Mine’s Fine. The Others Are the Problem
Nov 28 2013 | Posted in Items | Read More »
What Became of Tax Reform?
Nov 28 2013 | Posted in Items | Read More »
Problems With Obamacare Exchange Run Deeper Than Admitted
In mid-October, Health & Human Services chief Kathleen Sebelius said it would take “weeks” to fix the federal exchange. We said it would take months.
On October 30 she said we were assured the system would be running smoothly by November 30. Marilyn Tavenner, the official charged with the site’s development, said the same a week later.
But with that date fast approaching, the president in a Update: Dec. 3: The Obama administration says it has met its November 30 deadline, that 50,000 can now access the insurance exchange simultaneously and 800,000 daily. But the “back end” that connects to insurers is causing problems — something akin to what we describe in this article and have been speculating since the system’s launch. The administration finally released figures: 106,185 had signed up, but only 26,794 via the federal exchange. Meanwhile, in China 11/11 has become a major shopping day for lonely single men who relate to all those 1s in the date. They splurge on electronic gear, cameras, and so on. Alibaba is China’s Amazon. Its website reported successfully handling 402 million unique visitors on that single day. Obamacare claims it can now handle 25,000 at once. Why did we say “months”?
No one has come forward with a technical explanation, and those testifying before Congress as well as the president are technically clueless, so we are left to speculate. But there are hints that our surmise of a
All exchanges, federal and state, have in common the need to query federal databases — the IRS to corroborate declared income, other agencies to find out if an applicant is enrolled in other assistance programs, etc. — to determine whether the applicant is eligible for subsidies or for Medicaid or to buy on the exchange at all. Our guess, then an now, is that is where the deepest snafus lie. We said this shortly after the exchange debuted: What undoubtedly makes the system frighteningly complex is not the logic paths that the code must follow to gather its information, but the connections it must make. When the code knows at a certain point to reach out to a particular federal database, it may have found that its target runs on a different and incompatible platform — a stumbling block that the industry calls “interoperability”. As the clock ticked, system designers had to coordinate with that agency or department to find a way into that database, and if lacking, wait for it to be developed. That external data fiefdom will have its own validating ID, password protocols and data format to work through, slowing access. Worst of all, the target system may itself not have been engineered to handle heavy loads; there may be bottlenecks all over the network making sign-up perennially slow and difficult to fix.
The need for such coordination, multiplied times the number of external contact points that could be needed for the universe of applicants, makes for a very tangled web. It is our guess that here lies the deeper problems that could take a very long time to straighten out, which is why we said months, not weeks.
The debacle was so avoidable, starting at the top. Saddled with a Congress that blocks everything he had hoped to do, the President hoped at least to claim the Affordable Care Act as his one crowning achievement. Yet he has more than once said “I was not informed directly” as he did say in the latest press conference. No one in the media, more concerned with preserving access to power, asks the personal question: “Mr. President, why hadn’t you tried to access the system?”. And done so months ago, and each month thereafter, and then weekly as the October 1 deadline grew near? This was his baby and he allowed it to miscarry through utter inattention as to its health. Yet he wasn’t even interested in whether it worked. He could have called for delays months ago, with minor consequences.
And they called George W. Bush the incurious president?
news conference just said, “The website will work much better on November 30th….I am confident that by the time we look back on this next year that people are going to say this is working well”. Speaking as the president, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart said, “Let me be clear. When I said end of November, I did not say which November”.
few weeks ago may be correct. Why else would the state exchanges, created separately, also be having difficulties “often mirroring the issues plaguing the much larger federal exchange”, says The New York Times. Oregon says their system has problems determining whether people qualify for subsidies or Medicaid. Colorado’s experience is much the same. Others report error message as they wend their way through the system. None of these problems have to do with accessing the system, which was the original calamity; they are problems in the system’s innards.
Nov 15 2013 | Posted in Reform | Read More »
Obama v. Leakers and the Press:
Bad as Nixon Says Journalism Group
In the wake of the government shutdown and the threat of the U.S. defaulting on its debt, a report on the Obama administration’s hostility toward the press and its 
reporters went by hardly noticed. The report is a formal statement in support of what the media have contended all along — that the Obama regime’s aggressive actions against press freedom has introduced a climate of fear that inhibits both journalists and sources alike. ”The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration”, says the author, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. The general counsel of The New York Times at the time it published the Pentagon papers, James Goodale, has elsewhere said “President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom”.
