Tag Archives: Affordable Care Act

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Health care rollout no ‘mission accomplished’

ABC News correspondent Jon Karl sought to pin White House spokesman Jay Carney down on whether the tinkering of the once-crashed health care website produced a “mission accomplished” moment.

Carney didn’t take the bait.

Nor should he.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/12/02/abcs_jon_karl_to_carney_is_it_mission_accomplished_for_obamacare_website.html

The reference, of course, is to the famous photo op of President George W. Bush landing aboard the aircraft carrier in 2003 after the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been captured. Then the president stood before the world — and in front of a banner hung across the conning tower of the carrier — that declared “Mission Accomplished.”

It turned out the mission was far from accomplished. Many more Americans would die in battle before the Iraq War came to an end. Anyone with half a memory of that event knows the folly of declaring victory too quickly.

I’m quite sure the current president, Barack Obama, is aware as well.

The Affordable Care Act rollout was a disaster for the White House. The computer program meant to handle all those applications for health insurance crashed and burned. The White House took it down. Health officials throughout the administration began feeling intense pressure. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius could have done an honorable thing by resigning, given that it all happened on her watch. She has stayed.

The healthcare.gov website has been updated, tweaked, nipped-and-tucked and is working a lot better than before. Is it perfect? Has the administration accomplished its mission? No on both counts.

But the administration is making strides, which is about as good as it can get when you take on such a huge enterprise as trying to fix a broken health care system.

The mission is not accomplished — at least not yet.

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There you have it: Health care website is fixed

OK. The verdict now appears to be in on the effort to repair what troubled the launch of the Affordable Care Act.

That website, the one that crashed when Americans tried to sign on for health insurance, appears to be repaired. It’s working. It’s working pretty well. It can handle as many as 50,000 applications at once.

Is that the end of the debate over the ACA? Hardly.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/health-care-website-enrollment-obamacare-november-2013-100528.html

Some Republican luminaries, such as U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, say the healthcare.gov difficulties were the “least” of the troubles relating to the ACA.

Here’s my take.

The health insurance system was broken before Congress enacted the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The ACA is intended to bring insurance to an estimated 30 million Americans who don’t have it now. The website snafu was a big deal, hardly “the least” of the problems afflicting the system. Now it’s repaired. The Obama administration says more work needs to be done to make it work with maximum efficiency.

The administration pledged to fix the system when it crashed and burned at the beginning of October. It delivered on the pledge.

Now … let’s allow the program to take root.

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Healthcare.gov is fixed … or is it?

The White House says the Affordable Care Act website is working better than before.

Is it good enough yet? Well, that remains to be seen.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/12/01/officials_healthcaregov_making_strides_120823.html

One can presume that President Obama’s critics will keep looking for every possible glitch to toss back at the president. The heathcare.gov website had been rolled out in early October, only to crash and burn in front of our eyes. The Obama administration brought in some high-powered computer geniuses to fix the site.

Today, the site is back up and reportedly is working a lot better than before, which really isn’t saying much, given the disastrous opening.

The administration is trying to caution us that there remains a lot more work to do to get Americans enrolled in a health insurance plan of their choosing. It’s better than before.

Do not expect, though, that those who want to get rid of the ACA will accept any improvement as being sufficient. They hate the law. They want it repealed.

I’m still waiting, though, to hear what they will introduce in ACA’s place.

Meanwhile, let’s allow the work on this website to continue. As former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would tell you, the state from which the ACA was conceived had its rollout problems too. The Bay State got it fixed. Can’t we give the feds the same opportunity to make it right?

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Health care law faces huge day

There are big days … and then there are those days on which everything seems to ride.

The Obama administration is facing one of those “everything” days.

It’s supposed to get the healthcare.gov website fixed by the end of the day. This is the site that all but crashed in early October when millions of Americans tried to sign on to the federal exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/healthcaregov-tech-team-scrambling-to-create-workaround-for-site-before-deadline/2013/11/27/f5affc7c-577c-11e3-ba82-16ed03681809_story.html

Turns out the website wasn’t ready for prime time. Then came the cancellation notices that President Obama said wouldn’t come. He’d promised that we could keep our insurance plans if we were happy with them. That, too, turned out to be incorrect. Did the president actually “lie,” meaning did he make that promise knowing he couldn’t keep it?

I’m not proficient enough of a mind-reader to know that, unlike the president’s critics who’ve called him everything but the Son of Satan. Oh, wait a minute, come to think of it, I’m pretty sure he’s actually been called that too.

