Obamacare “repeal and replace” may have failed this year, but that doesn’t mean the Affordable Care Act can’t be significantly defanged. For example, there is still time to excise the Independent Payment Advisory Board from the law before it is up and running.
Obamacare “repeal and replace” may have failed this year, but that doesn’t mean the Affordable Care Act can’t be significantly defanged. For example, there is still time to excise the Independent Payment Advisory Board from the law before it is up and running.
A new poll shows that less than a quarter of people surveyed support the GOP bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare.
The Congressional Budget Office on Monday dropped its highly-anticipated analysis of the House Republicans' healthcare plan, arming all sides with results that can back up their favorite talking points on healthcare. The CBO report, on the one hand, says that millions more people will be uninsured…
The words President Obama used to sell his signature initiative, Obamacare—"if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"—may end up the most memorable of his eight years in office. But according to information posted on Healthcare.gov, this "guarantee" from the president was wholly without…
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin is shuttering his state's Obamacare insurance marketplace, the freshly elected Republican announced Monday.
With the announcement Monday of a five-year, $563 million contract award to Accenture, the Healthcare.gov contractor that rescued the Obamacare marketplace after 2013's disastrous launch, the total cost of the site will well exceed $2.2 billion. The new award is on top of the $1.7 billion in…
The Associated Press reports that the Obama administration is admitting premiums for health-insurance plans sold on healthcare.gov will increase in 2015. Here's the AP:
As reported in Government Executive, in a new study:
As 2015 open enrollment for Obamacare nears, Healthcare.gov has been telling consumers that "plans and estimated prices for 2015 coverage will be available in early November." Although signup is not possible until November 15, the website promises this "window shopping" experience will come sooner:
Healthcare.gov continues to prepare for open enrollment beginning on November 15, hoping to avoid a repeat of the disastrous launch in 2013. Apparently the preparations include extra "scheduled" maintenance. Wednesday morning, the site displayed a message reading, "The system isn’t available right…
President Obama has had to acknowledge two big lies of the Affordable Care Act: (1) You could keep your health insurance plan; and (2) the HealthCare.gov website would be fully operational at launch. Unless he acts with urgency, he will also be forced to apologize for assuring us that personal data…
The federal government issued sixty contracts from 2009 to 2014 in efforts to build Healthcare.gov, the federal insurance marketplace. According to a report issued today by the inspector general (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the government had already paid out just…
Six health insurance executives testified on Capitol Hill today. And all six, each representing a different company, unanimously agreed: The Obamacare website is still not entirely fixed.
In October 2013, as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was launching Healthcare.gov, CMS also launched a quieter initiative. As part of Ignite, an internal HHS program designed to spur innovation, a team within…
Kathleen Sebelius had one final glitch on her way out the door. At her resignation celebtration at the White House Rose Garden today, she was missing the final page from her prepared remarks:
Healthcare.gov has eliminated the web chat customer service option. Sometime around the beginning of March, the online chat feature that has been present since Healthcare.gov was launched disappeared. Although previous posts on the Healthcare.gov blog still refer to the "live chat" feature, the…
The top referrer to Healthcare.gov right now is the website Funny or Die. That's according to White House senior communications advisor Tara McGuinness.
For now, the "one-stop shopping" experience at Healthcare.gov repeatedly promised by President Obama is still at least one stop short of the goal. In early January, news reports revealed a glaring shortcoming at Healthcare.gov: no function existed to report "life events," such as the birth of a…
Late last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Hewlett-Packard was replacing Verizon's Terremark subsidiary as the host of the federal government's Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, when Terremark's contract expired in March 2014. However, the Department of Health and Human…
Details of the Healthcare.gov rescue in the fall of 2013 continue to dribble out via months-old contracts and modifications posted online. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) exercised two contract modifications in quick succession in October/November to increase the cloud…
Consumers whose sign-ups on the HealthCare.gov website left them convinced that:
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that Accenture Federal Services would be taking over for CGI Federal as the main contractor for Healthcare.gov. CMS documents reveal that without the new estimated $91.1 million contract, the government could end up making…
Six days into the new year and fourteen days after the extended December 23 deadline, the federal Obamacare website Healthcare.gov is still holding out hope of coverage beginning January 1 to some consumers. The notice, which first appeared on December 24, advises consumers who had "problems" with…
After a month of trying, I still can't complete an application to join the D.C. Health Exchange. For a week, the Obamacare marketplace asked me to prove my citizenship, my daughter's existence, and my fixed address in the District of Columbia, but it would not allow me to submit the requested…
As the full breadth of the Healthcare.gov debacle became apparent, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) turned to the architect of the Federal Data Hub to lead the team of contractors to fix the woefully inadequate website that had disastrously launched just weeks before.…
President Obama did not use Healthcare.gov to sign up for Obamacare. Instead, he sent his people to sign him up for the D.C. health care exchange in person.