Accused of leaking classified information to the press, eight current or former government employees have been targeted by the Obama Justice Department in felony criminal prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act, an Act that has been used only three times in all previous U.S. administrations. And now two more have been added: Edward Snowden and another contractor.
More investigations are in progress. We saw in May that the Justice Department had secretly purloined the call records of phone lines belonging to the Associated Press and its reporters seeking the source of a leak about a bomb plot in Yemen. It had also secretly pilfered the phone logs and e-mails of James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent of Fox News with implications that Rosen had conspired to cause a leak. The department continues to press its case against David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent ofThe New York Times, for refusing to reveal a source, perhaps also as retribution for revealing the Stuxnet virus that caused Iran’s centrifuges to fail.
These prosecutions, coupled with the electronic surveillance of all forms of communication that was revealed by Snowden, have caused sources of even mundane government doings to no longer answer their phones. The knowledge that their every call and e-mail is recorded by an omnipresent government has induced an atmosphere of paranoia that makes government officials fearful of talking to the press on any matter. The pledge to protect sources that reporters regard as sacred is rendered irrelevant when a government has the ability to track down their phone connections and read their e-mail. Scott Shane of The New York Times tells Downie, “Most people are deterred by those leaks prosecutions. They’re scared to death… If we consider aggressive press coverage of government activities being at the core of American democracy, this tips the balance heavily in favor of the government.”
The danger of this chilling effect is that we no longer can see inside government, a government, such as this one, that refuses interviews and deflects reporters by sending them to its websites as their only source of information. Increasingly, all we will know is what the government wants us to know.
In fact, the report says, the administration does not leave it to the chill effect to shut the public out. A government employee merely suspected of talking to the press is open to investigation, lie detector tests and scrutiny of e-mail and phone records. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, has ordered that employees of all sixteen intelligence agencies be asked in routine lie detector tests whether they have disclosed any classified information. Much like police re-opening cold case files, a new inspector general overseeing all those agencies is investigating past leak cases that failed to produce Justice Department prosecutions — some 375 unresolved according to a classified report to Clapper — to look for alternative ways to seek redress. The administration has created an “Insider Threat Program” that orders employees throughout the government to monitor fellow workers and report any suspicions.
A rundown of cases and government actions follows, from the report, our earlier articles on this subject, and what has come to light since:
The report was published by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). It narrates the multiple actions of the Obama administration against leakers and journalists, the first occurring just three months after the president’s inauguration when a Hebrew linguist under contract with the FBI was sentenced to a 20-month prison term for leaking classified information about Israel to a blogger. No further information was ever divulged.
The worst instance of the oppressive hand of government is the case against Thomas Drake, a whistleblower who provided documents to a Baltimore Sun journalist while at NSA when his report of waste went unheeded by NSA and “a sympathetic congressional investigator, to no avail”. Drake told the reporter of the government’s intention to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to an outside vendor to develop data monitoring software instead of using an internal product that cost far less and was less invasive of privacy. For this attempt to save taxpayer money and conceivable corruption, Drake was looking at 35 years in prison for revealing classified information which, in fact, was not. One of the charges against him was even for “making false statements” by his insisting that the documents were not classified. The case was so weak — the judge called it “unconscionable” that Drake and his family had endured “four years of hell” — that the government settled for a face-saving misdemeanor charge, but Drake had already been fired, had lost his pension and was ruined financially by legal costs.
The longest ongoing case is the Justice Department’s effort to force the Times’ James Risen to identify in court a former CIA officer as the source of leaking a failed CIA effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. Twice Pulitzer winner Risen had written of it in a book published seven years ago, yet he is pursued to this day. In July 2011, a federal district court ruled that Risen must testify to the accuracy of his reporting, but could not be compelled to reveal his source. But the Obama administration appealed. In support of Risen, 29 news organizations and groups documented the many “national security and government accountability news stories over the years that could not have been reported by the press without confidential sources”. Yet this July, a three-judge panel of the appeals court of the fourth circuit in Richmond, Va., reversed the earlier decision 2 to 1. Risen has asked that the full appellate court of 15 judges hear the case, vowing to go to jail rather than testify against his source.
