PSA: #Obamacare drawing con-men like rotten meat draws flies.

Don’t believe me? Then maybe you’ll believe that notorious right-wing Tea Party rag The New York Times:

To the list of problems plaguing President Obama’s health care law, add one more — fraud.

With millions of Americans frustrated and bewildered by the trouble-prone federal website for health insurance, con men and unscrupulous marketers are seizing their chance. State and federal authorities report a rising number of consumer complaints, ranging from deceptive sales practices to identity theft, linked to the Affordable Care Act.

Madeleine Mirzayans was fooled when a man posing as a government official knocked on her door. Barbara Miller and Maevis Ethan were pitched by telemarketers who claimed to work for Medicaid. And Buford Price was almost caught by another trap: websites that look official but are actually bait set by fly-by-night insurance operators.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Seriously, it’s widely known at this point that the only real reason that we haven’t seen more fraud is because pretty much nobody can actually use the site. To the point where seeing the process apparently working smoothly should in itself set off warning bells. But before Democrats start breathing a sigh of misguided relief, they should chew on this:

It is now becoming clear that the Obama administration will not have Health.care.gov fixed by December 1 so hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of people will be able to smoothly enroll by January 1.

Why do I say that? Look at this from the administration spokesperson’s daily Healthcare.gov progress report on Friday:

Essentially what is happening is people [those working on the fixes] are going through the entire process. As we have fixed certain pieces of functionality, like the account creation process, we’re seeing volume go further down the application. We’re identifying new issues that we need to be in a position to troubleshoot.

Does that sound like the kind of report you would expect if they were on track to fix this in less than three weeks?

That’s from Bob Laszewski, who first hit the national scene last month when infamous neocon and Sarah Palin supporter Ezra Klein interviewed him for Klein’s column for the paleoconservative fish-rap Washington Post. I assume that I can stop with that line of sarcasm, right? – Because my point is that we’re one-third of the way through the month to a December 1st deadline, and two-thirds of the way through to a November 15th deadline, and if neither deadline is met by Obamacare there will be a whole passel of folks out there who will in fact mildly panic and start looking for insurance policies because Barack Obama canceled their existing ones. When and if (read: “when”) that happens there’s going to be a lot of hungry predators out there, licking their chops.

So please be careful out there.

Moe Lane

PS: NO REPUBLICAN VOTED FOR OBAMACARE.