We’ll get to see now if (a) the administration’s computer geeks can deliver the goods on the website and (b) whether the critics will keep their mouths shut if the geeks actually make good on their promise to make the website user-friendly.

I’m cautiously optimistic on the first part; not so on the second.

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Cornyn offers insulting tweet on Iran deal

I’ve long thought that U.S. Sen. John Cornyn was a serious man.

Then came this response to the deal brokered over the weekend involving Iran’s nuclear development program.

“Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care”

http://blogs.star-telegram.com/politex/2013/11/sen-cornyns-iran-tweet-sparks-reaction-in-twitter-sphere.html

Huh? That was the response from the senior U.S. Republican senator from the great state of Texas?

So, in Cornyn’s mind an agreement that seeks to guide Iran toward a dismantling of its nuclear program, protect Israel — our nation’s most stalwart Middle East ally — and restore some semblance of stability in one of the world’s most explosive regions is a mere “distraction”?

Cornyn’s tweet drew some harsh response, some of which was equally unfair.

My larger point, though, is that Sen. Cornyn should know better than to suggest an intense negotiation involving the United States, Iran and several other great world powers is some kind of political feint to take interest away from an unrelated domestic policy dispute.

Ridiculous.

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What will happen if Obamacare gets fixed?

I’ve been giving thought to a situation that admittedly remains highly hypothetical … at the moment.

The situation involves attempts to repair the healthcare.gov website that has given the White House — not to mention millions of Americans — headaches, heartburn and all kinds of angst.

The website was meant to be the vehicle with which Americans would sign up for the Affordable Care Act. It hasn’t worked. The White House, President Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, staffers throughout the federal government and just plain folks are up in arms over it.

The president has apologized for the mess. His critics aren’t accepting his apology. They’re demanding that heads should roll. Sebelius seems like the likely target, given that HHS is administering this snafu and Sebelius is in charge of HHS.

Congressional Republicans have declared the ACA to be a disaster. They know, by golly, that it will never work. It won’t provide health insurance at a price Americans can afford, they say.

The website fix? Forget about it, the critics say. The website is just a tiny fraction of the problem.

Well, this is all so much political grandstanding.

I’m wondering now what will happen if the Obama administration’s team of computer geeks fixes the website. What will occur if healthcare.gov is repaired and the site is able to process applications? What’s going to happen if by some chance the ACA starts enrolling Americans, who then will be insured for the first time in years?

And what will occur if the nation’s health care deliver system actually starts seeing improvements that its supporters — starting with the president himself — have said it would deliver?

I’m not yet ready to start throwing dirt on the ACA. I want to wait to see if the experts can fix what’s wrong with the website and I’m waiting to see what happens when the law gets implemented fully.

If after all that occurs and the system is still a mess … well, then you can hand me the shovel.

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Politics means ‘lying’ takes on broader context

My American Heritage dictionary defines the term “lie” thusly: “a false statement deliberately presented as true.”

That’s a commonly accepted description of a lie. Someone has to knowingly say something that is false.

Well, in politics, lying takes on a different sort of meaning.

Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick “Prince of Darkness” Cheney, said just the other day that President Barack Obama lied when he made grand promises about the Affordable Care Act.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/senate-races/190496-liz-cheney-no-question-obama-lied-about-o-care

“No question” that he lied, said Cheney. What’s more, the former VP’s daughter has accused Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming — whose seat Cheney wants to take from the incumbent — of enabling the president to lie about the ACA.

I won’t get into whether Enzi enabled anything.

I am puzzled, though, why we allow politicians to use terms like “liar” and “lie” when the universe could contain all kinds of reasons for untruthful statements.

Yes, the president said anyone could keep their health plans if they wanted to do so once the ACA kicked in. It didn’t happen; millions of Americans had their policies canceled, forcing the president to announce this past week that insurers could keep policies in force for another year.

Pardon the verbal parsing, but for Cheney — who’s an underdog in her campaign to beat Enzi — to suggest that Obama “lied” is to become a mind-reader. She knows without a doubt, she says, that the president lied — which is to say he deliberately stood before the nation and said something he knew to be untrue.

Just maybe the president believed what he said at the time to be true. If someone says something in good faith — believing they are telling the truth — does that make them bad-faced liars?

Here’s an example that might hit Liz Cheney right in the gut.

Her dad told us that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Those WMD became the basis for us launching a full-scale war against Iraq in March 2003. Our troops stormed into Baghdad, captured Saddam, scoured the country from top to bottom looking for those WMD.

