First, apologies to my readers for the diversion from the usual fare, but I’ll point out that this entry is covered under the masthead in the category of “recent news” and there’s a relevant WUWT category.
Since like many of you, I’ve been forced to sign a document (at my radio station where I employed part-time) that confirms I’ve been given another document that advises me of my Obamacare rights, and of course being in tune to the news, I’ve been wondering if the claims about the Obamacare websites are as bad as claimed.
I read an article in the Pittsburgh Tribune “Sebelius visit fails to reassure as health care website glitches persist” that said:
Sebelius, who is making similar trips to cities across the country to spread the word about the website, told the audience of about 100 people that Healthcare.gov was “open for business.”
“Believe me, we had some early glitches,” said Sebelius, who was introduced by Rooney, a backer of the law. “But it’s getting better every day.”
So, I decided to find out myself. I went to http://healthcare.gov and chose my state, California. What follows is a record of what I actually got. I never made it past step 1:
Try it yourself: https://coveredca.com/shopandcompare/
NOTE: To be accurate, the website security certificate will work if the “www” is used as prefix, but not the link above sans www. By following the link from the Tribune article, with no other changes on my part, I ended up with the sans “www” connection, which they didn’t get a proper security certificate for. One wonders how many other “glitches” exist in basic security on these websites.
Even when you go in with the “www” there are problems. In Firefox I get this:
UPDATE: Reader Ben points out that it gets a failing grade from an SSL grading service, SSL Labs:
Source: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=coveredca.com
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“Goldie says:
October 13, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Rob, I just believe that a truly compassionate society has to provide a safety net for those who fall through the gaps and I find it hard to believe that the US has been unable or unwilling to enact something that provides this for that group of people.”
We have those things…they just don’t get counted if they aren’t done by the government. We have, for instance an entire network of religion-based not-for-profit hospitals which are in many cities and provide health-care for the poor through donations. There are fewer than there used to be for a variety of reasons, including increased legal demands and bureaucratic requirements.
One of the recent fights regarding Obamacare was the attempt to force these charitable religion-based hospitals (which charge those who are deemed able to afford it) such as Roman Catholic hospitals to pay for abortion or birth-control coverage despite their religious opposition to those practices. Many of those hospitals self-insure for health-care.
Gdn, this isn’t just about hospital treatment, its about community healthcare. How is that worked out in the US?
Goldie, That sounds like you are using a different definition of “hospital” which I am unable to discern. Hospitals do community healthcare, as do clinics, and as do some stores in limited ways.
Yes, we have a program of General Practice here that is also funded by Medicare. These are in-the-community- small clinics which – provide community care (inoculations, post-natal follow up etc), treat common medical conditions (not requiring the attention of specialist), provide follow-up once a patient is discharged from hospital and act as a first point of referral to specialists (so they don’t get swamped with the frivolous. In addition it is normal for a community midwife to undertake post-natal visits in the home to make sure the mother is coping etc. Is this all done at hospitals in the US?
Well it appears to have all gone quiet in the US – have a great sleep everyone.
Just a conversation starter for the morning. Most people outside of the US get their impression of your country via movies – after all, you do have a world dominating industry there. Would it be right to say that movies tend to present a one-eyed perspective of things like health care?
Goldie says:
October 13, 2013 at 9:29 pm
Not only yes, but Hell. yes. A prime example is “As Good As It Gets”, in which the single mom’s son’s health care dilemma would not in fact exist.
@milodonharlani
Interesting, that is exactly the movie I thought of too.
Goldie says:
October 13, 2013 at 9:14 pm
Post-natal care is free for moms & kids on Medicaid, although they usually have to go into clinics. Private insurance co-paid by employers & employees covers care for those with higher incomes.
Hello
Leaving aside the question of whether obamacare is desirable for a public policy point of view, I think I can say the implementation was flawed from the beginning. Politicians with no large software project management said essentially “Let there be a functioning software program to implement obamacare in 3.5 years” without estimating the time it would take to develop such a program. They could not have estimated the time because the requirements of the software project had not been completed at the time the law was passed and one cannot not estimate the time it takes complete a project without knowing those details.
I wrote a very short post laying out some of the software issues of obamacare at
http://boards.fool.com/software-issues-with-obamacare-30813946.aspx
Readers might want to read the two subsequent posts.
klee12
The US spends twice as much on health care per capita than all other western countries, yet has health outcomes more like impoverished Cuba than modern Australia. Plus, a sixth of Americans lack health insurance. Unfortunately, forcing people to deal with the private insurance companies who run the current overpriced, profit-motivated (ie. ruthless and unreliable) system will not work that well in all likelihood. Good luck, America !
