About 25% of HealthCare.gov Applications Have Errors 157
itwbennett writes "An estimated one in four user applications sent from HealthCare.gov to insurance providers have errors introduced by the website, an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said during a press briefing Friday. The errors include missing forms, duplicate forms and incorrect information in the applications, such as wrong information about an applicant's marital status, said Julie Bataille, communications director for HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). While the software bugs leading to the errors have largely been fixed, as many as 10 percent of insurance applications may still have errors and consumers who have used HealthCare.gov to buy insurance and have concerns that their applications haven't been processed or have errors should contact their insurers, Bataille said."
An internal investigation (Score:1)
An internal investigation into the magical healthcare.gov form errors ended when they noticed several changes attributed to "Yiuf, Crazy".
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Data In, Garbage Out (Score:5, Informative)
By this point, I think people generally understand that Healthcare.gov is to be avoided if at all possible. This system of systems is a monster (reportedly 500 million lines of code at 60-70% completion), and it's probably too big to test -- testing might take longer than it took to write, i.e., the QA death spiral.
The only reason to use the exchange is to get a subsidy. If you are a normal taxpayer who won't qualify for one, go off-exchange.
Or, join a religious health care pool, which are medical cost-sharing plans that are exempt from the law.
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You can still get the service by calling in.
I will never do that however, because there's no way I'm giving the US federal government any of my medical information voluntarily. Though, they likely have it all already anyway.
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You can still get the service by calling in.
I will never do that however, because there's no way I'm giving the US federal government any of my medical information voluntarily. Though, they likely have it all already anyway.
This isn't a traditional insurance application. Since insurers can't jack up your rates because you had a medical problem when you were 12 the website doesn't ask about your medical history. The medical info they ask for is limited to your age.
Which they already know, because that's on your Social Security records, your birth certificate, your driver's license, your income tax form, etc.
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Just don't depend on actually getting any money out from the religious health care pools. Unlike actual insurance companies, they have no legal obligation to pay at all. They also tend to happily take your 'donation' each month, but when you actually need to make a claim they'll decide your behavior is too sinful and kick you out. The main insurance industry is quite dodgy enough when it comes to finding excuses to avoid paying out - religious 'cost sharing' agencies are even worse.
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I can find some anecdotal horror stories, of course. But we both know anecdotes are worthless.
The best known of the pools is probably Medi-Share. From a website sympathetic to their position, http://christianpf.com/christian-health-insurance-alternative/ [christianpf.com]
- You must adhere to living a strict Biblical lifestyle in order to maintain your membership. Not doing so can get you expelled from the program and will likely nullify any claims you may have as well.
- 'For example, she told me a story of a member who was i
Not much of a scare (Score:3)
That sounds like a great deal if you live clean anyway. If you don't drink much, don't plan on getting pregnant, and don't care for routine examinations it's a great deal - just like the cheaper health insurance plans that are now illegal.
As for the "scare" from your link, it was one case where the company decided it could not legally provide insurance in the state where the people lived - unfortunate but not really a company issue. And an arbitration panel agreed with that assessment when challenged, Yo
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Really?
I live in an areas that has a mix of wealthy religious people of numerous faiths, and low-income people. The religious institutions around here do a lot of relatively cheap stuff that is easy to tell people about like soup kitchens, thanksgiving turkeys, and financial literacy classes. Raising $10k isn't hard for a faith group, using it to buy a bunch of turkeys is even easier, and it looks really good in the Parish Newsletter. But feeding those families all year is just no within their budget. The g
FUD in, FUD out (Score:2)
I fail to see what a large codebase has to do with end users using or not using it.
The only reason to use the exchange is to get a subsidy. If you are a normal taxpayer who won't qualify f
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I fail to see what a large codebase has to do with end users using or not using it.
It isn't completely written yet, much less tested. In other words it doesn't, and with that large of code base in this state won't, work (see IRS).
Why wouldn't somebody want to compare plans and prices available off-exchange with those in the exchange, exactly?
They're incorrect plan and price quotes? They make you enter your vitals before you can compare? Just two reasons off the top of my head.
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Going "off-exchange" doesn't mean not having health insurance, it means not using the exchange to buy health insurance. You can buy health insurance direct from insurance companies, but subsidies are only available via the exchange. Thus, if you don't need a subsidy, you don't need to risk using the exchange.
