Everything the government has its hand in cost 10x as much as it should and doesn't work efficiently. We hear stories of it every day, but we just roll our eyes because it doesn't directly impact us. This will directly impact us.
If that's the case, how do countries with single payer systems provide better healthcare and keep costs significantly lower than the U.S.?
That is what our "leaders" should have focused on in the first place instead of making a broken and costly system mandatory.
It's not that difficult. We have smart people that can do analysis. They don't work in Congress, but there are smart people out there. Two steps:
1) Take a look at countries with good healthcare systems. What makes them cost efficient?
2) Take a look at our current system. What are the factors that make it costly?
0
Options
unsung
I stopped by on March 7 2024. First time in many years, had to update payment info. Hope all is well. Politicians suck. Bye. Posts: 9,487
Feds reviewed only one bid for Obamacare website design
BY: Richard Pollock October 14, 2013 | 5:00 am
LEAVE A COMMENT
315
Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.
CGI FEDERAL ACCOUNTABILITY WATCHDOG
Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.
Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.
CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.
Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.
CGI was one of 16 companies that had been qualified by HHS during President George W. Bush's second term to deliver, without public competition, a variety of hardware, software and communication products and services.
In awarding the Healthcare.gov contract, CMS relied on a little-known federal contracting system called ID/IQ, which is government jargon for “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.”
CGI was a much smaller vendor when it was approved by HHS in 2007. With the approval, CGI became eligible for multiple awards without public notice and in circumvention of the normal competitive bidding procurement process.
The multiple awards were in the form of “task orders” for projects of widely varying size. Over the life of the CGI contract — which expires in 2017 — the IT firm can receive awards worth anywhere from the “$1,000 to $4 billion,” according to a contracting document provided by CGI to the Washington Examiner.
This is apparently the route chosen by CMS officials in awarding the Obamacare Healthcare.gov website design contract to CGI.
Between 2009 and 2013, CMS officials awarded 185 separate task orders to CGI totaling $678 million for work of all kinds, according to USAspending.gov, a federal spending database.The Obamacare website design contract was for $93 million.
There is no evidence CMS issued any public solicitation for the Obamacare website contract. The Examiner asked both CMS and CGI for copies of any public solicitation notice for the Healthcare.gov task orders. Neither CMS nor CGI furnished any such public notice.
Linda Odorisio, CGI’s vice president for global communications insisted in an email to the Examiner that the Obmacare Healthcare.gov project had multiple bidders.
“There were at least two bidders, we believe three, for the task order. That is all the information I have,” she said.
Similarly, CMS spokesman Tasha Bradley declined to provide a public solicitation document, saying the only way to obtain such a document would be to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.
It is not uncommon for federal officials to delay responses to FOIA requests for years, provide useless documents instead of those requested, or use the legal system to prevent public access.
The ID/IQ system provides a fast-track contract approval process, but it is much less likely than competitive bidding to secure high quality at a reasonable cost.
“Whenever you have limited competition, but certainly with a sole source or a one-bid offer, the government has to question whether it is going to get the best product at the best price,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog organization that monitors federal contracting.
Both USAspending.gov, which tracks federal spending, and the FFATA Subaward Reporting System, which specifically tracks contracts, refer to CGI as the lone bidder for the Obamacare website design award.
Each site describes the CGI contract award as the product of “full and open competition,” but CGI is the only bidder listed.
Amey suggested that CMS officials linked the “full and open competition” to the original 2007 ID/IQ process.
“They certainly could have handcuffed themselves by creating a schedule to require them to use an existing ID/IQ rather than going with a normal negotiated procurement,” Amey told the Examiner.
“By putting in tight turn-around times, creating something that was brand new in a year, they had a very tight schedule that required them to use the existing contract rather than starting from scratch,” Amey said.
But was there really competition? “In the multiple award ID/IQ world, you do worry about whether there is actual competition generally in the task order stage,” he says.
CGI is a relatively new company in the United States. Its Canadian executives grew their corporate U.S. presence through major acquisitions of U.S. companies.
The first acquisition came in 2004 when CGI purchased American Management Systems Inc. for $858 million in a cash tender offer that covered existing federal IT contracts in healthcare, financial services, and communications work.
In August 2010 CGI doubled its size again through the $1.07 billion cash tender offer to acquire Stanley Inc.
