Monthly Archives: October 2013

News

Critical Obamacare data center crashes, affecting all 50 states

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What happens when you elect a President who has no experience in computer science or even in the private sector? What if the President appoints someone to lead HHS who has no experience in information technology? What happens when an administration has the least private sector experience in decades?

This:

A data center critical for allowing uninsured Americans to buy health coverage under President Barack Obama’s healthcare law went down on Sunday, the U.S. government said, in the latest problem for the “Obamacare” rollout.

Verizon’s Terremark operates the data center behind a federal system for determining eligibility for government subsidies to buy insurance nationwide and hosts HealthCare.gov, the website that makes insurance available in 36 of the 50 states.

The data center experienced a failure on Sunday that led it to lose network connectivity, Health and Human Services Department spokeswoman Joanne Peters said.

Online insurance exchanges opened on October 1 under the law to offer health insurance plans to millions of uninsured Americans. But it has been marred by technical glitches and delays as would-be customers encounter error messages and long waits, often failing to make it through the system despite repeated tries.

“We are working with Terremark to get their timeline for addressing the issue,” Peters said in an email. “We understand that this issue is affecting other customers in addition to HealthCare.gov, and Terremark is working (to) resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

Peters said the newest glitch also affected a data services hub – an electronic traffic roundabout that connects numerous federal agencies and can verify people’s identity, citizenship, and other facts.

Problems with the data services hub affect customers of both HealthCare.gov and the state-run exchanges. State exchanges had been running smoothly.

The verification is necessary to determine eligibility for tax credits that reduce the cost of monthly insurance premiums, a key provision of the law.

[…]The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Connecticut officials about the outage and gave no indication of when the data services hub would be functioning again, said a spokeswoman for Access Health CT, the Connecticut exchange.

The problems with the rollout of the law have become a political liability for Obama. The White House has said Obama still has “full confidence” in HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, whose department is responsible for implementing the law. Sebelius has faced Republicans calls for her resignation.

I’m sorry but creating web sites is not the same as giving speeches with a teleprompter where you blame other people and talk about good you are at doing things that you have never done before – at any level, before. When you elect a moron with a history of drug use, you get moron quality work. I had to take a drug test and pass a background check before I could work in the information technology field for a private company, but obviously you don’t have to do that in order to be President.

News

U.S. Army: Christians and Tea Party conservatives are potential terrorists

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Todd Starnes from Fox News reports.

Excerpt:

Soldiers attending a pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood say they were told that evangelical Christians and members of the Tea Party were a threat to the nation and that any soldier donating to those groups would be subjected to punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

A soldier who attended the Oct. 17th briefing told me the counter-intelligence agent in charge of the meeting spent nearly a half hour discussing how evangelical Christians and groups like the American Family Association were “tearing the country apart.”

The soldier told me he fears reprisals and asked not to be identified. He said there was a blanket statement that donating to any groups that were considered a threat to the military and government was punishable under military regulations.

“My first concern was if I was going to be in trouble going to church,” the evangelical Christian soldier told me. “Can I tithe? Can I donate to Christian charities? What if I donate to a politician who is a part of the Tea Party movement?”

Another soldier who attended the briefing alerted the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty. That individual’s recollections of the briefing matched the soldier who reached out to me.

“I was very shocked and couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” the soldier said. “I felt like my religious liberties, that I risk my life and sacrifice time away from family to fight for, were being taken away.”

And while a large portion of the briefing dealt with the threat evangelicals and the Tea Party pose to the nation, barely a word was said about Islamic extremism, the soldier said.

“Our community is still healing from the act of terrorism brought on by Nidal Hasan – who really is a terrorist,” the soldier said. “This is a slap in the face. “The military is supposed to defend freedom and to classify the vast majority of the military that claim to be Christian as terrorists is sick.”

[…]The soldier said they were also told that the pro-life movement is another example of “radicalization.”

“They said that evangelical Christians protesting abortions are the mobilization stage and that leads to the bombing of abortion clinics,” he said, recalling the discussion.

[…]But this is not the first time an Army briefing has labeled evangelicals as extremists. Last April an Army Reserve briefing classified Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism as “religious extremism.”

[…]Two weeks ago, several dozen active duty troops at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, were told the American Family Association, a well-respected Christian ministry, should be classified as a domestic hate group because it advocates for traditional family values.

Fort Hood was the site of the attack by Muslim terrorist Major Nidal Hasan, an incident which the Democrats labeled “workplace violence”. They can’t call real terrorism what it is, but they cant teach that Christians and Tea Party conservatives terrorists. If you believe in natural marriage and the Constitution, then you’re a terrorist. If you wage jihad against civilians then it’s “workplace violence”. And this stupidity is all taxpayer-funded. The U.S. Army works for us – we pay for them to teach hatred against us.

