The Launch of Healthcare.gov

“For all that the Obama Administration has done to promote the new Affordable Care Act”

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Should read,

“For all that the Obama Administration has done to promote the most devastating deficit increasing UNAFFORDABLE Care Act…

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Then dearest Kate goes on to say…
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Still missing from the site right now is pricing information for plans.

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Why is that Kate? Wouldn’t you think in a site promoting AFFORDABLE Care, you would first want to post information on the cost? Do you suppose that posting the varying differences from region to region on the cost of healthcare may not look so good right now for Obambi?

Do you suppose that posting the varying differences from region to region on the cost of healthcare may not look so good right now for Obambi?
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Funny…you’d think that displaying a huge a variance in pricing would cast the insurers in a bad light, freedumblog.
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Regardless, tech rollouts this big are frequently done in stages; kudos for the clean design and informational content displayed at this point.

My job’s requiring me to verify that I have dependents under my health plan so I need to provide their “consultant” with a copy of the front page of my 1040 (SSNs and my $ amounts blacked out). What’s next – DNA samples??

“For all that the Obama Administration has done to promote the most devastating [HUH?] deficit increasing [not proven] UNAFFORDABLE [you're smarter than us libs aren't you!] Care Act…”
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Translated for you.

…lest I lose them as dependents under my health plan.

Thanks to the ludicrously named “Affordable Care Act” (dutifully regurgitated by Kate Pickert), my insurance premium for my $5,000 deductible insurance policy has just increased 54% (FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT!) over my last premium only six months ago! Thank you Obama. Thank you Time magazine and the rest of Obama’s political advocacy groups (e.g., ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, NPR, A-Mess-NBC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Classic, ESPN News, the New York Times-Democrat, the execrable Associated (with terrorists) Press, the Washington Post-Democrat, Sports Illustrated, et al.) You morons.

You need to show cause and effect here. Your premium rise probably has nothing to do with Affordable Care Act. And everything to do with your provider trying to get you to drop coverage and/or gouge you.

Next as much as it may drive you nuts, contacting HHS and telling them what your insurance company is doing might get them to pound the insurance co for an absurd rate increase and demand a roll back or suffer penalties.

It’s about time someone shined a spotlight on the evil liberal conspiracies of ESPN Classic.
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The other night, I was watching a replay of the “Miracle on Ice” and they’d edited the film so that it looked like the Soviets won. It’s all part of their plan to put us on collective farms and harvest our precious bodily fluids!
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Keep up the great work, textee! And don’t worry that Rusty and Earl are sounding more and more like you every day. They’re just part of the resistance.
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WOOOOLLLVVVEEERRRRIIINNNNEEEEESSS!!

I wonder if anywhere on the website (or media) there will be a fessing up about:

1) not adding to deficits
2) you can keep your doctor if you like them
3) you will have health care rationed
4) you can keep you HC insurance if you like it
5) HC premiums will decline

Not likely but folks can have the audacity of hope

I took the leap of faith and I perused the healthcare.gov site. In it you will find nothing more than an elaborate yellow pages of information to call the insurance companies up in your area. WOW, now how much did that cost me to make 5 different clicks on a site that I can just google healthcare / Pennsylvania?
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How much did it cost to create this site, Ms Pickert? Any figures on that?
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When all was said and done with my little experiment, I was basically directed to “call my company up and ask about COBRA”. Imagine that!!!
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Great job Kate. Great job pointing out that this site is nothing more than a big blow-job on the American people to be led back to more UNAFFORDABLE healthcare.