The first indication of questions of CGI performance and pricing came in February 2010 when the firm protested a $230 million CMS contract award to Computer Sciences Corp. Inc.
In a sharp rebuff to CGI in November 2010, General Accountability Office acting counsel Linda H. Gibson denied the CGI protest.
In doing so, she noted that CSC’s bid was $148 million versus CGI’s bid of $258 million. When CMS modified the terms of its proposal, CSC was still substantially lower, coming in at $223 million versus CGI’s price tag of $395 million.
Worse, Gibson noted that at the time CMS officials had only rated some of CGI's previous services as “fair.”
“The record reflects,” Gibson wrote in her 2010 decision, “that CGI's positive ratings were somewhat tempered by the fact that [DELETED] had received 'fair' ratings on one of its relevant contracts and that CGI's performance had also been rated as "fair" on another contract, which CMS deemed relevant.”
As the Examiner previously reported, CGI in Canada also suffered embarrassment in 2011 when it failed to deliver on time for Ontario province's flagship project a new online medical registry for diabetes patients and treatment providers.
Ontario government officials cancelled the $46.2 million contract after 14 months of delay in September 2012. Ontario officials currently refuse to pay any fees to CGI for the failed IT project.
live and let live...unless it violates the pearligious doctrine.
As of right now...
Obamacare is nothing but a fucking DISASTER!
And anyone who cant admit this, needs to have their head pulled out of their ass.
Take me piece by piece..... Till there aint nothing left worth taking away from me.....
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 36,358
per week through my work hasnt changed but a couple things did, HRA did used to be started at 500 and tacked on bonus of 250 for meeting certain "wellness" goals. Now thats reversed. Also upped by 500 the max out of pocket per year.
not saying one way or the other about this law. but I thought this was interesting from GF's thread about quotes....
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
There's a difference between the whole of ACA being a failure and the failure of a web page. It makes sense to me to wait until next year to start assessing how successful or unsuccessful it is. Probably June 2014 will have some actual information to go off of.
It should be interesting in January when the budget issue comes back up and Republicans will try to make an argument to take away people's insurance.
We were labeled terrorist before the failed website.
By who?
...reid said anarchist.
This wagon said this.
Senior White House Adviser Dan Pfeifer said: “What we’re not for [is] negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest. We’re not going to do that.”
live and let live...unless it violates the pearligious doctrine.
0
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hedonist
standing on the edge of forever Posts: 24,524
Isn't the website a bridge to the ACA?
That, or phone?
We here have had no luck getting a foot in...and I wear a mere 6-1/2.
We want in, goddamnit! Actually, he needs in...will, at some point and many others are in the same canoe.
Beavers...your comment about June 2014. That's when we'll have a better grasp on whether this was a success or failure?
For all that was supposedly put into this HUGE undertaking...what grand and glorious fuckery.
We here have had no luck getting a foot in...and I wear a mere 6-1/2.
We want in, goddamnit! Actually, he needs in...will, at some point and many others are in the same canoe.
Beavers...your comment about June 2014. That's when we'll have a better grasp on whether this was a success or failure?
For all that was supposedly put into this HUGE undertaking...what grand and glorious fuckery.
I threw June out there because that's when people will have been paying and utilizing their insurance for awhile. Right now, people are just trying to buy tickets, but the show isn't for another few months. It's too early to say the show sucks.
0
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hedonist
standing on the edge of forever Posts: 24,524
I threw June out there because that's when people will have been paying and utilizing their insurance for awhile. Right now, people are just trying to buy tickets, but the show isn't for another few months. It's too early to say the show sucks.
But the folks trying to sell the tickets are the ones running the show, no? Producing it?
My fingers are crossed that the end product won't be as abysmal as its poorly-planned beginning.
I threw June out there because that's when people will have been paying and utilizing their insurance for awhile. Right now, people are just trying to buy tickets, but the show isn't for another few months. It's too early to say the show sucks.
But the folks trying to sell the tickets are the ones running the show, no? Producing it?
My fingers are crossed that the end product won't be as abysmal as its poorly-planned beginning.
The state's only involved on the front end when getting people signed up. Private insurance companies follow through on the coverage and reimbursement to providers (within the guidelines set by the ACA).
