Author: Robert Zimmerman

Obamacare and the unstoppable project.

On multiple occasions over the past 18 years, I have been that IT consultant yelling “Stop!” to a client (sometimes a software developer, sometimes a customer) who very much does not want to hear that. In one instance, the executive vice-president in the charge of the project I had just spent a few months reviewing walked out of the meeting in which I was presenting my findings in order to track down and destroy all copies of the report containing those findings. Likewise, I’ve had a few engagements that have ended abruptly due to my insistence on honesty and reality, but I sleep well at night, so the trade-off is excellent.

Stick around till the end, because the Dilbert cartoon there encapsulates everything we know about how today’s federal government operates: “You should buy twice as much.”

You think their website is bad? The Obama administration has had to issue 254 corrections to its own Obamacare regulations.

The damage wasn’t limited to little-used regulatory language that needed to be fixed of careless mistakes. The medical loss ratio requirement has been hotly debated as a tool to limit insurance companies’ profitability. Billed by The Washington Post as the “provision that terrifies insurers,” the policy forces insurance companies to spend a mandated percentage of patient premiums on patient care in order to keep premiums artificially low. Twenty-four corrections were issued to the Medical Loss Ratio rule alone. Some parts of the regulations were “technically inaccurate and [conflicted] with language elsewhere,” according to Batkins. Some corrections had to be corrected again later on.

The report pointed to the real-world effects of mistakes in the dense regulations, specifically federal officials’ assumption that it would take 28 minutes to complete an online application via the federal exchange, which turned out to be drastically wrong. [emphasis mine]

Remember, the word “regulation” is really about control and power. One entity, the government, gets to regulate the behavior of others. The problem is that this particular government, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, is wholly incompetent.

President Obama’s new big lie.

The article, which outlines why Obama’s claim that all those canceled insurance plans are “substandard” is an outright lie, also had these two paragraphs scream out at me:

Cancer patients whose plans are cancelled are getting whacked the hardest. They are losing access to the specialized cancer hospitals and oncologists treating them. And they will get meager help, if any, paying for innovative cancer drugs that cost thousands of dollars.

The most troubling provision in Obamacare’s Section 1311 gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services blanket authority to control how doctors and hospitals treat patients. This is all in the name of improving “quality.” This could mean everything in medicine.

Ain’t it great how the Democrats have stood by this law from day one?

It is time to start considering the worst case scenario for Obamacare,

that the exchanges continue to malfunction, that plan cancellations go into effect, that insurers see the political winds shifting and stop playing nice with the administration, and that significant numbers of people are left stranded without coverage as a result. Rather than reforming the individual market, which was flawed but did work for some people, Obamacare will have destroyed it and left only dysfunction and chaos in its wake.

The article looks hard at the situation, and sees nothing but disaster. The policies that have been cancelled cannot be reinstated easily, if at all. The people whose policies have been cancelled cannot enroll in a new plan because of the failure of the Obamacare website. The result: Come January large numbers of Americans who once had catastrophic health insurance — to protect themselves against a sudden health emergency — will no longer have that insurance and will be exposed.

The Democrats wanted this, they created this, they demanded this, and now they have given us this. And in a sane world there would be no doubt that come November they would be fired for this. Sadly, I have doubts it is a sane world.

72 absurd items Obamacare requires your health insurance to cover.

Want to know why Obamacare has forced premiums to skyrocket? Besides forcing insurance companies to provide insurance to those already sick, the law also requires everyone to get the services listed in the article above, most of which no one wants.

I am so glad the Democrats forced this law upon us, and then shut the government down so that it would go into effect on time!

The future: Getting rid of health insurance and paying your doctor direct.

The only good that might come from Obamacare is that it will so mess up the healthcare insurance industry that medical treatment will be forced to return to the simpler and more efficient system where the patient buys the doctor’s services direct and no insurance is involved.

Four things the U.S. government did faster than building the Obamacare website.

I’ll give you a hint: None of them were done during Obama’s administration. And all of them were far more challenging that writing the software for a webpage.