They weren’t there.

Did Daddy Cheney tell a lie? I’m guessing his daughter Liz would say “no.” Some of us likely would beg to differ. Hey, that’s politics.

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LBJ would have none of this

Barack Obama’s difficulty in calming the fears of fellow Democrats reminds me of something I heard from a prominent Texas Panhandle educator.

He declared that President Obama is no President Lyndon Johnson, the stalwart Texan who rose from Senate majority leader to the vice presidency and then to the presidency amid a stark national tragedy.

Obama cannot seem to find it within him, my friend said, to develop the kind of relationships he needs with lawmakers in his own Democratic Party, let alone with those on the other side.

Obama fails to calm jittery Dems

I’m trying to imagine President Johnson being bullied by Congress. I cannot frame that image in my mind.

Johnson had this way of getting in the faces — quite literally — of senators and House members. He would threaten them, cajole them, put the squeeze on them by embracing them in a massive embrace. The threats would come in the form of promises to cut off funding for pet projects if they didn’t see things his way. The cajoling would arrive in the form of promises to do right by them if they lined up behind his legislative agenda.

President Obama’s health care plan is in trouble with Republicans and Democrats. Republicans dislike the Affordable Care Act because, well, I guess it’s because Barack Obama pitched it, sold it and got it enacted into law. Democrats are running from it because they fear for their political lives with the 2014 mid-term elections coming up.

The president is quite good at selling the big idea. He’s quite bad at bringing others along.

Ol’ Lyndon is spinning in his Hill Country grave while one of his descendants struggles with getting Congress to follow his lead.

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Obama: ‘That’s on us. That’s on me.’

A friend of mine posted something on Facebook yesterday that praised President Ronald Reagan’s taking responsibility for misleading the nation on the Iran-Contra scandal. “That’s how a leader” should do take the heat, the message said.

The implication, of course, is that President Barack Obama hasn’t taken personal responsibility for the mess-up involving the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the ridiculous failure of the website healthcare.gov to handle applications for insurance.

Well, today the president said, “It’s on me,” meaning that he’s the man in charge and that he is responsible for the insurance policy cancellations that have scared the daylights out of Americans.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/obama-gives-people-extra-year-keep-health-insurance-2D11591250

Obama has instituted a plan to give Americans an extra year to shop for insurance while keeping their current insurance plans.

He vowed to take action to stop the cancellations. Today, he announced the plan. Will it work? Well, like everything associated with the ACA, that remains to be seen.

Will the government computer geeks be able to repair what ails the website? That, too, is an open question.

However, I swear I heard the president say today that he’s at fault for this mess. I believe that’s what a leader is supposed to do.

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Obamacare rollout numbers put in perspective

I got to listen to a lot of yammering through most of my workday today about the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the enrollment numbers released today by the White House.

The yapping came from Fox News commentators who — not surprisingly — were calling the rollout a disaster and the initial enrollment figures a testament to the incompetence of the Obama administration.

Then I read this article one of my dearest friends on the planet shared on social media. It tells a different story.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115586/obamacare-enrollment-october-was-106k-says-hhs

It says essentially two things: One, while the enrollment numbers aren’t great, they compare favorably with the initial enrollment of those in Massachusetts who became covered under what’s been called “Romneycare,” which is former Gov. Mitt Romney’s version of a mandated health insurance policy enacted in his state. Oh yes, and Romney campaigned unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2012 by running against the Affordable Care Act. The second thing the article notes is that despite the troubles with the healthcare.gov website and all the hoo-hah associated with it, the computer program stands a decent chance of getting fixed.

But that’s not what the conservative media are telling us. They’re insisting that the ACA is a disaster. They say it will never work. They insist that the computer problems are but a symptom of a failed policy.

President Obama made promises he couldn’t keep, to be sure. He said no one would be denied health insurance if they were happy with the policies they have. That’s turned out to be not the case. Is it his fault? Well, he is the president of the United States, the man in charge. It’s on his watch and he should take the heat — which he is doing.

I am unwilling, though, to give up on the Affordable Care Act. I feel the need to remind my friends on the right — and on the far right — that Medicare rolled out in 1965 with some significant glitches in it.

President Lyndon Johnson was in charge then and he managed to work with congressional leaders of both parties to fix the program. Does anyone want to scrap Medicare now? I didn’t think so.

The article attached to this blog analyzes the problem with a decided lack of passion.

I think that’s how we all should examine the ACA and look for ways to improve it.