Wow. I just read on NBC that the administration had expected all along that roughly 50 to 75% of insured Americans will lose their existing coverage because of this bullshit law. One insider said they had anticipated as many as 80% would lose their coverage within the first year.
Unbelievable.
People are stupid for supporting ANY of these idiots.
We lost our insurance about 5 years ago, with the exception of one year in which I was lucky enough to gain coverage through an employer. My high deductible was met December 27th. Overall my year of insurance increased my out of pocket expenses $14,000 that year.
I gave up and just paid cash for years, but some months prescriptions alone cost over $400. It can be untenable.
I've tried to stay out of this debate. I don't think the plan was put together well, especially with politicians exempting themselves from it. That tells a story. But given my current financial state and our new state of residence, my girls and I now qualify for a reasonable plan and get a little tax credit to make it affordable. It's hard to continue the anti- obamacare debate with people when at the moment it's actually looking like it might help us. But it looks like we're a minority.
My heart goes out to those in the opposite situation as ours.
We were labeled terrorist before the failed website.
By who?
...reid said anarchist.
This wagon said this.
Senior White House Adviser Dan Pfeifer said: “What we’re not for [is] negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest. We’re not going to do that.”
Er, no. You were labelled that for trying to run the country and the entire world economy off a cliff in response to this single issue. He was absolutely right. For all your incessant whining about ACA, the consequences of your brinksmanship would have been far worse than the thing you were trying to fight.
Wow. I just read on NBC that the administration had expected all along that roughly 50 to 75% of insured Americans will lose their existing coverage because of this bullshit law. One insider said they had anticipated as many as 80% would lose their coverage within the first year.
Unbelievable.
People are stupid for supporting ANY of these idiots.
Don't worry. They say it will all be fixed by the end of November ... although they didn't clarify which calendar year it would fall under ...
:think:
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hedonist
standing on the edge of forever Posts: 24,524
Don't worry. They say it will all be fixed by the end of November ... although they didn't clarify which calendar year it would fall under ...
:think:
Yeah. I have zero faith and confidence in anything they're pledging on this.
I'm fortunate that my premiums increased only 10% (my company is picking up the HUGE difference for now), but my husband's COBRA plan is up soon - rate of $550 per month - and to add him to mine will cost $600. Started shopping around but can't even get information from the official website.
Don't worry. They say it will all be fixed by the end of November ... although they didn't clarify which calendar year it would fall under ...
:think:
Yeah. I have zero faith and confidence in anything they're pledging on this.
I'm fortunate that my premiums increased only 10% (my company is picking up the HUGE difference for now), but my husband's COBRA plan is up soon - rate of $550 per month - and to add him to mine will cost $600. Started shopping around but can't even get information from the official website.
"Affordable" Care Act, my ass.
His is $550, to put him on yours is $600, and then your complaint is with the ACA? but you don't even know what a plan for him would cost in the new system?
10% increases in premiums has been pretty routine for about the last 10 to 15 years.
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hedonist
standing on the edge of forever Posts: 24,524
Yeah. I have zero faith and confidence in anything they're pledging on this.
I'm fortunate that my premiums increased only 10% (my company is picking up the HUGE difference for now), but my husband's COBRA plan is up soon - rate of $550 per month - and to add him to mine will cost $600. Started shopping around but can't even get information from the official website.
"Affordable" Care Act, my ass.
His is $550, to put him on yours is $600, and then your complaint is with the ACA? but you don't even know what a plan for him would cost in the new system?
10% increases in premiums has been pretty routine for about the last 10 to 15 years.
My complaint (one of them) is that by now, we SHOULD know what the cost would be.
And the 10% increase in my case is only what was passed on to the employees in my company. As said above, there was a drastic increase that my company is generously covering.
Look, I admire anyone who can maintain optimism in the midst of this clusterfuck. I'm just not one of them.
I'm not one for media biased conspiracies and such, but when CBS and NBC are running stories like this, and the one that I posted about, it really has to make you wonder how bad the situation really is.
I wonder when people will finally begin to understand...the government isn't smarter than you...they don't know what is better for you...they can't provide for you...and they don't care about you.
I'm not one for media biased conspiracies and such, but when CBS and NBC are running stories like this, and the one that I posted about, it really has to make you wonder how bad the situation really is.