In 2009 chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, James Rosen, reported that North Korea was about to conduct another nuclear test. A Justice Department investigation resulted in a 2010 indictment of a State Department analyst named Stephen Jin-Woo Kim for giving classified information to Rosen, again using the most severe weapon in its arsenal, the Espionage Act. Not until this year was it discovered by The Washington Post that the Justice Department had secretly seized Rosen’s phone records and e-mail, and for an extended time, to discover Kim as the source. To win a court’s subpoena to do so, a department affidavit had claimed “probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed or is committing a violation” of the Espionage Act “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator”. The government had crossed a line and was now accusing the press of the crime of committing journalism.
A close rival to Drake’s maltreatment at the hands of the Obama enforcers was the persecution of former CIA agent John Kiriakou. In 2012, five felony counts accused him of disclosing classified information and revealing to journalists the names of two CIA agents that he mistakenly believed were no longer at the agency. Kiriakou was not just another agent. In the midst of a bloody shootout in 2002, he had stormed a house in Pakistan, captured a badly wounded man, and sent a cell phone photo of his ear that identified the captive as Abu Zubaydah, a prize catch in the early moments of the new war against al Qaeda. The Obama government has chosen to forget that he risked his life for his country because Kiriakou since revealed that Zubaydah had been waterboarded. That occurred under the Bush administration, but although Obama has banned torture, he decreed on coming into office that “we should look forward, not backward” and declined to investigate any CIA operatives for violations of the Geneva Conventions and international law. Thus, while the two agents walk free of prosecution, it is Kiriakou who is spending 30 months in prison for revealing their names. CIA boss at the time, David Petraeus, celebrated the sentencing calling it “an important victory for our agency, for our intelligence community, and for the country” against those who “believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers” no matter their conduct.
The case of Army private Bradley (now called Chelsea) Manning is well known. He pleaded guilty of releasing his download of 250,000 State Department dispatches and half a million military incident reports to Wikileaks, but the government again went for the extreme of the Espionage Act. The judge threw out the Act’s maximum charge of “aiding and abetting the enemy” — the government could not come up with a single instance as proof — yet nevertheless sentenced Manning to 35 years in prison. That what Manning released contained a film of Apache helicopters over Baghdad killing a group of armed men and two Reuters correspondents in their midst, as well as material that shed light on a more brutal military than the Pentagon would like us to know of, made the over-sentencing by a military court look vengeful.
Another consideration is the question of just how classified is “classified”? By 2011, over 4 million Americans had security clearances giving them access to classified material and the U.S. had 92 million more supposedly secret items to add to the classified repository that year, says the CPJ report. If everything is secret and so many Americans are in on the secrets, just what is the damage wrought by Chelsea Manning?
A 2012 Associated Press story revealed that the CIA had penetrated an al Qaeda group in Yemen that had developed an underwear bomb to explode aboard a U.S. commercial flight. The AP cooperated by holding the story for five days to protect the covert operation, and when it broke, the White House spoke of it openly, congratulating the CIA. Yet in its own covert operation, the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed and grabbed two months of call records for 20 phone lines and switches of the AP’s company and personal phones that swept up “thousands upon thousands of newsgathering calls” by more than a hundred AP journalists, said AP President Gary Pruitt on CBS News’ “Face the Nation”. The Justice Department only made its action known to AP three months after the sweep. It used the records to extract a guilty plea from a former FBI agent for leaking the bomb plot.
Denied bail, Barrett Brown, a freelance writer whose work has apperarted in a number of national publications, sits in prison awaiting trial on charges that would keep him there for 105 years. The FBI’s pileup of dubious counts even include obstruction of justice for being at his mother’s when the initial warrant was served. His real crime, at least in the eyes of the government, is the practice of investigative journalism. Hackers broke into and downloaded the files of two firms, HBGary and Stratfor, that sell to corporations global intelligence but also advice on techniques they can use to spread disinformation and discredit critics and activist groups. The troves were so vast that Brown set up a website named ProjectPM and invited journalists to probe their contents by crowd sourcing. Their discoveries reveal how closely tied is the federal government to such private security firms. The most serious “crime” is that Brown merely posted a link to the material on ProjectPM’s private chat channel. Brown is not a hacker and had no part in the break ins, yet his maximum sentence would run ten times as long as that sought for Jeremy Hammond, who is accused of breaking into Stratfor. It is clear that the government’s primary attack is not so much concerned with Internet crimes as to send a loud threat to investigative journalists.
