U.S. House votes to delay Obamacare penalty for non-enrollment

10 hours ago
By David Morgan and Thomas Ferraro
Source: Yahoo News

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to delay for one year the tax penalty Americans will pay under President Barack Obama's healthcare law if they decline to enroll in health coverage.

The vote, part of a Republican election-year attack strategy against the 2010 healthcare law known as Obamacare, marked the 50th time House Republicans had passed legislation to try to repeal or dismantle it.

The measure to delay the tax penalty passed by a vote of 250-160, with 27 Democrats joining with 223 Republicans to back the legislation. The bill is certain to go nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate and would face a White House veto even if it succeeded.

The 27 Democratic votes on Wednesday for the bill fell short of the 39 who broke ranks with the White House last November and voted with Republicans in favor of a failed bill that would have allowed health insurers to continue to sell plans canceled under Obamacare.

Supporters of the new bill cast the legislation as an issue of fairness.

They argued that individual consumers should be granted a delay on the penalty because the Obama administration had postponed the implementation of some Obamacare provisions that apply to businesses.

"This is an opportunity to stop the political games and put working Americans first," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said after 50 such votes, "It's time for Republicans to end their obsession with upending health reform and work with Democrats to strengthen it."

Analysts say a delay on the penalty would undermine the law's aim of extending health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans by destabilizing new private insurance marketplaces established on the expectation the penalty would encourage people to enroll in coverage.

More than 4 million people have already enrolled in private insurance through the marketplaces. The open enrollment period ends on March 31.

One of Obamacare's most unpopular provisions, the individual mandate requires most Americans to be enrolled in health coverage by March 31 or pay a tax penalty that is being phased in over three years.

(Reporting by David Morgan and Thomas Ferraro; Editing by Peter Cooney and Andrew Hay)

 

 

 

House passes bill targeting health care law

January 10, 2014
 By DONNA CASSATA
Source: Yahoo News

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House overwhelmingly passed a bill to impose new security requirements on President Barack Obama's health care law as Republicans maintained an election-year focus on the contentious program and its troubled rollout. 

The vote Friday was 291-122 for the measure that Republicans said would address potential data breaches, though they offered no examples in which personal data had been compromised through the government website. There were 67 Democrats who joined with Republicans to back the measure.

he bill was the first of several targeting "Obamacare" this year in the GOP-led House. Republicans see the law's woes as paying political dividends in November's midterm contests and vow to be relentless in highlighting what they consider a disastrous law.

The administration opposes the bill, which stands no chance in the Democratic-led Senate.

Republicans insisted the legislation was necessary to address potential problems, pointing to last year's security breach at Target Corp. The nation's second-largest retailer said Friday that personal information connected to about 70 million customers through credit and debit card accounts had been stolen in a pre-Christmas data breach.

"What if Target had not bothered to tell anyone?" asked Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., who argued that the Health and Human Services Department's promise to notify Americans of security breaches needed the force of law.

The measure would require the secretary of health and human services to notify an individual within two business days of any security breach involving personal data provided to the government during health care enrollment.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., spoke of "credible and documented fear" of the health care website.

Democrats said there had been no security breaches at the health care website and the bill was simply a Republican effort to scare Americans from signing up for coverage with misinformation.

"They are trying to put fear into the public," said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.

Rep. Diane DeGette, D-Colo., described the legislation as a "solution in search of a problem."

In fact, there was at least one breach last year. A North Carolina man tried to log on to the website and got a South Carolina man's personal information. The administration had to scramble to make a software fix.

Republicans used debate on the bill to assail the health care law, using oft-repeated criticism such as "train wreck" and disaster.

The goal of the Affordable Care Act is to expand coverage to tens of millions of Americans who lack insurance, to lower health care costs, to increase access to preventive services and to eliminate some of the pre-existing condition requirements that insurance companies have used to deny coverage. The health care website HealthCare.gov got off to a calamitous start on Oct. 1, followed quickly by widespread reports of canceled policies and higher premiums.

To date, more than 2 million Americans have signed up for coverage through the federal marketplace covering 36 states and exchanges in 14 states. At the same time, at least 4.7 million people who buy their own insurance were told their policies would no longer be offered this year because they failed to meet the standards of the law.

Republicans who steadfastly opposed the law seized on Obama's proclamation — repeated by many Democrats — that if you like your health care, you can keep it, using the law as a political cudgel. The House voted more than 40 times last year to repeal, replace or undo parts of the law.

The administration, in objecting to the measure, said it already has implemented safeguards to secure personal information and notify consumers if a breach occurs.

"When consumers fill out their online marketplace applications, they can trust that the information that they are providing is protected by stringent security standards," the administration said in a statement Thursday.