I wonder when people will finally begin to understand...the government isn't smarter than you...they don't know what is better for you...they can't provide for you...and they don't care about you.
I'm not one for media biased conspiracies and such, but when CBS and NBC are running stories like this, and the one that I posted about, it really has to make you wonder how bad the situation really is.
I wonder when people will finally begin to understand...the government isn't smarter than you...they don't know what is better for you...they can't provide for you...and they don't care about you.
You mean the federal government lied to us to get an agenda through? Not really new, and for me it's lower on the scale than yellow cake uranium. I suppose what we're seeing is people in a panic about being in uninsured limbo come January 1st, which is understandable.
Was she the sole responsible person who authorized $500M for a website and earmarked $2,000,000,000 to run it in 2014? If so, I find her to be quite remarkable. If not, I wonder what her kickback will be for taking one for the team?
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hedonist
standing on the edge of forever Posts: 24,524
Was she the sole responsible person who authorized $500M for a website and earmarked $2,000,000,000 to run it in 2014? If so, I find her to be quite remarkable. If not, I wonder what her kickback will be for taking one for the team?
I wonder the same.
And this kinda pisses me off - "She said that the site has never “crashed” but is functional — just unreliable and slow."
Oh, okay. Something can be functional but unreliable; this makes complete sense.
And this kinda pisses me off - "She said that the site has never “crashed” but is functional — just unreliable and slow."
Oh, okay. Something can be functional but unreliable; this makes complete sense.
While she was testifying, CNN did a split-screen of her talking and the Care.Gov Website ... which was displaying "The System Is Down for the Moment. Please Try Again Later"
Sebelius was asked if she would enroll in ACA insurance and she answered that she could not because she was enrolled in her workplace insurance program .... AND SHE WAS WRONG!!! She can! It gives directions on the website how to do so!
How could she get that question wrong. She is supposed to be the MFIC.
:?
No one knows how this thing works. Romneycare worked in a state that has just over six million residents and they just assumed it would work when rolled out to over 300 million residents.
I don't fault them. Hell, it's only a plan that makes the bible look like a sunday toilet read and whose sparse details on how it works only came out about three years after it was signed a law. What could go wrong?
So the Repulicans don't like it. And the website is shite. But can somebody who isn't a money chaser please explain to me why everybody, should not have health care.
If somebody goes into emergency and can't afford the bill after having their life saved, who picks up that bill? And if it is indeed the tax payer, then what is the problem of having everybody under the umbrella?
The poison from the poison stream caught up to you ELEVEN years ago and you floated out of here. Sept. 14, 08
Comments
It's not that difficult. We have smart people that can do analysis. They don't work in Congress, but there are smart people out there. Two steps:
1) Take a look at countries with good healthcare systems. What makes them cost efficient?
2) Take a look at our current system. What are the factors that make it costly?
"If you like your plan you can keep your plan".
Lie #49723584
BY: Richard Pollock October 14, 2013 | 5:00 am
LEAVE A COMMENT
315
Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.
CGI FEDERAL ACCOUNTABILITY WATCHDOG
Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.
Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.
CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.
Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.
CGI was one of 16 companies that had been qualified by HHS during President George W. Bush's second term to deliver, without public competition, a variety of hardware, software and communication products and services.
In awarding the Healthcare.gov contract, CMS relied on a little-known federal contracting system called ID/IQ, which is government jargon for “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.”
CGI was a much smaller vendor when it was approved by HHS in 2007. With the approval, CGI became eligible for multiple awards without public notice and in circumvention of the normal competitive bidding procurement process.
The multiple awards were in the form of “task orders” for projects of widely varying size. Over the life of the CGI contract — which expires in 2017 — the IT firm can receive awards worth anywhere from the “$1,000 to $4 billion,” according to a contracting document provided by CGI to the Washington Examiner.
This is apparently the route chosen by CMS officials in awarding the Obamacare Healthcare.gov website design contract to CGI.
Between 2009 and 2013, CMS officials awarded 185 separate task orders to CGI totaling $678 million for work of all kinds, according to USAspending.gov, a federal spending database.The Obamacare website design contract was for $93 million.