The Washington Examiner reports:
The Healthcare.gov website has been plagued with problems since the October 1 launch. As web programmers often do, the designers of the federal government's flagship health care website have a test version of the site, spa.healthcare.gov, to help work out the kinks before implementation on the…
Oregon, once touted as a model for President Obama's health care law, signed up just 44 people for insurance through November, despite spending more than $300 million on its state-based exchange.
The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on Obamacare and why more speeches by the president will not save it.
The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on President Obama's speech to the press today on the problems plaguing Healthcare.gov and Obamacare.
Peter Doocy of Fox News reports that Healthcare.gov has not been working properly today:
In an interview with Barbara Walters on Friday, President Obama again acknowledged problems with the roll out of the Obamacare website Healthcare.gov. At one point, the president referred to Healthcare.gov as "my website" (via CNN):
Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer says the president won't be attending the Gettysburg address anniversary today because the "whole website thing." He appears to be talking about the ongoing problems with the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov.
Vice President Joe Biden says that "God willing" the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, will be fixed. He made the remarks at the Port of Houston today.
When the Obama administration launched the Healthcare.gov website on October 1, the president and his officials focused on the coverage that would now be available to the uninsured as of January 1, 2014. However, with the recent flood of cancellations of those who were told they could "keep their…
Americans are methodically dealing with the Kübler-Ross stages of Obama-care grief, with our national healing process moving briskly through roughly one stage per week: (1) denial upon realizing that the website HealthCare.gov didn’t work; (2) anger at the realization that the technical back-end of…
The federal health insurance exchange website created by Obamacare has been a "complete disaster" said CNN analyst Gloria Borger. Speaking on Jake Tapper's program Wednesday afternoon, Borger was asked to respond to the enrollment numbers released by the administration following the first month of…
WRTV in Indiana reports that a man has tried for 6 weeks to sign up for Obamacare, but is still unable to:
The launch of the health exchanges has produced diverse images of failure: blank screens, improperly released Social Security numbers; a White House official undermining congressional oversight on September 6, 2013, with a phony security certification; and political appointees blaming their…
The rallying cry among those who still believe in Obamacare, and that it will fundamentally transform health care in America, like to say of the program’s current problems, “It’s just a web site.” Implying that it can, like the transmission on your automobile, be fixed and you can then proceed to…
As surely as the Obamacare rollout has been a disaster, the calls are now ringing throughout Washington, especially in conservative ranks, for Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to resign. It won’t happen. And if The Scrapbook has its way, it shouldn’t happen, either.
President Obama said that "I've been burned already with-- a website," before correcting himself and saying, "the American people have been burned by -- a website that has been dysfunctional." He made the comments in an interview with MSNBC host Chuck Todd.
Justin Hadley was using the Obamacare website when he was accidentally sent "eligibility letters" addressed to other people -- in other states.
The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on his view from the bleachers at game six of the world series and the failure of the President's promise on keeping your health insurance policy if you like it, and whether the president will sacrifice part of Obamacare to help the…
The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the world series and the political environment in the wake of many Americans having their health insurance policy cancelled.
When Kathleen Sebelius testified at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, she acknowledged the presence of a worrisome statement included in the source code of Healthcare.gov and promised that work was already underway to remove it. A search of one portion of the code later on Wednesday revealed…
Obama administration officials produced a memo documenting security concerns with healthcare.gov, the health insurance exchange website, the Associated Press reports:
At a hearing on Capitol Hill, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said that the Obamacare website has "never crashed."
This from the Department of Making Chicken Salad out of Chicken Feathers:
Sylvia Burwell, director of the Office of Management and Budget, refused to guarantee that the Obamacare website will be fixed by December 15:
The Obamacare rollout is going about as well as the introduction of New Coke or the merger of Time and AOL or … take your pick. Just how bad is it? Well, the administration won't tell. Just doesn't, it appears, want to talk about it.
CNN reported last night that HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius will make time to attend a gala in Boston, but is too busy to testify on Capitol Hill about Obamacare:
Yuval Levin explains what's going on with healthcare.gov at National Review Online:
Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted the roll-out of Obamacare today on MSNBC:
The launch of federal government's Obamacare insurance exchange, Healthcare.gov, has been plagued with delays, errors, and poor website design, even prompting USA Today to call it an "inexcusable mess" and a "nightmare". Now comes another example of why the website's reputation is in tatters.…