Leaks can be criminal but the publication of what is brought into the open has never been. Yet in the government increasingly has seemed to view journalist as complicit. Glenn Greenwald, the online journalist and then Guardian journalist who has for years reported on government secrecy and surveillance and was therefore to whom Edward Snowden went with his cache of NSA material, lives in Brazil and is wary of returning to the United States. He would like to testify before the Senate but not without assurance he would not be arrested. His colleague, film maker Laura Poitras, who has been stopped and questioned repeatedly for hours by the FBI at airports, lives and works in Germany where she needn’t worry that the FBI would show up and commandeer her hard drives. Such is the atmosphere engendered by this administration’s assault not on leakers alone but on the journalists that report their revelations.
The committee’s report was based on interviews with 30 seasoned journalists from the Washington press corps that elicited comments such as that from Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for Scripps newspapers and stations, who said “the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration” in deterring accountability reporting of
government agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, “filled by people with ties to target companies…just wouldn’t talk to us”. David Sanger calls it “the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered”. One damaging side effect will be to U.S. policy abroad which encourages other governments to become more transparent and open to press freedoms. They look to our government’s growing hostility to the press and see hypocrisy that they can turn back on us to avoid making changes.
This is a policy from a president who, in his first inaugural address, said, “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency”. On his first day in the Oval Office he commented, “For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city”.
Nov 14 2013 | Posted in Policy | Read More »
In Congress, Our Intelligence Overseers Cheerlead the NSA
Oversight committees in the Senate and the House should engage in constant and probing questioning, yet the posture of the two intelligence committees, hoodwinked by the runaway NSA, is essentially “why didn’t they tell us?”.
Instead of realizing that theirs is an adversarial role that calls for deep suspicion and pressing for answers, both Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca) and Mike Rogers (R-Mi), the chairs of their respective Senate and House committees, have become shills for the sixteen (yes, there are sixteen) intelligence gathering fiefdoms. They’ve been taken by surprise as each day brings revelations of further snooping they knew nothing about — the Google and Yahoo transmissions, 70 million digital communications inside France in a single month, taps on the cell phones of heads of state, possibly the Pope. mother hen at the senate
No one told Sen.
Feinstein had to reach that far back on the calendar to make her case in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The NSA’s Watchfulness Protects America”. She made the extravagant claim that “if today’s call-records program had been in place in before 9/11, the terrorist attacks likely would have been prevented”. Really? How?
Well, in 2001 the CIA was tracking two Saudis in Malaysia who would become 9/11 hijackers. They had given CIA the slip and flown to Los Angeles. The senator may not know that they had not been put on a watch list to block their entry. She tells of our agents knowing the phone number of an al Qaeda safe house in Yemen and learning after 9/11 that one of the Saudis, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had called the number from the U.S. If we had been collecting every phone call in America back then, our FBI would have caught them calling Yemen and thwarted the attack.
Really? That would be the FBI that, asked by the CIA to review the material on the two Saudis in 2001, gave it to an agent in Boston to look over “in her free time”. She began on July 24 and learned from the INS that the two might be in country. She informed the FBI’s counter-terror center in New York but labeled her e-mail “routine”, which gave them 30 days to respond. By then, one operative was listed in the San Diego phone book. That would be the FBI that failed to follow up when their field agent in Phoenix reported to Washington in July 2001 that young Arabic speakers were locally seeking flight training. He urged a nationwide check of flight schools. Nothing was done.
That would be the FBI headquarters that refused to authorize a warrant for the Minneapolis office to search the living quarters of a student at a flight school named Moussaoui who wanted to learn only how to steer a plane, not how to take off or land. He was later found to have the telephone number in Germany of a ringleader of the terrorist cell that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Or that would be the FBI that did nothing in response to the Phoenix office suggesting that the Bureau track aviation schools because of its noticing “an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” learning how to fly.