Mike H says:
October 13, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Twelve million (at least) of the ~48 million uninsured people in the US are illegal immigrants. Most of the rest could afford insurance, but chose not to pay it, often because they’re young. No one in the country lacks access to medical care. There are indeed better ways to ensure access than having people go to ERs, but that is a problem that can be solved without the monstrosity of Obamacare.
Those people who were unfortunate enough to actually get through the process and get signed up for obummercare got an additional bonus they probably weren’t counting on. Web security people say those unfortunates have just published openly for all the world, everything needed by identity thieves to clean out everything they have. The site has no more security than pinning the info on the outside of your front door.
Anthony, my experience is with the Australian system :). It is not as bad as the system in the UK but it is very flawed. I could write more than one blog post about the many flaws wihin that system and why I hate it so much. However, there are lots of variations between the UK system and the Australian experience including the right to have our own doctor. The rub for me is the issue of bulk billing. If one requires a lot of medical attention then lack of bulk billing is expensive for someone on a low or negligible income. Also, unless one gets a Medicare Benefits Card, the cost of scripts can also be extremely high. Yes we do pay for THE PILL, so Sandra Fluke would not like our Australian system.
There is good and bad about the Australian system, and I do see that a lot of people waste the time of ER people when they go for something that is nothing more than a cold and a few sniffles, leaving people who need real attention waiting longer than is necessary. We do not pay for A&E services. It is billed to the government. In some ways I see this as a flaw in the system.
This whole thing is all about health insurance and I can see no reason for any government to be involved in health insurance.
@Andrew Harding:
“Like Communism it is a good idea in theory, but terrible in practice!”
Communism is the idea that everyone should be everyone’s slave forever. Even as a theoretical idea, it’s abject.
@Dale Rainwater:
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
M. Friedman stole it from George Courteline. And if you look at recent history: in Argentina (the foremost, well-known land of the Mighty Steak), the Kirschner put government in charge on the meat industry, as a result Argentina now imports meat ; in Venezuela (the fourth largest oil reserve country on the planet), Chavez put the fovernment in charge of the oil and gas industry, as a result Venezuela now imports gas ; in Thailand (the biggest exporter of rice in collective memory), the government was put in charge of rice trading, as a result, Thailand lost its place as the first exporter of rice and could very soon have to import rice.
So, the track record confirms it. In a twisted sense, it’s a good thing the government is in charge of curbing down CO2 !
RockyRoad, I resemble your remarks!
“Just let me go naturally.”
The failures of government web sites to admit applicants is a symptom. The disease is the creeping conceit that government can (or should) subsume entire blocks of society under its purview. That they would choose to place the health care system, which consumes 18% of the U.S. GDP, under its authority, and so enthrall 50 million more citizens is more than disturbing.
For those who freely forgo health care because they are young and healthy, are at little risk, or are simply undecided, the mandate that they must help subsidize others’ health needs, or else pay a fine to the government, is unconscionable.
I can only see this unfairness growing more complicated, and more onerous for everyone who is coerced into “investing”. An editorial by Gordon Crovitz in today’s WSJ, spotlights the problem.
(See: Crovitz: “ObamaCare’s Serious Complications”)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303382004579129381775545554.html?dsk=y
Crovitz notes that Americans are partly to blame for allowing the spiraling costs of medicine. We did it to ourselves by insisting on more expensive procedures, paid for by our employers, without looking for alternatives, without even checking what the costs were. Since we never asked for competing bids for our medicines or our treatments, doctors pharmacists and insurance companies felt free to inflate their costs.
Obama will not back off the implementation of the bill named after him, and it seems doubtful that even the shut-down will forestall its creeping assimilation over the next few years, but whatever system evolves, a top priority of genuine reformers should be the requirement of a single transparent pricing system. Institutions that post their prices at check-in desks will engender a smarter and more competent clientele of users. Americans who educate themselves on any matter of policy – and that includes their own health care – will demand the best bang for their buck. That should keep the provider institutions honest. In an open society, government will not, be one of those institutions.
Posts fishing like this make me glad I kept that 10 foot pole. ;p
@Anthony
You replied to Cal:
@CAL pointing out my experience with failed security certificates is “right wing propaganda”? How so?
I didn’t believe the claims that the website(s) were as bad as was being claimed until I actually tried it myself.
Cal makes a good point I think you missed here. The post seems to imply that if the website is this poorly implemented then “obamacare” must therefore be rubbish. The post is titled “my obamacare experience” but I put it to you that that is disingenuous. Are you seriously suggesting that because a newly constructed website has some admittedly grievous glitches, then the healthcare delivered by the system is going to be poor or unworthwhile? That is certainly the impression I am left with, especially in the context of the debate over it that has been raging.
