Today's schadenboner begins with this tale of woe from another
publicly prominent ObamaVoter….Jessica Sanford, the Federal Way woman who got a shout-out from President Obama last month with her fan letter for the Affordable Care Act, got a rather rude awakening last week. Turns out she doesn’t qualify for a tax credit after all.
At least that’s what the letter said that she got from the state. Now she says her dream of affordable health insurance has gone poof. She can’t afford it. She’ll have to go without. “I’m really terribly embarrassed,” she says. “It has completely turned around on me. I mean, completely.”
Chalk it up to a bollixed-up state website that apparently still has major problems. Originally it said Sanford and her child would get a whopping tax credit that would reduce their total premium to $169 a month. Now the state is telling her it goofed – twice – and she has to pay full ticket. There may even be a third goof involved: At least one health-insurance broker says she may qualify for a tax credit after all, albeit a small one. Officials at the state Healthplanfinder website could not be contacted Sunday night. But it just goes to show that even in the state of Washington, which has earned national kudos for a health-insurance exchange that seems to function better than the dysfunctional federal website, there are big, big problems.
Pretty good way to make an ass of yourself…nationally…write a letter to your newest BFF, Barry, get publicly recognized for being such a great brown noser, and then have your life pretty much ruined for your trouble…
The hitch was that the website told her that her income was low enough that she could enroll her son in the state Medicaid program for children of low-income families, known as Apple Health. For that she would have to pay a premium of just $30 a month. She could enroll him right away, and she did. But that created a problem. When she enrolled Ryan in Medicaid, she couldn’t count him toward a tax credit. Not that the website mentioned it. In fact, it gave her the opposite impression.
Once the new health insurance policy kicked in on Jan. 1, the premium was supposed to be $280 a month, plus, she assumed, the Medicaid premium. But after she signed up for a policy, and after she gave her credit-card information, she got a letter from the state last week saying that her income was too high to qualify for subsidies – the cutoff is $44,680 for a single adult, 400 percent of the federal poverty level. So she would get no help from the feds at all.
“I was dumbfounded,” she said. “I thought this was a total mistake, they’re going to correct this — this isn’t true. How could I not qualify for a tax credit? I make under $50,000 a year. There’s got to be something. So I got ahold of my broker, and a couple of days later he called me back, and he told me that no, it was true.”
Now she says her health-insurance dream has gone bust. Without a tax credit she has to consider the cheapest “bronze” level plans, but the deductibles are so high that couldn’t afford to purchase prescription medication. “I was like, forget that – I’m not going to pay.”
So now she is looking forward to no health insurance at all.
But, as I have posted previously, most ObamaVoters are pretty amazingly stupid and, since you can't fix stupid…
She says she wants to make it clear she has no beef with Obama and Obamacare. She still believes in the Affordable Care Act. “I don’t want this to be a political thing,” she says. “I don’t want to be bashing the president. I don’t want to be bashing the ACA. I don’t want to come across as saying that. I am a big Obama fan.
It is really hard to feel sorry for any of these people (and I don't).
On the one hand you have the people who, after being told that it would turn out this way, voted for it and are now extremely PO'd about it and have turned on their hero. Sorry, we warned you and you didn't listen…stew in your own juices, buddy. And on the other hand you have those people like poor, dim-witted Jessica. She is the type who wouldn't even entertain the thought that this could possibly turn out this way…we warned her and she stuck her fingers in her ears and started chanting so that she couldn't hear us. So she now has zero insurance but is totally okay with it because she just
knows that this isn't what her hero intended and she still loves him with hugs and kisses. And that's because she is a complete moron.
Part Two of today's schadenboner experience has to do with the
security of healthcare.gov which would be more accurately characterized as
the utter lack of security…David Kennedy, the founder of TrustedSec, an online security firm, said that the risks were easy to ascertain.
“Just by looking at the website we can see that there is just fundamental security principles not being followed, things that are basic in nature that any security tester, like myself or anyone that we hire to test these sites, would actually test for prior to being released,” Kennedy, formerly of the National Security Agency and a one-time cyber-intelligence analyst for the U.S. Marine Corps, said.