Or that would be the CIA whose chief, George Tenet, when asked why the CIA had done nothing to track down Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed the south tower of the World Trade Center, said that German intelligence “gave us a name, Marwan — that’s it — and a phone number”.
So much for FBI/CIA’s skill with phone numbers back then, yet Feinstein wants us to believe that they would surely have caught that one call from Yemen and “likely” have prevented 9/11.
Back to the present, Sen. Feinstein continued to say that call records “and other NSA programs have aided efforts…to disrupt terrorism in the U.S. approximately a dozen times in recent years”.
A dozen? Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, testified in defense of phone record capture before the House Select Intelligence Committee that more than 50 terrorist attacks had been disrupted. He pledged to come up with “a list” in a matter of days but never did.
About a month later, Sen Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was apparently handed such a list — classified of course, as is virtually everything this government does — of 54 incidents. Leahy deflated Alexander’s claims, saying the list does not show that “dozens or even several terrorist plots” and that they “weren’t all plots and they weren’t all thwarted”. Only 13 had any nexus in the U.S., only one relied on phone call records, and that involved a “material support” prosecution — money sent to al Shabaab in Somalia, not a plot. Nothing persuasive has been made public to justify the wholesale spying on the American public that Feinstein says “protects America”.
Other claims in her op-ed of aborted plots all originated overseas with no mention by her of U.S. phone records coming into play, and yet “The NSA call-records program is working and contributing to our safety. It is legal”, she wrote. That’s a highly questionable assertion. Her claim rests entirely on Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That section allows the FBI’s national security branch to subpoena an enterprise’s “business records”, but instead of what you would expect “business records” to refer to — a company’s financial and accounting data, purchasing records, contracts, personnel files, etc. — NSA reached past all that to grab instead the phone companies’ customers’ private activity — the phone records of the entire nation.
It is safe to say that no Congress member envisaged the law to mean that. The abuse led Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wi) to say in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, “The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law”. the apologist in the house
Feinstein’s counterpart in the House is Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Select Intelligence Committee. Rogers is an unabashed defender of NSA spying. Challenged in a hearing by a law professor that the NSA is violating the 4th Amendment, his answer was, “I would argue that maybe the fact that we haven’t had any complaints …clearly indicates in ten years that somebody must be doing something exactly right”. Well, sure, how would anyone know to complain if they don’t know they are being spied on? Then came this sentence: “You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated, right?” In a Sunday interview he was asked if he thought it appropriate to listen in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone. “Think about this”, he answered. “In the 1930s we had this debate before… and we decided we were going to turn off our ability to listen to friends…we’re not going to do any of those things… Well look what happened in the 30s: the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the rise of imperialism and we didn’t see any of it. And it resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people”.
It was a bravura show of utter ignorance of history, starting with there being no ability then to listen in on heads of state, and ending with the notion that no one was aware of Hitler and the Red Scare (or Mussolini invading Ethiopia, Japan in Manchuria and China, the Sudetenland, the Anschluss, etc.). But set that all aside. He is saying this is likely to happen again if we don’t listen in on Angela.
Feinstein about NSA’s spying on Angela Merkel, and it’s been going on since 2002, well before she became the German Chancellor. Feinstein expressed outrage, yet we note she has no objection to NSA spying on every last one of 317 million Americans. In fact, while some bills in Congress aim to curtail government spying, Feinstein is promoting the FISA Improvements Act, which would make it explicitly legal for NSA to do what it now does using loopholes in the law — searching to identify Americans in captured international phone and e-mail traffic without a warrant. She believes that civil liberties and the inviolacy of home and hearth explicit in the 4th Amendment will just have to be set aside while the government employs any and all extremes to protect the United States from another 9/11 attack.
We could find no further mention of a list in the media, which took him at his word and moved on. Our government usually rushes to the cameras to report any terrorist killed or plot confounded, so we were suspicious whether phone records had produced any results whatsoever.
Nov 13 2013 | Posted in Secrecy & Surveillance | Read More »
The Achilles Heel That Could Trip Up Obamacare
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is burdened with flaws. If the healthier young do not buy insurance, premiums for the old will zoom, causing policy cancellations that drive costs still higher, which will lead to more cancellations and what is referred to as a “death spiral”. Millions of others face cancellation because their coverage fails to meet Obamacare’s minimum standards. There are threats that doctors by the tens of thousands will refuse to treat patients with policies that pay too little. We know about these.