Kate Pickert:
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Enter your zip code, insurance status, basic health status, family makeup and a few other details and up pops the insurance plans available to you. Pretty cool, huh?
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I make data-driven web applications (that get their information from disparate sources) like this every day, so I guess it isn’t that amazing to me. Plus, I’ve been booking airline tickets by comparing multiple carriers from my mobile device for a few years, now. So have a lot of folks.
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Maybe I’m jaded, though.
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Boy, I would have loved to have bid on this job.
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Still missing from the site right now is pricing information for plans.
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Until pricing information is accurately and instantly available, this site is worthless for the purpose of “more accountability and a more competitive marketplace” –even if I had built it myself.
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healthcare.gov is a good start and a politically savvy one too.
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Right. It’s brochure-ware. It’s an application whose purpose is marketing. The part that matters, the “much more functionality” promised to come in 2014 –a geological age forward in internet tech time– will be a completely different application altogether. Think about “Windows XP.” Think about “Windows Vista.” Now think about “Windows 7.” Then think about the iPhone 4. Now think about how the web has changed since 2006. Were you writing on a blog at TIME.com upon which I could post commentary, Kate Pickert? Did you even have an iPhone then?
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What will web application technology look like in 2014? Will the money spent on this “look, we’re so cool” web site have been completely wasted when the whole thing is done over again with completely different functionality and technology?
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Experience in this field says the most likely answer is “yes, unfortunately, because the people who commissioned this were more interested in creating the appearance of forward progress than anything else.”
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Also, until Congress makes it against the law again for insurers to collude and price-fix –remember the anti-trust exemption?– we’re never going to realize the magic of a “more competitive marketplace” solving any problems.
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You just can’t have accountability and competition be the result of legal, state-sanctioned insurance monopolies and cartels, Kate Pickert, even if consumers get to “shop” on the coolest web site EVAH.

“you’re smarter than us libs aren’t you!] ”

That’s one of the immutable laws of nature

Prolly upset that ABC and all ESPN clones are owned by Mickey Mouse. My gosh, they let homos and lesbians work there y’know! That’s what makes them morons.

OK, then explain how you KNOW FOR CERTAIN that our health care costs will be significantly higher than if Congress had done nothing at all. Go ahead, use all the brain cells you need to.

Kev @ 4.2: In their bizarro world “Hoosiers” was edited to have black thugs in it and Hackman would’ve used the N word as he kicked them off the team.

Very nice stuart, and I will be waiting for Ms Pickerts comments too. (I won’t hold my breath).

1) that’s the audacious hope!
2) and 4) that’s been answered repeatedly, no need to drill it into your brain
3) no. [Close-captioned for the uninitated: NO]
5) see 3.2

The site is fine but it underscores how little was accomplished with health care reform. There’s no option for “I don’t like my employer’s plan” and if you imagine losing your employers plan and ask it some questions the answers are really futile. For example, here are some of the options it gives me as a NY resident if I lose my job and health coverage

1) sign up for my spouse’s plan.
2) COBRA (how would I pay for that with no income?)
3) Medicaid (if I qualify)
4) Find doctors who will provide health care to the uninsured. (Seriously, that’s what it says to do).

We really blew it by not creating Medicare for all as a base.

“Will the money spent on this “look, we’re so cool” web site have been completely wasted when the whole thing is done over again with completely different functionality and technology?”
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Didn’t you just pretty effectively make the case that anything built by anyone (including you) will, in short order, be obsolete and, therefore, “wasted” in the same manner? Though I’m not sure that even Healthcare.gov could compete with Windows Vista.

Didn’t you just pretty effectively make the case that anything built by anyone (including you) will, in short order, be obsolete and, therefore, “wasted” in the same manner?
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Yes.
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This has been yet another fun-filled edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions…

By October, healthcare.gov will include price estimates. Because I’m a reporter who covers health care, friends, colleagues and family members constantly ask me for advice about how to buy insurance and how to find out what their options are. It’s this experience that leads me to believe this new site has a lot of utility for folks looking for coverage.

Beyond the fundamental truth of nano-obsolescence, however, there is a specific criticism of this particular project that goes something like:
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What if I told you that I was building YouTube, but that only the search functionality was going to be built –the video play and upload part was going to happen (supposedly) four whole years later?
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That’s a different project than building all of YouTube now, so that all of the functionality that makes it YouTube is available, and then re-building all the functionality in stages, dealing with change, platform and versioning issues along the way as normal.
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This project is mainly a brochure for the next project, in other words. My point isn’t so much that it’s a waste of money by the Administration, it’s not, if the point is to demonstrate to establishment media that they’re really “doing something.”

Thank you so very much for responding to commentary, Kate Pickert, it is greatly appreciated.

