MarketWatch, giving some advice on Obamacare:
1. “You might want to avoid signing up on Day One.”
…it’s an open question whether people will be able to, frankly. I hear stuff about the way the software’s been not-tested; stuff that, for the Republic’s sake, I really hope is not true.
Guess we’ll see on Tuesday!
Via Instapundit.
Moe Lane
Yes, faxes are still a thing, apparently. You can even do them from your computer. And if you’re a small business owner wanting to get Obamacare coverage, you’re going to have to!
Administration officials are quietly telling key interest groups to expect initial glitches signing up online for coverage under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
Two sources tell The Associated Press that small businesses will not be able to enroll online starting Oct. 1 when new health insurance markets go live. Instead, one of the sources, a person who was briefed on the situation, said business owners will initially have to mail or fax their information so that they can enroll.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement hasn’t yet been made.
Continue reading Small businesses must …fax… their #obamacare exchange applications in.
Because there’s a really, really, really bad warning sign coming out of DC.
Just days away from launch, the District of Columbia’s health marketplace is announcing a pretty significant delay.
While the D.C. Health Link will launch a Web site on October 1, shoppers will not have access to the their premium prices until mid-November. The delay comes after the District marketplace discovered “a high error rate” in calculating the tax credits that low- and middle-income people will use to purchase insurance on the marketplace.
The insurance marketplaces, if working as plan, are supposed to spit out an estimate for a tax credit after a shopper enters in some basic information about where she lives and how much she earns. In the District, that won’t happen next month. Instead, the eligibility determination will be made “off-line by experts” by early November.
Continue reading Why the Senate should consider maybe doing this defunding #Obamacare thing.
For months all eyes have been on October 1 — the first day people can sign up for Obamacare.
But as that day approaches, many people working on the nuts and bolts of the health law are tamping down any expectations of a sign-up stampede.
Not everyone will enroll immediately. And that, they say, is the way they want it.
Translation: despite the fact that the feds will be spending $12 million to advertise the new exchanges at the end of September, and that various states are spending several times that number for their own, specific exchanges… the government doesn’t want any of that advertising to in fact succeed, apparently. Nah, they’d much prefer that people hammer the sites in December; although why anybody would do that, either, is not really explained. Anybody without insurance at that point is looking at a hundred buck fine that won’t even hit until the year after next, anyway. And that’s assuming that the White House doesn’t delay the individual mandate ‘temporarily.’ So I’m missing wht the government is expecting a surge of sign-ups, ever…
Yes, I know, I’m being deliberately obtuse. Articles like the above one from Politico are what you get when the government is having a slow-motion train wreck of a new policy rollout.
How are those going, again?
…The Obama administration is working on the Obamacare exchanges, right? They’re not getting distracted by the entire Syria thing, right? They’re not hoping that we’re just all going to forget about the Obamacare exchanges because of the Syria thing, right?
…Right?
Thirty four days, and counting:
The Obama administration has delayed a step crucial to the launch of the new healthcare law, the signing of final agreements with insurance plans to be sold on federal health insurance exchanges starting October 1.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notified insurance companies on Tuesday that it would not sign final agreements with the plans between September 5 and 9, as originally anticipated, but would wait until mid-September instead, according to insurance industry sources.
Nevertheless, Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for HHS, said the department remains “on track to open” the marketplaces on time on October 1.
Continue reading Another delay on #obamacare ‘exchanges;’ difficulties getting products to markets?
Do you know what a big problem is going to be in orbital construction, once we get serious about doing it in bulk? Inertia, in free-fall situations. You see, while an object’s effective weight in free-fall may become nil, its inertia remains unchanged. This means that once an object starts moving, it keeps moving – and it can only be made to stop moving by the application of sufficient force; you can’t count on gravitational pull to help do the work for you. The end result is that you can easily be in a situation where you’ve got something with ten tons’ worth of mass moving in one direction… and eventually impacting something that can’t shrug off an impact with ten tons’ worth of mass, and will thus crumple or shatter under the strain slowly, but inexorably. Nothing you can’t work around, but it’s something that you have to plan for.
And why am I telling you this?
Oh, no reason: Continue reading Counting down to the slow-motion crash of the Obamacare exchanges.
(H/T: Instapundit) By using the best friend of any dysfunctional (read: Democratic-controlled) state government: an over-reaching federal regulatory structure.
A main cause [for state fiscal woes] in addition to Medicaid, is the cost of health care for state and local government retirees. These largely unfunded obligations are similar to the pressures on the federal government to fulfill its unrealistic Medicare promises.
But there is a critical difference when it comes to how state and local governments can approach these obligations compared to the federal government. State and local governments can’t print money and typically have “balanced budget” requirements. More often than not, retiree health benefits are not guaranteed under state constitutions, are not insured, and are not protected by federal law, which means the systems in place can be changed.
States that offer extremely generous health benefits for government retirees, and which have little to no pre-funding for those benefits, could choose to move their retirees into the Affordable Care Act’s new exchanges. State and local governments would likely continue to contribute by paying some premium support to individual retirees for healthcare, but the federal government and/or participants in the exchanges would pick up much of the tab. For these states, the exchanges offer a chance to shore up their finances and relieve state taxpayers of some of the looming burden of financing all those retirees. It could be a huge opportunity for states and localities in desperate need of fixing their long-term finances, and one that they should seriously consider in the coming months. Continue reading Failed Blue states to leech off of successful Red ones? #obamacare
Not without a budget.
This paragraph from the Investor’s Business Daily article on the Obama administration’s remarkable inability to get states to sign off on state Obamacare exchanges caught my eye, particularly the part I bolded:
In the states with federally run exchanges, HHS will be tasked with hiring the people to run the exchanges, ensuring that insurance plans applying to be on the exchange are compliant with ObamaCare regulations, and setting up and running the websites for the exchanges. Congress has not yet appropriated the money to let HHS hire exchange employees.
Continue reading Not One Dime for Obamacare federal exchange funding.