But there is another threat that the media has hardly touched on. The health care act offers subsidies in the form of tax credits to low- and moderate-income Americans to lessen the cost of health insurance to what is hoped to be an affordable level. Working its way through the courts is a suit brought by a group of individuals and businesses from several states who are opposed to Obamacare and believe they have a found a loophole to bring it down.The plaintiffs claim the government cannot issue subsidies through its federal exchange. The ACA provided that the federal government would take over the job of operating the health care insurance marketplace for any state that did nothing to set up its own. That proved to be 36 states that left the job to Washington. The law states that individuals who buy insurance “through an exchange established by the state” may be eligible for tax credits. The plaintiffs argue that the language is specific and makes no provision authorizing the federal government to issue such subsidies via its exchange.
The suit was brought in May. In late October, the Federal District Court in Washington denied the government’s request to dismiss the case based on the government’s argument that the plaintiffs lack “standing” to sue. But the court found that one of the plaintiffs, who runs a sole proprietorship flooring company in West Virginia, does have “standing”. His net income is low enough to exempt him from the requirement to buy insurance under the ACA’s mandate, but the subsidy would put that net income over the threshold, forcing him “to either pay a penalty or purchase more insurance than he wants,” in the words of the lawsuit, and he is thus “harmed”.
The court did not accept the plaintiffs’ bid for an early injunction that would peremptorily block the government from issuing subsidies. The judge found that to be premature as the plaintiffs had not yet proved they were likely to succeed on their claims.
For its part, the Justice Department argues that the government “stands in the shoes” of states that elected not to conduct their own marketplaces for insurance and that Congress’s intent was to offer the tax credits nationwide. But the DC court leans right, and if the language in the ACA is interpreted literally, the removal of subsidies for residents of almost three-quarters of the states would make insurance prohibitively costly, triggering an uprising that would threaten Obamacare’s continuance.
Nov 11 2013 | Posted in Law | Read More »
Obamacare: a “Train Wreck” in for Repairs
Republicans called the Affordable Care Act a “train wreck” well before it left the station but the sputtering web engine has made it clear that Obama’s administration doesn’t know how to run a railroad. The website’s dysfunction persists but the topic has shifted to the president’s shiftiness in telling the public they will be able to keep the insurance plan they have and therefore their same doctors. As many as 10 million of the 15.4 million policies bought by individuals directly from insurance companies are expected to be canceled by year end for not meeting the minimum standards imposed by Obamacare. Most companies will offer replacement policies, but at higher cost, given the added benefits the policies must now carry. But even if everyone could afford the upgrade, the deadline to apply for coverage to start the 1st of the year is December 15. Later than that and a person will face a gap in which he or she has no coverage. But will healthcare.gov be able to handle this many applications by then? The president’s Big Lie, endlessly repeated in the 2012 campaign and since, lit a fuse that would inevitably blow up in his face once the facts of the law Whenever the subject of cancelled policies comes up, Democratic propagandists such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz (R-Fl and chair of the Democratic National Committee) immediately switch to “but it only affects 5%”. Like Romney’s 47%, it seems the Democrats have their own 5% they don’t care about. News outlets aligned with the loyal opposition scoured the land to find worst case scenarios of people affected by the cancellations, leaving readers and viewers to think they are the norm. Fox, for example, found a 56-year-old woman whose cancelled $54 a month policy would be replaced with one costing $591 a month. Well, yes, that is what real insurance policies cost to pay for our runaway medical system; it is her $54 policy that is the joke. And someone who can only afford a $54 a month policy might very likely be eligible for subsidies to drive down the cost of the new policy, but it was not in Fox’s interest to point that out. “This law itself is born from an architecture, a foundation, that is just not workable”, is Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s verdict. Oddly, Ryan’s plan for Medicare relies on exactly the same architecture. It would give vouchers to seniors to buy insurance on the Internet on a government-run Medicare exchange. But there is a difference. The Ryan plan would send 50 million to enroll on the Internet, a number that dwarfs Obamacare’s potential applicants. a look at that architecture
The problems with the federal insurance marketplace — hours to sign up, bad data sent to insurers, inability to access the system at all — have become well known. Outsiders brought in to probe for causes found a loosely coded site that lacked error checking. One could enter multiple spouses, could list spouses as children, could sign up for more than one plan, could enroll more than once — when users repeatedly hit the “Submit” button in the unresponsive system — and could even change someone else’s data. One consequence is flawed data being handed to the insurance companies that are “straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far”. Insurers are finding they have to correct a high percentage of submissions manually and even hire temporary workers to phone applicants. They fear an inability to handle the load once the current trickle turns into a flood.