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I'm not sure this is the case. My understanding is that a lot of the broken forms came from earlier in October and November when the site was still very broken. I think this was a mistake, the only excuse I can think of for leaving the site online in that state was they were hoping to speed up the development through live testing, but it lead to a lot of bad data getting into the system and those people getting used as guinea pigs.
But at this point the errors are largely fixed, I'm sure some still exist but
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Re:Data In, Garbage Out (Score:4, Informative)
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One thing I've noticed about the government is that it's the only sector where people routinely attribute lies from one bit of the sector to everyone else. In other words if the NSA lies about something people will say that the New York Health Exchange's credibility is shot, but if McDonald's does it everyone goes "at least Burger King is honest." This is remarkably silly because the NSA has nothing to do with New York state government, or healthcare; but if MickyD's thinks it can get away with a lie it's p
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It is not as horrible as most people think. Take all the brouhaha about religious institutions having to or not having to pay for contraceptives. Technically contraceptives are cheaper than Ob-gyn. Dropping contraceptive coverage should trigger additional premium for these institutions. Adding you to the pool with mammogram and pregnancy coverage lower
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But anyway the correct thing to com
Re: You seem a bit confused (Score:2)
There's a big difference between being $15k in the hole and 100s of thousands if dollars in the hole. When you talk about pre ACA medical bankruptcies you're talking about big money. A $15k debt is something most people could manage. And if they can't manage it then they shouldn't buy a Bronze plan.
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That is the problem talking about insurance based on anecdotes. Insurance is statistics, actuaries and collections. People like you who are willing to take the risk rake up bills that are denied by insurance companies
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[*] One thing I must concede is that, you are not taking the attitude of
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Half a Billion Dollars In, Garbage Out (Score:5, Insightful)
No. They awarded a known incompetent company with a record of bad projects with a non-compete contract. Then they paid them ONE HALF OF A BILLION DOLLARS for a shitty website and aren't asking for a fucking refund.
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You got a link to that $0.5 Billion cost?
Snopes.com just did a piece on the amount of spending on healthcare.gov, and said it was in $150 million range plus whatever they spent last month.
Half a Billion Dollars (Score:2)
From what i understand, a lot of that cost was infrastructure, not code. That can be reused even if the application was burnt to the ground and started fresh.
Compared to what? (Score:3)
Re:Compared to what? (Score:4, Informative)
I've only had to fill out paper health care forms a couple of times, but it's really easy to see how those confusing monsters can be filled out erroneously by the form filler, and then of course there are the transcription problems when forms get computer entered, either by drones in a coding center or by HR people.
What's wrong with this in comparison though, is that when the end-user uses a web site you would assume there is error checking of form logic (ie, if I fill box A and B it should be able to tell if I need to fill out box C). There's still the problem of factual error by the user but that's harder to detect.
The problem here though seems to be the data stored is erroneous due to problems with the code, not due to user error.
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Keep in mind that in theory Healthcare.gov should be simpler then those monsters. This is because a) Healthcare.gov is not intended to be so confusing that people fuck it up (many "cheap" plans intentionally confuse people, take their premiums, and then throw them off as soon as they file a claim because the application was wrong), and b) it is not supposed to get any info from you except your age and address. The only other info it should need is income info, and in theory that's coming from the IRS.
That'
All I have to say (Score:2)
They seem to have their priorities correct (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't have to excuse them, we can demand they anticipate these things and provide for it. They seems to have an idea of these issues, with their plans to create a cadre of "navigators" to help people with internet access and web site help. But the plan and law was heavily politicized, 36 states refused to set up their own exchanges and dumped all of them on the federal exchange. Millions of people who would have gone to medicaid are dumped into exchanges because they refused to expand medicaid.
No doubt there were self inflicted wounds. Politicians scared of people getting sticker shock, insisted on disabling the window shop and see full price option at roll out, That was the root cause of disaster. The first thing the "tech surge" did was to enable window shopping. It was enabled as early as Oct 15, I tested it then, They could not have done it that soon if it was fresh code. Window shopping was the original code, They just disabled the meddling by the politicians and went on the original code path.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
Re:They seem to have their priorities correct (Score:5, Insightful)
But the plan and law was heavily politicized
Yes sir, it was. Remember "We'll have to pass the law to see what's in it"? After that, every excuse is moot.
Half a billion dollars.
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Look at credit card companies, why are they all headquartered in Delaware? Why are they charging 40$ late fees and two cycle finance charges? Before the federal truth in lending and disclosure laws were enacted, how much they got away with? Basically Delaware is more interested in protecting their credit card company jobs rather than protecting your ri
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But the plan and law was heavily politicized, 36 states refused to set up their own exchanges and dumped all of them on the federal exchange. Millions of people who would have gone to medicaid are dumped into exchanges because they refused to expand medicaid.