I can only echo Cal’s comments. I owe my life to the Nhs. Twice. Is it inefficient? Yes, but no more so than any other large organisation – including big corporations. Is it value for money? Demonstrably so. Could it be improved? You bet. Would I swap it for the current madness you guys are putting up with in the states? Never in a million years. To be honest, everything I have heard, read or seen regarding the system in the US strikes me as madness. Nearly every other first world country has some form of universal healthcare, and by comparison the US is currently getting extremely bad value for money, as well as suffering a great deal of inequity.
I realise that to a large extent it is a cultural block. There is a long and deep rooted mistrust of government, and a preference for the individual be in control of their own destiny. That’s admirable, but there are limits. Would you have the military outsourced? The police? Why should health care be different? It is subject to the same sort of inflexible demand. There are some things to which a government is best placed to organise and run. Sometimes they do it well and sometimes they do it badly, so vote for the guys who can get it into some sort of shape, but
….sorry cut off…..
….but some kind of universal healthcare in a first world nation ought to be a basic standard.
Efficiency and government are not necessarily disjoint. It depends how you run your government. Similarly private ownership and efficiency don’t have to equate either – just look at what happened to the world financial markets in 2008. By drawing this equation you are oversimplifying the world. You are looking at a cartoon and not at reality. Don’t just throw up your hands at government inefficiency like it was some sort of inevitable law of nature. Demand that your government be run efficiently – that it doesn’t waste the money it extracts from you in taxes!
Efficiency is just efficiency. Both private and public organisations can possess it. For example the last time I looked the military was all run by the government. And parts of the US military are actually quite efficient … suggest you ask bin Laden for a reference. Now in the military they don’t say “Hey we are run by the government so what do you expect. Lets just slack off”. No! They demand and expect very high standards. At least as far as the pointy end of the military is concerned they simply don’t put up with second rate. That sort of attitude can be present in ANY organisation, whether private or public.
The important issue isn’t really whether health care is publicly or privately provided – paid by the taxpayer – paid by insurance – whatever. (shock! heresy!) The money ultimately comes from the public – whether gathered via private insurance or taxes or whatever – and is spent on the sick. The rest is just details of accounting – who holds and balances the books – and so on. What really matters is that the money ends up being well spent – that there is no waste – that there are incentives in the system to keep costs down and improve outcomes.
Face it. Obamacare would never have gotten to first base if healthcare in the US was working well. By any objective measure the US has one of the most expensive inefficient inhumane and wasteful healthcare systems in the world. OK it was private but hey – it was broke. Now this bizarre obamacare compromise that congress whipped up may not fix it. But it is unlikely to make it any worse. And if obamacare doesn’t work, scrap it and try something else, and then something else again, until finally something you try does work.
What I see are a bunch of people determined to put up with a broken system because their ideological blinkers are telling them that since it is private it ought to work brilliantly, so lets just all pretend that it does. Yessir. Ignore that dying man on the floor. We all have a wonderful health care system here in the good old US of A if only Obama would keep his mitts off. What I also see are republicans implacably determined, desperate even, not to give obamacare a chance, not because they don’t think it will work, but because deep down they greatly fear that it will.
The USA spends far more than any other country per capita on healthcare. However out of a ranking of 48 developed countries, it comes in at 46th for efficiency of it’s healthcare. It’s fairly obvious that while the Conservative side do not like Obamacare for one reason or another, the US health system is seriously dysfunctional and highly wasteful. Reject Obamacare if you must, butt doing nothing is not an option, the US health system really does need root and branch restructuring if it is to serve the needs of citizens.. http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-efficient-health-care-countries
Dave A says (October 13, 2013 at 1:23 pm): “Astounding !
Helping your fellow man through voting for a Government and President who enact a law to assist those who cannot gain medical treatment in your Country get that medical treatment is…. Slavery.”
Exactly. Without choice there is no altruism. Do we admire the man who is driven into a fire at gunpoint to rescue survivors, or do we admire the man who goes willingly? Do we admire the man who drives his fellow man at gunpoint into the fire, instead of going himself? Is he truly being altruistic? Perhaps Dave A has forgotten that Congress EXEMPTED ITSELF from the law. Yeah. Wow!
Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman once put it this way: “I believe there is an enormous difference between a situation in which 90 percent of the people are willing to tax themselves to help the bottom 10 percent and a situation in which the middle 80 percent of the people tax the top 10 percent ostensibly to help the bottom 10 percent but probably in fact to tax both ends of the scale to help themselves.”