The experts said the personal information of millions of Americans is at risk, including Social Security numbers, birthdays, incomes, home mortgages, and addresses. Rep. Mo Brooks (R., Ala.) called it the “mother lode for identity theft.”
“Americans should be scared to death,” said Rep. Chris Stewart (R., Utah).
Kennedy demonstrated an attack in the hearing room, showing how on Finder.Healthcare.gov a hacker could breach into a computer, monitor its webcam, and steal passwords.
Hackers from Russia or China could “absolutely” breach the online marketplace, he said.
The problems could only get worse since the president’s team is trying to fix the website while it is still up and running.
Morgan Wright, a cyber terrorism expert and CEO of Crowd Sourced Investigations, LLC., said attempting to fix one line of code could open up a “Pandora’s box.”
“You create an unintended series of cascading events you have no control over because you don’t have a grasp of what the code is actually doing,” he said. “You think you’ve changed one thing, by doing that you’ve opened up a Pandora’s box of vulnerabilities on the other side.”
Kennedy said he has never seen anything like it.
“To be honest with you, I have not seen—and I’ve worked for Fortune 10, Fortune 50, Fortune 1,000 companies, as well as on the government side—I have not seen an application that pales in comparison to 500 million lines of code, including some of the largest applications you would ever see in the history of man.”
Because of the sheer amount of code, it is impossible to conduct a complete end-to-end security assessment on the website, the panelists said. Just reviewing it for security risks could take six months.
What these guys are saying is that should pigs fly and healthcare.gov suddenly start working (sort of...at least to the point where lots of people can get on and navigate it quickly) then anyone who coughs up their personal data and info can pretty much count on it being stolen. So, again, only the truly stupid need apply.
Meanwhile, over where the cool kids hang out,
the insurance companies are getting screwed out of their investment in this steaming pile...
The HealthCare.gov website is so problem-plagued that WellPoint Inc., the nation’s second-largest insurer, is backing away from advertising its new health-care offerings, its chief executive said Tuesday.
“I’ll be very candid, we have pulled back from marketing, not knowing how to get people enrolled at the moment,” Joseph Swedish, WellPoint’s chief executive, said in an interview at the WSJ CEO Council Tuesday.
This would be one of the guys who just the day before spent an hour and a half in the presence of King Putt being reassured that everything was okay and by the way would you please, please, please just give us another chance and a little more time...
The company has spent more than $300 million building systems that are compatible with the new health insurance changes and is “camera ready” to accept new enrollment, Mr. Swedish said.
But with the health website marred by technical problems, there’s little sign the anticipated flood of enrollment has amounted to anything but a trickle. Mr. Swedish said enrollment is still “anemic.”
And you know...there are going to be some very uncomfortable shareholder meetings this year and people like Swedish are going to have a lot of explaining to do. This whole DumbassCare thing probably looked like a really smart move a few years back but it sure looks like a big bucketful of stupid today and stopping the promotion probably should've happened the second week of October rather than the third week of November.
Speaking of promotion...
The more Americans visit the site and are unable to sign up, the bigger the risk that they might abandon their efforts to sign up – particularly the young, healthy Americans that are key to balancing out the economics of the insurance exchanges.
I could be wrong but I'm thinking that one of the keys to making this dog's breakfast work was not only getting the young and stupid to sign up but to sort of
keep it a secret as to how important it was to get the young and stupid to sign up. I don't know about you but I've heard about it now on just about every day since the "launch" and I've got to believe that more than a few of the young and stupid have begun to put two and two together and concluded that they are the ultimate chumps in this story. So, I'm thinking that most of them (or at least an awful lot of them) will take their ball and go home.
And marketing fail like this only reinforces that "we is chumps" idea:
Either that or "you is sluts" which isn't any better but does give me a chuckle when I think about war on wymynz stuff...
Either way, I see the young and stupid maybe wising up...not a lot but maybe...just enough to stay away from DumbassCare in significantly large numbers.