This is just a straightforward exercise of self-interest at the US state level. It's not the individual state's job to cover inadequacies in federal law or shoulder the costs for their implementation.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
Can be != will be. It's worth noting here that filing a claim indicates that you will cost an insurance company money. If they then can find an error in your application that let's them selectively disqualify you after the fact, there would be considerable incentive to do so.
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But don't despair, Democrats fumbled by not ramming down single payer or medicare for all, that would have been
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No matter how flawed the law is, no matter how expensive it is going to be, no matter how many fumbles the administration makes, there is this huge hunger for healthcare by a very large section of America.
So what? No matter how much "hunger" is out there, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
It is an historic anomaly that Church is aligned with the capitalists and not marxists. It will get corrected eventually.
Your weird obsession with the "Church" is why you got modded "flamebait". There is no one Church. Nor is Christianity the only religion out there. And there are splinter sects of Christianity that do support some degree of Marxist tenets. That doesn't help Marxism perform any better. It also doesn't help that Marxism routinely perceives religion as a competitor to be ruthlessly stamped out.
OTOH, capitalism just work
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OTOH, capitalism just works and has done more to relieve poverty and build wealth than anything else out there.
You are correct that capitalism has done more to relieve poverty. But the "winner take all, no regulation from the government" is feudalism, not capitalism. Capitalism will deliver the goods only when there is a strong government, strong enough to enforce contracts, strong enough to disrupt collusion and other anti-competitive behavior of the rich and powerful. The day government is weaker than the most powerful individual (or corporation) capitalistic system will degenerate into feudalistic system.
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Well, I would not win the third prize in the Scripture Knowledge, something even Betram Wooster could. But I do know that the last sermon on the mount of Olives by Jesus basically said, "Those of you who gave food, clothed, cared for, bailed out (yes bailing out of jails is in that list) those of you who were the least fortunate did those things to me, so you guys get to go to heaven. Those of you who di
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When you equate taxation with armed robbery, you disagree with Jesus about paying unto Caesar what was Caesar's. When our founding father's declared "No taxation without representation", they did what Jesus did not do. Jesus never questioned the right of the Romans to r
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Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
Can be != will be. It's worth noting here that filing a claim indicates that you will cost an insurance company money. If they then can find an error in your application that let's them selectively disqualify you after the fact, there would be considerable incentive to do so.
Two points:
1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address. They could dump you if you lie about which County you live in, but the whole "let's throw him off because he said he'd gotten the sniffles once and he'd gotten them twice" racket is now impossible.
In other
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Was any of it medical? The site is supposed to ask for three things: your address (to find out which policies are available in your area), your age (because insurers can charge older people more), and a bunch of financial info (your current policy, income, options offered by your employer, current income, etc.) to determine whether you're eligible for tax subsidies. Khallow was talking about that fun thing insurers do where they demand a 15-page medical history, and then throw you off your insurance because
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1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
Seriously? If this really is true, then Obamacare is even worse than I expected. We really need built in incentives for insurance companies to make bad decisions.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address.
And don't forget considerable financial information - which if materially wrong gives the insurer a pretext for cancellation of the insurance.
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1) This is just wrong on a financial level. There's actually a mechanism so that insurers who pay out more claims due to insuring higher cost customers get paid from the guys who benefited from having low-cost customers.
Seriously? If this really is true, then Obamacare is even worse than I expected. We really need built in incentives for insurance companies to make bad decisions.
You know why we need Obamacare? Because people seriously argue that they should be rewarded for picking an insurer who turns away chicks with the breast cancer gene with low low rates.
2) Healthcare.gov does not take any of your info but your age and address.
And don't forget considerable financial information - which if materially wrong gives the insurer a pretext for cancellation of the insurance.
How's the insurer even gonna know you lied about the financials? And you do have to actually lie, because it is connected to the iRS database, so it'll remind you how much you actually made.
If you do lie, you'll get in trouble, but it'll be with the Feds for tax fraud.