HCR, in its present form is an abomination. What started out as a good faith measure, ended up as ANYTHING but. It is probably the most confusing piece of legislation ever concocted by egotistical “win at any cost” politicians and will end up costing the American public dearly. As a medical practitioner, I think it is horrible and as an American taxpayer, I think it is even worse! NO ONE knows the cost of this monstrosity and no one understands the impact it will have on our existing (already overworked) infrastructure. Great job, Democrats, you built it, you own it and I hope that it proves to be your downfall.

Earl, 3.2 applies to you as well.

Current plans don’t have to meet higher benefit standards of new policies. But the plan may not be viable for long because insurers cannot add benefits or enroll more people in noncompliant policies.
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Premiums for individual policies will be 10 to 13 percent higher by 2016 than the average premium that year under current law, according to Congressional estimates.
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Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted
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But that’s the key — doctors who are on our health plan. Most of us have had the experience of learning that a doctor we liked and trusted is no longer accepting the insurance plan we have. And I suspect that we will begin to see some major shifts in which doctors are accepting which plans when we begin getting our paperwork and choices for 2011 next Fall. Health plans are going to cut their reimbursements to doctors, and that looming Medicare cut is due to be reviewed again come November. Bottom line — yes, to the letter of the law, we’ll be able to choose any doctor who is on our health plan. We just don’t know which doctors will still be working with which health plans..

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When will liberals learn that repeating things doesn’t make them true, it is just a repetition of a lie or a by another name a liberal truth.

I think he has to nail down his spelling before he moves on to more advanced subjects like crunching numbers.

Free, you are absolutely correct. Myself and many of my colleagues are in a quandary over this bill. We are being asked to see more patients, our paperwork will double or triple, yet we will be compensated less…how smart is this? Instead of working with physicians, democratic lawmakers IGNORED us and rammed this thing down our throats (along with the rest of the American public) and declared VICTORY! Well, their celebration may be short lived. When wait times increase dramatically and the cost of premiums skyrocket, the American public will be furious and rightfully so…”change we can believe in”? I think not!!

This “rammed down our throats” meme is getting old. And it’s untrue. If you speak for the entirety of the American people, then I’m the Queen of England.

earljr1

Not only will your paper work increase but if you do it incorrectly you may face stiff fines. You got to love our government. If a business does something worng or money is spent inappropriately you get fined or go to jail. If its the government the solution is another program.

The dirty little secret that mist liberals will not say out loud or will deny (lie) is this is the first step to a government takeover of HC, to the detriment of everyone.

Who does it hurt to have this thing? The way everyone here is talking about it, you would think it would have a negative impact. Once prices are available, it will be a far more useful tool, granted, but it is nice to have a go to resource in the meantime.

I would say the “win at any cost” politicians were Republicans, who as a bloc refused to vote for what was essentially a blast from the past Republican bill from the 90′s.

Since no one here seems to have been in the position of applying for medicaid (or at least won’t admit to it here), I’ll provide you with that point of view. Finding information on how to apply for medicaid is hard. Often times it seems like the system is set up to be as hard to get to as possible, so that less people will apply. Trouble is, it’s those that need the help the most that have the most problems getting that information. Imagine a person who has anxiety problems so intense they can’t even go outside. Most government websites are so daunting they would make that person want to curl up into a little ball and never go back.
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This website, if nothing else, makes information about how to apply for medicaid more accessible.

Thought you might be interested in this:
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“Increasing Medicaid Payments for Primary Care Doctors
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Effective January 1, 2013
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As Medicaid programs and providers prepare to cover more patients in 2014, the Act requires states to pay primary care physicians no less than 100 percent of Medicare payment rates in 2013 and 2014 for primary care services. The increase is fully funded by the federal government.”

Regardless of what political view(s) you have the site is awesome!

“Once prices are available, it will be a far more useful tool, granted, but it is nice to have a go to resource in the meantime.”
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Agreed. There is sufficient informational content to render the site more than just “marketing” or establishing merely that they are “doing something”. And I would remind our resident web-app engineer that not everyone gets their “data” downloaded to their 4G phone. In fact, about 50 million of us still get their news from dead trees.

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7017968700

I was going to say that I don’t think medicaid is hard to apply for at all. All anybody has to do is walk into their county office of public welfare. But you’re right about somebody with a disorder like anxiety; they’d find it very intimidating to go to the welfare office.

