Michael Olenick: Consumer Reports Joins Obama in Telling Obamacare Big Lies
After months of analysis I can objectively conclude that Obamacare is, to ordinary middle-class people, worse than worthless.
Read more...Category Archives: Health care
Obamacare’s Drug Coverage Minefield
Now that the consumer front end of Healthcare.gov seems to be under control (the insurer interface is another matter), public attention is now shifting to the ultimately more important question of what benefits patients receive, and at what cost.
Read more...Obama Kept His Head in the Sand During Healthcare.gov Fiasco
The New York Times has an instructive account, Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama, of the scrambling in the Administration to deal with the beyond-redeption-by-the-power-of-spin disaster of the Healthcare.gov launch.
Read more...Krugman, on ObamaCare, Gets the Wrong Worm
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Krugman’s latest — “The Obamacare Worm Turns” — is homer-esque even by the tribal Democrat standards of “Conscience of a Liberal.” But sadly, Krugman’s got the wrong worm. Let me explain. I can best do this in the form of a table:
Read more...ObamaCare, TINA, Medical Ethics, and the Health Care Economist
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
I probably shouldn’t even tangle with David Cutler; he’s from Harvard, and he’s wicked smart. Anyhow. Also too, he advised the 2008 Obama Campaign on health care. But there were some things he said in this recent interview with PBS (and in his now famous 2010 letter to Larry Summers) that really ticked me off, and so I want to lay down a few markers. First, let’s look at two charts:
Read more...Bob Goodwin: Software Engineering in Crisis – Healthcare.gov is Just the Dead Canary
It has been a good generation to be involved with software. The scarcity of the skillset combined with the demand for the output have generated outsized incomes, while the work has been consistently rewarding. Our quirky group of builders has had an outsized influence on our industries, not to mention our culture and ideals. But that influence is looking less benign as the rigid procedures of computing are changing commercial relationships and the application of the law.
Read more...Michael Olenick: Obamacare Pits the 50% Against the 49%
Buried on CNN’s website is a story about an early Obamacare success…
Read more...Another Lurking Obamacare Problem: Balance Billing
One of the proofs that Obamacare is really about helping insurers and Big Pharma rather than ordinary Americans is its failure to do much about the seamy practice known as balance billing.
Read more...ObamaCare Rollout: Administration PR Tactics and the First Release of Enrollment Numbers
The “enrollment” numbers for the Healthcare.gov website, even using the Administration’s Orwellian definition of “enrolled” was barely above half of the scary bad number published as a rumor by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.. Generous application of porcine maquillage followed.
Read more...Michael Olenick: Comprehensive Review of ObamaCare Plans Reveals Not Only High Cost for Atrocious Coverage, but Also Apparent Violations of ACA Requirements
After five weeks healthcare.gov presented insurance policies for my family to purchase. No wonder the website was dark for so long: the plans are expensive, atrocious, and the insurance companies look like they are cheating.
Read more...Healthcare.gov Enrollments to Date a Pathetic < 50,000
No wonder the Administration has been tap dancing about results of the Obamacare launch.
Read more...The ObamaCare Rollout, Organizational Dysfunction, and Public Relations in the Administration
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Administration officials and defenders often claim that demand and volume overloaded the Federal exchange when it was rolled out. This claim is, in fact, not true, and I’d like to see what that lie tells us about organizational behavior inside the administration, and how it will react to future ObamaCare problems — which will be numerous.
First, some examples of the false claim, both from the administration and its defenders:
Read more...Michael Olenick: Obamacare Will Lead Me Either to Get Divorced or Leave the US
Yves here. While readers may contend that Michael Olenick’s case is an outlier and anecdotes are not the same as data, the extreme secretiveness of the Obama Administration combined with deliberately misleading statistics leads one to give some weight to anecdote in the absence of better facts.
Read more...Michael Olenick: How My Experience with Healthcare.gov Shows “Better” Software May Not Be the Solution
By Michael Olenick, a regular contributor on Naked Capitalism. You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick
This piece about my attempts to enroll on healthcare.gov runs the risk of being long, frustrating, and potentially repetitive, but that simply reflects the experience itself. But it also gives a taste of the nature of the problems and where the remedies might lie.
Read more...Obama’s Remarks on the ACA Rollout Debacle: From Selling Hope and Change to Hawking Insurance
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Obama’s “remarks” are a sales pitch. WaPo’s MoDo, Dana Milbank: “Not since the Ginsu knife cut through an aluminum can and still sliced a tomato has America seen a pitch quite like the one President Obama delivered.” Much more importantly, Jon Stewart: “When did the President of the United States turn into Gill from the Simpsons?” The Wordle tells the story; let’s break out the color coding magic markers:
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