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According to the Boston Globe this morning, Massachusetts' (you know the state that was the model for the PPACA) Health Connector website has not enrolled a single person since it was revamped to support Obamacare at a cost of $69 million. The entire infrastructure to support the PPACA is apparently riddled with problems that impact not only healthcare.gov but the sites created by states that choose to implement their own. In Massachusetts, 100,000 people have been told their insurance which was in complian
Re:They seem to have their priorities correct (Score:4, Informative)
I think you've missed the point about having a 25% error rate. That means 25% of the people who used the exchange will have thought they selected a plan, but in reality, they didn't. They may think they have insurance, but don't.
So, the correct order would be to do the backend first, which makes sure that people actually get insurance, then fix the pretty front end. Fixing the pretty front end first actually makes things worse because it increases the number of people who will be hurt by the errors.
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The healthcare.gov website is being maligned more than it deserves to be. Buying healthcare is not going to be as easy as buying iTunes, or even booking hotels.
Actually, where I live buying health care is that easy. You can go online, get quotes, compare them and when you've picked one, buy it online with no more difficulty than buying a laptop from Dell. There are data mining operations that are thinly disguised as comparison web sites that will compare a bunch of generic quotes for health insurance if you're too lazy to figure it out for yourself.
But then again I live in one of those evil nations that have universal health care as a minimum standard. If priva
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Not enough info to judge... (Score:2)
Part of the 25% error rate is apparently the Feds double-sending a form. That's not a good thing, but it's not like the insurer can't do it's job just because it has two identical copies of one of your forms. If the forms are different, and include important info, the double-copies could be a huge problem, but the article doesn't give us any way to tell how many of these 25% error are actually errors vs. how many are conservatives in the insurance industry bitching that their guy got whipped in November of
Don't use the website (Score:4, Informative)
I have a family of 4 and we'll end up paying $74.00 per month for Blue Cross Silver plan. It's better than what I have right now through Blue Cross, and I've been paying $400 a month for it.
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The "Just Lie" bit was a tongue-in-cheek swat at how the NSA lied to congress and nothing happened.
I'm paying less than a thousand dollars for insurance per year. This doesn't include dental (I have a dentist buddy that does work for free) however, and my 2 children are going to be on medicaid (free). So the plan is really just for my wife and I. No lie, we're broke and the government has set things up to where rich folks are paying for the medical insurance of the poor.
Re:Don't use the website (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, you're a "winner" in the health care insurance lottery, congratulations. But realize that the rest of us are the "losers" who are paying not just the cost of our health insurance, but part of yours, too.
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I would be pissed if I had to pay $800 per month for health coverage, when I go to the doctor (a total of) 6 times per year for a family of 4. Not to mention I would have had to pay, out of pocket, $3,0
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OK, you're a "winner" in the health care insurance lottery, congratulations. But realize that the rest of us are the "losers" who are paying not just the cost of our health insurance, but part of yours, too.
Welcome to a civilized society.
Here's the deal, people in your country are going to get sick and need medical care and you have two options, 1) let them suffer and die or 2) treat them by taking dollars out of your pocket.
It doesn't matter how the dollars leave your pocket, taxes or higher insurance premiums, but you're gonna have to pay.
Thing is I expect the ACA will lead to you paying less in the long term since some of the people paying now will have been freeloading before. As a youth you'll pay more by
Expensive (Score:2)
Even worse, I was comparing if my plan started now. If I started a new plan in 2014, the low
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In theory they don't have to put up with a $1,300 a month premium. That's $15,600 a year, which means that as long as they make less then $164k and change the premium is more then 9.5% of their income, which means they are supposed to buying plans on healthcare.gov. They'd even get the subsidy available to those making less then 400% of poverty-level.
I suspect that in practice your company has another, cheap-ass shitty plan option that your lesser-paid coworkers are supposed to use.
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Republicans are in tough situation. (Score:2, Interesting)
The root cause of the problem is that Republicans dominate very small states with very large percentage of poor people. For example South Carolina had about 150K people already eligible for medicaid but were unaware of it. Even though the Republicans refus
Re:Republicans are in tough situation. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is true the Republicans do have a job on their hands trying to raise votes by "not purchasing them with other peoples money".
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The result is too much of capital, and people have been cutting back on consumption. The "fix" we have been pushing
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When they say
In hindsight, they could have ... (Score:2)
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Wait for the next round (Score:2)
We're just dying to try out version 2.0. Preferably 2.0.1 where they have the bugs worked out.
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Well, the numbers are meaningless without context. What is the percentage of normal insurance forms that have errors on them?
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An estimated one in four user applications sent from HealthCare.gov to insurance providers have errors introduced by the website
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That is true.
Unfortunately for those bitching about the website the error-rate the article's talking about is entirely from the pre-relaunch period. The data they have on the post-relaunch website is a 0.77% error rate.