There is no evidence CMS issued any public solicitation for the Obamacare website contract. The Examiner asked both CMS and CGI for copies of any public solicitation notice for the Healthcare.gov task orders. Neither CMS nor CGI furnished any such public notice.
Linda Odorisio, CGI’s vice president for global communications insisted in an email to the Examiner that the Obmacare Healthcare.gov project had multiple bidders.
“There were at least two bidders, we believe three, for the task order. That is all the information I have,” she said.
Similarly, CMS spokesman Tasha Bradley declined to provide a public solicitation document, saying the only way to obtain such a document would be to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.
It is not uncommon for federal officials to delay responses to FOIA requests for years, provide useless documents instead of those requested, or use the legal system to prevent public access.
The ID/IQ system provides a fast-track contract approval process, but it is much less likely than competitive bidding to secure high quality at a reasonable cost.
“Whenever you have limited competition, but certainly with a sole source or a one-bid offer, the government has to question whether it is going to get the best product at the best price,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog organization that monitors federal contracting.
Both USAspending.gov, which tracks federal spending, and the FFATA Subaward Reporting System, which specifically tracks contracts, refer to CGI as the lone bidder for the Obamacare website design award.
Each site describes the CGI contract award as the product of “full and open competition,” but CGI is the only bidder listed.
Amey suggested that CMS officials linked the “full and open competition” to the original 2007 ID/IQ process.
“They certainly could have handcuffed themselves by creating a schedule to require them to use an existing ID/IQ rather than going with a normal negotiated procurement,” Amey told the Examiner.
“By putting in tight turn-around times, creating something that was brand new in a year, they had a very tight schedule that required them to use the existing contract rather than starting from scratch,” Amey said.
But was there really competition? “In the multiple award ID/IQ world, you do worry about whether there is actual competition generally in the task order stage,” he says.
CGI is a relatively new company in the United States. Its Canadian executives grew their corporate U.S. presence through major acquisitions of U.S. companies.
The first acquisition came in 2004 when CGI purchased American Management Systems Inc. for $858 million in a cash tender offer that covered existing federal IT contracts in healthcare, financial services, and communications work.
In August 2010 CGI doubled its size again through the $1.07 billion cash tender offer to acquire Stanley Inc.
The first indication of questions of CGI performance and pricing came in February 2010 when the firm protested a $230 million CMS contract award to Computer Sciences Corp. Inc.
In a sharp rebuff to CGI in November 2010, General Accountability Office acting counsel Linda H. Gibson denied the CGI protest.
In doing so, she noted that CSC’s bid was $148 million versus CGI’s bid of $258 million. When CMS modified the terms of its proposal, CSC was still substantially lower, coming in at $223 million versus CGI’s price tag of $395 million.
Worse, Gibson noted that at the time CMS officials had only rated some of CGI's previous services as “fair.”
“The record reflects,” Gibson wrote in her 2010 decision, “that CGI's positive ratings were somewhat tempered by the fact that [DELETED] had received 'fair' ratings on one of its relevant contracts and that CGI's performance had also been rated as "fair" on another contract, which CMS deemed relevant.”
As the Examiner previously reported, CGI in Canada also suffered embarrassment in 2011 when it failed to deliver on time for Ontario province's flagship project a new online medical registry for diabetes patients and treatment providers.
Ontario government officials cancelled the $46.2 million contract after 14 months of delay in September 2012. Ontario officials currently refuse to pay any fees to CGI for the failed IT project.
Obamacare is nothing but a fucking DISASTER!
And anyone who cant admit this, needs to have their head pulled out of their ass.
Till there aint nothing left worth taking away from me.....
not saying one way or the other about this law. but I thought this was interesting from GF's thread about quotes....
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
We are labeled terrorists - for not supporting this
Let's ease up on drama. Polls suggest a lot of people must have their head up their ass:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/10/25/does-this-latest-obamacare-figure-surprise-you.aspx
There's a difference between the whole of ACA being a failure and the failure of a web page. It makes sense to me to wait until next year to start assessing how successful or unsuccessful it is. Probably June 2014 will have some actual information to go off of.
It should be interesting in January when the budget issue comes back up and Republicans will try to make an argument to take away people's insurance.
We were labeled terrorist before the failed website.
By who?
...reid said anarchist.
This wagon said this.
Senior White House Adviser Dan Pfeifer said: “What we’re not for [is] negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest. We’re not going to do that.”