How did it happen that to design the linchpin of the President’s key accomplishment, in a country that teems with the sophisticated technology that spawned Facebook and Amazon and many more, the Obama administration contracted with companies relatively inexperienced with the Internet?
Why did they think that playing politics, holding back the regulations that dictated the system’s specifications until after the 2012 election lest they cause controversy, would have no consequences? How could government officials think that last-minute changes requiring re-writing of code would not squeeze the test window in the months leading to the October 1 deadline? And no one seemed to feel responsible for end-to-end stress-testing, which should have been ongoing in the months before the release date.
tangled web
When Congress creates laws, its members seem utterly unmindful and unconcerned for how those laws will be implemented. That is certainly the case with the Affordable Care Act. Like tax law, it is larded with requirements, many of which are inconsequential and simply add to complexity. Government departments and agencies are then left to deal with the mess.
Example enough was in a Wall Street Journal column that said, “The Government Accountability Office last year calculated that for the IRS alone, implementing ObamaCare would be a ‘massive undertaking that involves 47 different statutory provisions and extensive coordination’”. That applies only to those eligible for subsidies to help pay for their insurance, but the coding job remains the same.
If repairs do take months, only the sickest will have persevered to buy insurance. The young and healthy — whose participation is key to offsetting the cost of those with illnesses — will give it a try but not come back. That raises the specter of a “death spiral” for Obamacare, say health care economists. Losing the young will make insurance premiums soar, forcing healthier policy holders to take their chances and drop out. The cycle repeats as rates for the rest rise again, and yet again from more dropouts, until only the sickest are left in the pool and the system collapses. “We didn’t have enough testing” So lamented Secretary Sebelius. “We didn’t have enough testing, specifically for high volumes, for a very complicated project”. The Food and Drug Administration, an agency that reports to her, engages in rigorous clinical trials before approving drugs. Why didn’t those best practices occur to her for the huge launch of the federal insurance marketplace? Months before, they could have found a hacker to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack to bombard the prototype exchange website with increasing millions of logon requests to reveal at what point the system broke. They would have discovered well in advance that another warehouse of servers was needed. Actually, Sebelius did say that the system had been stress tested. They had set the bar at five times the highest volume that the Medicare.gov website had ever experienced. But Medicare’s universe is only a slice of the population, and when would millions of seniors have had cause to rush that mature system to make for a comparable peak day? famously aloof
How could it be that President Obama paid so little attention to the status of what is endlessly called his “signature” achievement that he was clueless about its problems? Did he simply take the word of equally non-technical Sebelius (a former governor) that “we’re on target”, as she said in a July interview after months of “projecting optimism and confidence”?. How could he be so unaware of the exchange’s complexities that, in a Rose Garden appearance, he would say “Nobody’s madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means, it’s gonna get fixed”, as if the commander in chief can simply order millions of lines of code to rearrange themselves. And so, as the Bloomberg/BusinessWeek article put it, “we are witnessing the beginnings of the single most exhausting, hellish code review in software development history”.
overtook his fictions. He must have foreseen this, but thought he slip one past us. Instead he has given opponents in Congress and elsewhere grounds to attack the health care law, criticism embellished by their own forms of dishonesty and half truths. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tn) hectored Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about those policy cancellations, but Blackburn failed to mention that her state refused federal funds to expand Medicaid, leaving hundreds of thousands of Tennessee’s poor with no protection. Her state also left it to the Obama administration to manage its exchange. Blackburn would later go on Fox News to inveigh against medical privacy violations and not wanting “financial and health information to be hacked”. Ms Blackburn, surely you know that Obamacare doesn’t ask for medical history. Because there is no turning away for pre-existing conditions, remember? The Fox interviewer left Blackburn’s lies unchallenged.
Nov 5 2013 | Posted in Healthcare | Read More »