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The 25% error rate in so-called 834 transmissions is a "preliminary" estimate of the website's performance between its launch Oct. 1 and Nov. 30
0.77% is just for the past week.
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The relaunch was on Saturday November 30th. It's Saturday December 7th. The entire post-relaunch period is last week.
This article is like bitching about how terrible Windows 3.11 was the week after MS launched Windows 95. No shit 8 days ago Windows sucked, that's why they re-did the damn thing.
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Ah! I misread your "pre-relaunch" as "pre-launch." Apologies.
Replacing "have" with "had" in the summary and title does put a rather different spin on things.
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It's my understanding that this is happening with no user error at all. It's as if they load all the information into a database then when you select a plan, it retrieves the information and places what it thinks it needs on the forms it thinks it needs and that is where the errors are occurring. So it would actually be the website's problem as it attempts to collect the information and place it into the application forms as needed and failing there.
Re: Human error (Score:2)
Strange, TFA as well as the summary seem to imply that the users are entering faulty information into the forms or failing to enter any information into some forms, and that is what is causing the problems.
Re: Human error (Score:5, Informative)
Introduced by the website seems to imply they are because of the website. Both the article and summery say that.
Now from what I have been told, you don't fill out specific forms. You enter specific information into the website and it fills the forms out for you based on the plans you pick. It is supposed to stop you from filling forms out incorrectly or getting confused on wording and so on. It also allows you to do direct comparisons without having to fill 20 forms out for 10 different providers offering 2 plans each.
Re: Human error (Score:2)
Oh, my mistake then. I was under the impression that the end users filled out forms on the website, and were missing some or incorrectly filling them out, leading to an error.
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Oh, my mistake then.
"If you like your mistake, you can keep it."
Obamacare was rushed out, without any testing, and it's a new application for them. Of course it will have all the hallmarks of a version 1.0 release . . . like plenty of errors. Most wise IT folks always wait for the second or third release of a product before using it.
Except with Obamacare, it's the law that you have to use the 1.0 buggy release.
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It seems like you are conflating the website with the law. You do have to get insurance, but you do not have to use the website.
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It seems like you are conflating the website with the law. You do have to get insurance, but you do not have to use the website.
If you are entitled to a subsidy, the website is the only way to get it. Direct applications to insurers won't receive one.
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Strange, TFA as well as the summary seem to imply that the users are entering faulty information into the forms or failing to enter any information into some forms, and that is what is causing the problems.
Failed reading comprehension in elementary/primary school didn't you? The summary and article both state the erroers have been caused by the Healthcare.gov system not the health insurance applicants.
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Now you know that's not true. The article and summary specifically make it clear that bad information is being input by users
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No, the article and summery make it clear the errors they are talking about are introduced by the website. Read the entire sentence being used to discover the meaning of what is being said.
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I don't think users can make the system to send duplicate form pages.
problem is with the way it sends the info to the insurers.. it's like faxing them over email.
oh and a fairy simple fix would have been while at it to overhaul the whole system. why? so that it doesn't matter to the "basic care for everyone rates" at all what your marital status is or if you were born in compton. for extra insurances you could then visit the insurers.. but hey,if it's worth being proud of a country where it matters into
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The problem with a) Checks and Balances, b) powerful individual congressman, and c) a massively diverse country is that major overhauls of entire policy areas are virtually impossible.
For example let's say you just want to get Federal per capita health spending below Canada's, because the federal government in Canada is the only spending on healthcare which should be (in theory) a lot cheaper then the various systems our Federal government uses to insure less then half of the country. That probably requires
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Two points:
1) This is a long-term program, not a short-term war. Social Security/Medicare/etc. all had some disasters at roll-out. Once the disasters were fixed the program started running and have kept running pretty much unchanged. OTOH, the whole point of winning a war is that the war ends. the government program funding said war gets to go away, and everyone goes home.
2) Don't worry. There are plenty of conservative think-tanks in DC. There're probably more conservative think-tanks then liberal ones bec
Re: Totally worthless anyways: I won't buy (Score:2)
I think one of the big issues that will be coming forward due to Obamacare is that the definition if rich is going to change. Obama has always said the rich are going to "pay their fair share" for healthcare so the poor can be covered.
It's just that a lot of people who don't think they're rich at all are finding out that Obama thinks they are and he is making them pay.
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Totally agree that "fair share" is a very effective political tool and almost impossible to define.