So who are the real domestic terrorists? Why don’t we look at actual acts of domestic terrorism. The most recent incident of domestic terrorism is the Southern Poverty Law Center assisted attack on the Family Research Council building. The SPLC, you remember, is the group that labels pro-family groups as “hate groups”. And yet I suspect that the Army is relying on the SPLC to tell them who they should be concerned about. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house!

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News

Americans choosing not to purchase Obamacare exchange plans

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On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume talked about how the majority of the new enrollees are signing up for Medicaid, not Obamacare, and how young people are refusing to sign up for Obamacare plans on the exchanges.

And more discussion from the same panel:

For those who can’t watch, here’s an article from Fox News about how the majority of new enrollees are choosing Medicaid, not Obamacare plans.

Excerpt:

While virtually all the ObamaCare focus is trained on the program’s dysfunctional website, another problem could be emerging — in states where individuals are able to sign up, far more are enrolling in Medicaid than private plans.

For now, the statistics are spotty. The Obama administration still hasn’t provided figures on how many people have successfully enrolled through the federally run exchanges. Some, but not all, states have provided their own relatively up-to-date figures.

But for those that have, the lopsided numbers show Medicaid is getting the lion’s share of enrollees.

In Washington state, more than 35,000 people have signed up for coverage since Oct. 1. Of them, just 4,500 went into private plans. Roughly 31,000 signed up for Medicaid — with coverage kicking in sometime between now and Jan. 1.

The director of the state’s Health Care Authority said they were “pleased by the strong response of Medicaid-eligible residents.”

But the imbalance — if it does not even out in the months to come — could create problems for private insurance companies which are relying on a major influx of new and healthy customers to make the system hum.

“There are a lot of elements of this law that have to work, that must work — otherwise the whole thing collapses,” the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon said. “They need — need — lots of healthy people to sign up for insurance through the exchanges.”

The fact that people are flocking to Medicaid isn’t necessarily a problem — but a lack of healthy enrollees on private plans would be.

The main reason the Affordable Care Act mandated that individuals buy insurance was so that private insurers would get enough young, healthy people in the system who could offset the costs of covering older and sicker patients. Otherwise, at the very least, costs will skyrocket for those in the system.

[…]The Democrat and Chronicle newspaper reports that in New York, nearly 24,000 of the 37,000 newly enrolled residents are going into Medicaid, which millions of New Yorkers are already on. Just 13,313 chose private plans.

Medicaid is fully taxpayer-funded, so this is not going to help the deficit/debt situation at all. That money will have to be borrowed and paid back by taxpayers. Making things worse is the fact that young people are not signing up to purchase the overpriced health insurance plans on Obamacare exchanges.

Excerpt:

As Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy have pointed out for Reason magazine, the concept of today’s older generation as impoverished is simply wrong. In fact, today’s seniors are far wealthier than today’s young adults.

Looking at rates of homeownership, 83% of elderly households own a home. Meanwhile, 36% of millennials are still living under their parents’ roof. Those over 65 years of age have much lower poverty rates than most other demographic groups. Households headed by people 65 or older have 22 times the wealth of households headed by people under 35.

Not only are many young people either unemployed or underemployed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that people under 40 owe 67% of the roughly $1.4 trillion that Americans owe on school loans. That’s on top of an average of several thousand dollars of credit card debt.

ObamaCare forces people who can scarcely afford the extra cost to subsidize care for people who absolutely can afford to pay for their own health services.

In the exchanges, a young person will have to pay an estimated $250 per month for basic insurance. Again, this cost is so high because these premiums are expected to pay for older people’s healthcare costs. These costs now include covering a plethora of expensive drugs, services and procedures thanks to ObamaCare’s requirements for insurance plans.

Buying plans on insurance exchanges costs money, and many young people don’t have any money to spend these days. Young people have not done particularly well at finding jobs lately, especially since they have acquired precious few marketable skills in the public schools. (Most people can’t get a job calling people racist and sexist and homophobic, because there are only so many journalism jobs to go around).

So what Obama has really done is promised lots of goodies to all of his supporters, but there is no one signing on to pay for it. And that’s what I would expect from someone with no marketable degrees or skills who has very very limited experience working in the private sector. Many of the people in the Obama administration just haven’t done anything productive in the private sector, and that lack of experience is now showing. We have elected a government that believes in making policy based on feelings, not facts.