BTW, if Dave A thinks the folks who like Obamacare are all “altruists”, I have a bridge in San Francisco I’d like to sell him. 🙂
Once U open an account you cannot close it
Here’s a few problems with costs and efficacy that haven’t been mentioned – big problems:
= = = = = =
“On the day Jim Lenox got his last injection, the frail 54-year-old cancer patient was waiting to be discharged from the Baltimore Washington Medical Center. He’d put on his black leather coat. Then a nurse said he needed another dose of anemia drugs.
His wife, Sherry, thought that seemed odd, because his blood readings had been close to normal, but Lenox trusted the doctors. After the nurse pumped the drug into his left shoulder, the former repairman for Washington Gas said he felt good enough to play basketball.
The shots, which his cancer clinic had been billing at $2,500 a pop, were expensive.
Hours later, Lenox was dead.
For years, a trio of anemia drugs known as Epogen, Procrit and Aranesp ranked among the best-selling prescription drugs in the United States, generating more than $8 billion a year for two companies, Amgen and Johnson & Johnson. Even compared with other pharmaceutical successes, they were superstars. For several years, Epogen ranked as the single costliest medicine under Medicare: U.S. taxpayers put up as much as $3 billion a year for the drugs.
The trouble, as a growing body of research has shown, is that for about two decades, the benefits of the drug — including “life satisfaction and happiness” according to the FDA-approved label — were wildly overstated, and potentially lethal side effects, such as cancer and strokes, were overlooked.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/anemia-drug-made-billions-but-at-what-cost/2012/07/19/gJQAX5yqwW_story.html
= = = = = =
May 20, 1999 – “FDA approves Vioxx for the relief of osteoarthritis symptoms, management of acute pain and primary dysmenorrhea, or painful menstruation.”
http://www.boyneclarke.com/resources/entry/chronology-of-the-key-events-in-the-development-of-vioxx-november-06
“A significant proportion of the scientific literature is now ghost written. A large number of clinical trials done are not reported if the results don’t suit the companies’ sponsoring study.”
-David Healy, Feb, 2001
“You see here the face of one of the greatest serial killers ever. Perhaps the greatest serial killer of all time. This man was a doctor. His name, Harold Shipman. He worked close to where I live. Shipman’s case illustrates that situations where trust is important can provide the conditions for extraordinary abuses.”
-David Healy, Feb, 2001
http://www.pharmapolitics.com/feb2healy.html
= = = = = =
Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison
By Ron Unz, 2012
[…]
In September 2004, Merck, one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies, suddenly announced that it was voluntarily recalling Vioxx […]Within weeks of the recall, journalists discovered that Merck had found strong evidence of the potentially fatal side-effects of this drug even before its initial 1999 introduction, but had ignored these worrisome indicators and avoided additional testing, while suppressing the concerns of its own scientists. Boosted by a television advertising budget averaging a hundred million dollars per year, Vioxx soon became one of Merck’s most lucrative products, generating over $2 billion in yearly revenue. Merck had also secretly ghostwritten dozens of the published research studies emphasizing the beneficial aspects of the drug and encouraging doctors to widely prescribe it, thus transforming science into marketing support. Twenty-five million Americans were eventually prescribed Vioxx as an aspirin-substitute thought to produce fewer complications.
[…]
Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx…
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chinese-melamine-and-american-vioxx-a-comparison/
= = = = = =
cynical_scientist:
Thankyou for your fine post at October 14, 2013 at 12:06 am.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/13/my-obamacare-experience/#comment-1447287
Your post is outstandingly the best post in the thread so far. It points out that – as often happens in WUWT threads – opinions on both ‘sides’ of the issue have been completely distorted by the political beliefs of the commentators.
In reality there are two basic forms of universal health care which have variants that are demonstrated to be successful in several countries. These two basic forms are the British NHS and the French universal insurance methods.
But the US has retained what is basically a Third World option: i.e. those who can afford what they need get it, and those who can’t afford it don’t get it. This lack of a proper universal health provision is ‘patched up’ with modifications such as Medicare, and a law which says accident victims obtain emergency care but get the bill for it so medical bills are a major contribution to suicide rates in the US.
So-called Obamacare is another ‘patch’ to the existing US system. Indeed, the main topic of this thread is a practical difficulty in becoming part of the additional modification to the existing system.
What bemuses people from outside the US is why Americans want to keep trying to find ways to make their system work for all when there are two systems which are each demonstrated to work for all in several countries.
If most Americans want universal health care then why not adopt one of the systems that work?
And if most Americans don’t want universal health care then why keep making the modifications to what they have?
Richard
richardscourtney,
Mandatory compassion is fascism.
Not to mention that British and French health care systems, as we all know, don’t work.