The House had planned to vote on another bill that would require the administration to report weekly on the number of visits to the government health care website, the number of Americans who applied and the number of enrollees by ZIP code, as well as other statistics. The administration has opposed this measure, saying it has been providing information on enrollments, and the added requirements would force it to hire new staff.

The House will debate that bill next week.

Epic fail: 99% of Obamacare applications can’t be processed, ‘nightmare scenario’ coming in January

October 7, 2013
 Mike Adams
Natural News 
 Source:Infowars.com

 
Obamacare is going to crash and burn from technical issues more than political concerns, it seems. You’ve probably already heard that virtually no one can sign up using the online Obamacare exchanges. The web forms are broken. The code is buggy. The data integration is a jaw-dropping failure.

This is why, all over the country and across the media, no one can seem to locate anyone who has successfully signed up through Healthcare.gov. Even the one person the Obama administration rolled out as a “success case” turns out to be completely staged and fabricated.
But there’s even more shocking news about Obamacare that could utterly destroy any credibility the system might have remaining: Of those applications who somehow make it through the broken online sign-up system, 99% can’t be processed and will fail.
99% can’t be processed
According to insurance industry insiders who spoke to CNBC, 99 out of 100 applications don’t contain enough information to result in enrollment.
“…federal officials could face a situation in January in which relatively large numbers of people believe they have coverage starting that month, but whose enrollment applications are have not been processed,” reports CNBC.
“We’re getting incomplete data,” says one source from the insurance industry who goes on to describe the data as “corrupted.”
That’s fitting, of course, as the entire Obama administration is also corrupted. And incompetent. The Obamacare socialism dream turns out to be one big job-destroying frag fest that deceived Americans on every level. Although called the Affordable Care Act, it isn’t “affordable,” the system doesn’t CARE about you, and even when you want it, it’s almost impossible to get the online applications to ACT properly.
Healthcare.gov tricks people into thinking they’re enrolled
The problem is that the Healthcare.gov website doesn’t ask users for sufficient information needed to process their enrollment. The website, in other words, is a joke. It’s a public relations facade. Even when people think they’ve signed up, the system doesn’t have enough information about them to actually complete the enrollment.
So between now and January, even those people who somehow make it through the broken Healthcare.gov website and think they have enrolled will find themselves without any health insurance when January rolls around. Somehow, federal workers are going to have to contact these individuals one at a time and ask them for additional information to process their enrollment.
That process, of course, is fraught with nightmarish scenarios of failure and incompetence. Why? For starters, because the masses of government workers needed to carry out such a follow-up program have never been hired! And that’s because no one anticipated the Obamacare online exchanges would be such a nightmare of technical incompetence in the first place.
Secondly, even if you could hire all these people in the next few weeks, the simple fact of the matter is that support-level people who work for the federal government tend to be people who are really just there for the paycheck and who don’t actually give a crap about whether they are effective in their jobs. This is going to be worse than DMV workers. It’s going to be an office full of extremely unhealthy, over-paid, under-educated, “I-don’t-give-a-s#@t!” workers whose only real mission is to log enough hours to collect a paycheck, not to actually solve problems with Obamacare enrollment. Think TSA workers sitting behind computers all day long…
Obamacare is the ultimate vaporware
More and more people are now realizing that Obamacare is D.O.A. (Dead On Arrival). Most Americans don’t want it and most employers absolutely despise it. Even the few Americans who are interested in the program can’t seem to sign up because the websites are broken (and will remain broken for months). Of those who somehow do manage to complete the enrollment process, 99% will NOT actually be enrolled due to a lack of required information.
This is headed for an absolute P.R. disaster for the Obama administration, which has so far been running on nothing but lies and vapor. Obamacare is, in fact, the ultimate “vaporware” because it makes promises the software simply can’t deliver.
No wonder the Republicans are trying to delay it or defund it. The public cry for precisely such action is only going to gain strength from here forward, especially as January rolls around and potentially millions of people who think they have health insurance suddenly find out they have none whatsoever (even though they signed up and were told they had enrolled).
This is going to create a nightmare scenario with doctors and hospitals, where Obamacare enrollees show up demanding health care services but they don’t actually have insurance. This mess is going to be dumped right in the laps of medical clinics and hospitals, both of which are already suffocating under a tar pit of health insurance paperwork. Add to that a failed, incompetent system of non-coverage courtesy of the Affordable Care Act, and you get a system infested with so many critical failures that it just can’t function.
That’s where Obamacare is headed: An epic fail at every level. Obamacare will long be remembered as the perfect example of what can go wrong when irrational Big Government worshippers shove complex socialist programs down everyone’s throats. It also shows the danger of taking an industry which should be based on a free market and instead trying to force it into a Soviet-style centralized command system run by a corrupt, incompetent government dominated by tyrants and fools.
Defund Obamacare now!

Link: .infowars.com/epic-fail-99-of-obamacare-applications-cant-be-processed-nightmare-scenario-coming-in-january/