Originally published at Corrente.

It looks like young Ezra (and, to be fair, everybody else) missed a major policy change in Obama’s shift to the new, shorter (for individuals*), final version of the basic application for ObamaCare.** As it turns out, the issue (or at least one of the issues; gawd knows what other time bombs are buried in the thing) wasn’t only the length and complexity of the form, though that was and is bad enough; the issue is the actual content of the form. Here’s what I’m talking about. It’s right in plain sight. I’m using a screen dump of the new, shorter, finalized form from Ezra’s article:

By lambert strether of Corrente.

Here’s another color-coded annotation of an Obama transcript (via Kaiser), this one from his news conference right after Senator Max Baucus warned that ObamaCare would be “a huge train wreck”. The contrast between Obama working from a prepared text (Inaugural, 2013; Hamilton Project, 2006) and Obama improvising at the podium is quite remarkable; we see no intricate verbal patterning at all.

Whereas the prepared texts are bright with color coding, Obama’s health care presser — and I know this will come as a shock to you — codes as equivocation (with one neoliberal code word, “market,” a little nonsense, and few lies). No secular religion or flights of populism whatever. Nevertheless, for all its banality and woodenness, the presser contains some remarkable passages.