That, or phone?
We here have had no luck getting a foot in...and I wear a mere 6-1/2.
We want in, goddamnit! Actually, he needs in...will, at some point and many others are in the same canoe.
Beavers...your comment about June 2014. That's when we'll have a better grasp on whether this was a success or failure?
For all that was supposedly put into this HUGE undertaking...what grand and glorious fuckery.
I threw June out there because that's when people will have been paying and utilizing their insurance for awhile. Right now, people are just trying to buy tickets, but the show isn't for another few months. It's too early to say the show sucks.
My fingers are crossed that the end product won't be as abysmal as its poorly-planned beginning.
The state's only involved on the front end when getting people signed up. Private insurance companies follow through on the coverage and reimbursement to providers (within the guidelines set by the ACA).
Unbelievable.
People are stupid for supporting ANY of these idiots.
I gave up and just paid cash for years, but some months prescriptions alone cost over $400. It can be untenable.
I've tried to stay out of this debate. I don't think the plan was put together well, especially with politicians exempting themselves from it. That tells a story. But given my current financial state and our new state of residence, my girls and I now qualify for a reasonable plan and get a little tax credit to make it affordable. It's hard to continue the anti- obamacare debate with people when at the moment it's actually looking like it might help us. But it looks like we're a minority.
My heart goes out to those in the opposite situation as ours.
Er, no. You were labelled that for trying to run the country and the entire world economy off a cliff in response to this single issue. He was absolutely right. For all your incessant whining about ACA, the consequences of your brinksmanship would have been far worse than the thing you were trying to fight.
:think:
I'm fortunate that my premiums increased only 10% (my company is picking up the HUGE difference for now), but my husband's COBRA plan is up soon - rate of $550 per month - and to add him to mine will cost $600. Started shopping around but can't even get information from the official website.
"Affordable" Care Act, my ass.
His is $550, to put him on yours is $600, and then your complaint is with the ACA? but you don't even know what a plan for him would cost in the new system?
10% increases in premiums has been pretty routine for about the last 10 to 15 years.
And the 10% increase in my case is only what was passed on to the employees in my company. As said above, there was a drastic increase that my company is generously covering.
Look, I admire anyone who can maintain optimism in the midst of this clusterfuck. I'm just not one of them.
Till there aint nothing left worth taking away from me.....
I'm not one for media biased conspiracies and such, but when CBS and NBC are running stories like this, and the one that I posted about, it really has to make you wonder how bad the situation really is.
I wonder when people will finally begin to understand...the government isn't smarter than you...they don't know what is better for you...they can't provide for you...and they don't care about you.
Till there aint nothing left worth taking away from me.....
You mean the federal government lied to us to get an agenda through? Not really new, and for me it's lower on the scale than yellow cake uranium. I suppose what we're seeing is people in a panic about being in uninsured limbo come January 1st, which is understandable.
"Hold me accountable for the debacle. I'm responsible," Sebelius said, under heated questioning from Rep. Marsha Blackburn
http://www.businessinsider.com/kathleen-sebelius-testimony-obamacare-website-debacle-2013-10
Was she the sole responsible person who authorized $500M for a website and earmarked $2,000,000,000 to run it in 2014? If so, I find her to be quite remarkable. If not, I wonder what her kickback will be for taking one for the team?
And this kinda pisses me off -
"She said that the site has never “crashed” but is functional — just unreliable and slow."
Oh, okay. Something can be functional but unreliable; this makes complete sense.
:fp:
http://www.businessinsider.com/kathleen-sebelius-healthcare-gov-testimony-obamacare-website-2013-10
How could she get that question wrong. She is supposed to be the MFIC.
:?
No one knows how this thing works. Romneycare worked in a state that has just over six million residents and they just assumed it would work when rolled out to over 300 million residents.
I don't fault them. Hell, it's only a plan that makes the bible look like a sunday toilet read and whose sparse details on how it works only came out about three years after it was signed a law. What could go wrong?
If somebody goes into emergency and can't afford the bill after having their life saved, who picks up that bill? And if it is indeed the tax payer, then what is the problem of having everybody under the umbrella?
The poison from the poison stream caught up to you ELEVEN years ago and you floated out of here. Sept. 14, 08