I work in mental health, so for me helping people apply for medicaid is a no-brainer. I’ve also been on it, having suffered myself with a mental illness for more than 17 debilitating years in which I couldn’t work. I was offered medicaid for workers with disabilities when I began working, but the employee insurance ended up costing the same (premiums, that is, I failed at the time to factor in the little costs of deductibles and co-payments). But I also wanted a larger choice of doctors. In PA, medicaid more often than not ends up being accepted only at the clinics. I wanted to stop going to clinics as well to go back to a specialist I’d seen a few years prior. At one time, he took medicaid but then he was dropped by the state because too many doctors in the area were accepting the service.
He told me this.

Medicaid also forced me to undergo an unnecessary operation. After foot surgery, I had two operations to remove the pins, when only one would have been adequate. Except the HMO attached to my medicaid wouldn’t pay for all of the pins to be removed all at one time. How stupid is that?

Sorry megatron, your attempt to blame republicans is weak and without merit. EVERY republican suggestion that would have made this bill more palatable to physicians, was rejected outright by the democrats. I can promise you this, when I start hearing patients complain, I will direct their attention to democratic demagoguery and outright deception…the American public has been sold a bill of goods and most physicians will gladly tell them so.

EVERY republican suggestion that would have made this bill more palatable to physicians, was rejected outright by the democrats.
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Except for the individual mandate that was patterned on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts HCR and endorsed by Grassley … before they both ran away, and the idea of end-of-life counseling, that was put in at the insistence of Johnny Isakson … before Sarah Palin decided they were death panels, before the insurance marketplace idea that the Cato institute was hyping in the 1990s … before they ran away.
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There are loads of Republican ideas in the Affordable Care Act. It’s just that once Democrats accepted them, Republicans decided the ideas they once championed as free-market solutions were all socialist claptrap. (See also “cap and trade.”)

Now little kevie is pretty sure he knows everything there IS to know about medicine and how we physicians should be grateful to the far sighted democrats. You could NOT be more misinformed, but as usual, this has never stopped you from intruding with your warped and unrealistic, liberal viewpoint. Physicians know fully well who perpetrated this myth on the American public, little kevie. Republicans saw the myriad of problems it would produce and pleaded to scrap this boondoggle and start over…Knowing how DESPERATE Obama was to claim “victory”, they refused and saddled the American public with this Albatross. Happy wait time in your physicians waiting room, kevie and I hope those premium increases don’t put a dent in your wallet.

Err… how is anything you just wrote at all a counter to Kevin’s dissection of your original claim? You claimed:

EVERY republican suggestion that would have made this bill more palatable to physicians, was rejected outright by the democrats.

Kevin proved that you were wrong, even with the wiggle-room “more palatable to physicians” clause (Which physicians? All physicians? Some physicians?). If you are indeed a doctor, I must admit I feel rather depressed at the apparent lack of standards that allowed you to make it through Med school with your asinine argumentative and logic skills.
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Do you go around diagnosing patients this way? I hope they get second opinions by doctors capable of having rational opinions to begin with.

Right, Earl. If only there were some kind of professional organization for doctors — I don’t know, maybe we could call it the “American Medical Association” or something? — then we could have seen if they endorsed the Affordable Care Act or not.
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Oh, hey, look at this:
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/05/health.care/index.html

You’re right, it is easy, once you know how to go about it, The trouble is in getting to that point. And there are a worrying amount of doctors who aren’t willing to aid in the process, even in the mental health profession. (Note I said worrying amount, by no means not all.)

Little kevie REFUSES to acknowledge the AMA represents fewer than 35% of the doctors in this country (he knows, because he has been called on his deception previously) I happen to be a member and know fully well a high percentage of us were NOT happy with this endorsement. As I did then, I suggest anyone in doubt, contact your OWN physician and inquire as to how they feel about this current HCR. If you are a “pie in the sky” liberal like little kevie, you may not like the answer.

“pretty cool…” “If this sound like an ad [for Obama], it is.”

Wow! The government has a website that will list insurance providers in your state. Is this a big deal? Not! You can find the same info on your state’s health insurance webpage, and many other sites on the web. This is simply another waste of taxpayor dollars, and it gives Obamamaniacs another chance to gush about his [nonexistent] benefits to our society.