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
“Next time we get a Gov’t that wants to punish a segment of the population-can now withhold health care and medication.”
Bingo. The Glorious People’s National Health Service is continually whining about how they should be able to deny treatment to people who are fat, or smoke, or indulge in some other politically correct behaviour. If you put the government in charge of healthcare, they’ll use it as a stick to enforce their goals.
Some years ago I watched a public information film from the 40s, promoting the glorious benefits the Glorious People’s NHS would bring. Apparently it was going to make people so fit that health care costs would fall dramatically after a few years.
Didn’t quite work out that way. The NHS is now the fifth largest employer in the world.
MarkG says; “Next time we get a Gov’t that wants to punish a segment of the population-can now withhold health care and medication.”
Except that if such a scheme were in any way proposed, we can rest assured that the British Public would have the proposer swinging in short order. The NHS is probably the one thing that could provoke such a reaction.
Your scenario seems to more resemble the situation with the Private Sector. Get a cough that wont go away, or maybe some bowel obstruction that’ll require lengthy involvement, and see how quick the ‘Market’ led health sector will sign you off onto the NHS 🙂
Rob: “Do you get your monies worth?”
Multiplying the cost is not a step in that direction.
Tribune link is malformed.
richardscourtney,
Thank you for that explanation.
First, I love the fact that installing my own certificate is exactly how I spent last night. If you’re using a Linux server and buy one of the lower end certs, it’s extremely difficult to figure it out with the 10 year old scrap of documentation they send you. For the amount of money they charge they should come to your house and cook you dinner while they install everything for you.
However, for the amount of money going into these sites, I EXPECT they would have hired people who already have experience in these installations. Once I have a few installs under my belt that will be me. I see there is a need…
Second, for those Americans that are not aware of this, the rest of the world thinks the US has primitive, horrible health care, where unless you have a few dozen million in your bank account you get left bleeding in the street. This is because over the last few decades the rare horror stories are the only ones the rest of the world hears.
Third, national health care systems are HORRID. They perpetually suck money out of every other aspect of society. There is no limit to how much health care could cost. NO limit. Even military and civic infrastructure has limits.
Eventually, everyone on the entire planet will just work in the health care industry. And guess what? Even that won’t make it work properly.
boy oh boy, the parochial jingoists are out waving their banners and lying like politicians.
perhaps some canadian would care to tell us where every single graduate of McMasters goes?
(hint- they all leave canadastan for greener pastures)
perhaps some canadian socialist would care to explain to the world why SARS found a happy home – where? oh, the usa? no? where? in china – and where else? mombasa? no? where?
oh- the Nosocomial capital of the world – canada!
perhaps some canadian apologist would care to explain to any reasonable person how in the world an ontario hospital can perform 150 prostate biopsies and never sterilise the canulum because the instructions were written in english and too complicated?
oh- i’d also be interested in hearing how you can just hop down to the mall in any big canadian city and get yourself an MRI scan on a whim.
http://www.bcliving.ca/health/mri-scans-waiting-for-public-health-care-vs-paying-for-a-private-mri-clinic
“in the United States. Pittsburgh alone has more MRI machines than all of Canada.”
and ladies – if you go to hospital in canada, you may wish to have your husband accompany you.
those canadian doctors with dots on their foreheads hold no records for respecting females.
thank you for this notice As for the time being I have private insurance until my wifes Company dumps us onto Obamacare On Oct 13, 2013 7:21 AM, “Watts Up With That?” wrote: > > Anthony Watts posted: “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 “current news” and there’s a relevant WUWT category. Since like many of you, I’ve been forced to s” >
JohnM says: (re UK NHS)
“… Oh, and my local hospital now has several MRI suites…..much has happened in the NHS since it was updated. Shame the present lot are flogging it to overseas tax avoiders.”
He overlooks the massive cost we all pay for this low grade service. Just one hospital in the UK NHS has been outsourced to CIRCLE – Hinchingbrooke. This is the only hospital in the NHS which is now run by doctors and nurses who can get on with doing things properly without management stopping them. The results so far are excellent, and the hospital is running within budget (having previously gone bankrupt under normal NHS ‘management’ – true for most NHS hospitals by the way).
Oh, and any sane person or company avoids tax (not evades please note) where possible.
Taxation is not a moral issue. Governments are in effect taking money they have no moral right to by force if necessary (if you or I did it, it would be extortion). There is no equity in tax law – fact.
“the No 1 cause of bankruptcy in the USA…is medical bills…”
That quote is from a game-of-telephone-like distortion of a study which included loss of job from illness, gambling, addiction, and death of a relative (not medical bills from death) as part of “medical issues”, not “medical bills”. Yet another example of, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It includes the results of inheritance taxes, death of a business partner, gambling away all your money, spending all your money on drugs, and getting fired for being doped up at work…and lots of other things not related to medical bills. Where it does include medical bills, it does not attempt to determine whether they were the primary cause, and includes medical bills of greater than a thousand dollars.
I recently watched some episodes of “The Sopranos” in which Tony was shot in the belly by his uncle “Junior” and treated in an intensive care ward. Tony, the boss of a Mafia crime family, was very concerned about the cost. Luckily he was covered by the health plan of one of the corrupt unions that he ran. Surprisingly, given all of the comments here about government health insurance and freedom, he was visited by a a case worker from the insurance company. Her job was to get him out of the hospital as fast as possible to control the cost of his care. Given all the talk of freedom, it was also surprising that she had full access to the confidential medical records of this treatment so that she could get him out of the hospital as soon as possible. Tony, the boss of a Mafia crime family, didn’t like this treatment but then he was powerless in the face of the health insurance company so he just had to like it. She told Tony, the boss of a Mafia crime family, that he was healthy enough to leave the hospital and so out he went.
The case worker told him that the paramedics performed a “wallet biopsy” so that they would be able to take him to a hospital that would treat him. His surgeon told him that he was lucky to be taken to a level 1 trauma since he would be dead otherwise. Other people had the freedom to die at less capable hospitals. True, ihis freedom comes from their lack of money but is i still freedom.
How lucky people in the US must be to have the freedom to share their confidential medical records with insurance companies so that they will be able to maximize their profits. How lucky Americans must feel that they can give up their lives in order to fulfill the conditions of their health insurance and maintain quarterly profits so vital to to the bonuses of Wall Street bankers. Ah, the benefits of freedom.
As Janice Joplin sang “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”.
Tom, you used an episode of the Sapranos as your example? Really!? Wow.
LOL – I was thinking that too, Gdn… In fact, I was watching House last week and they got the MRI within a few minutes, whereas in Canada it’s usually months and months…
For those outside the US: most of you are concentrating on the end result and are ingorant of the means being used to achieve it. Prior to Obamacare, 85% of us had insurance, and polls showed that we were overwhelmingly satisfied with the insurance we had. Under Obamacare, an estimated 5% will never have insurance. So Obamacare took control over the entire healthcare industry to insure another 10%. It would have cost less to simply GIVE insurance to that 10%, but what the government wanted was direct control of almost 20% of the economy.
No one denies the worthiness of the desired outcome – healthcare for all – but they have done it in a way in which the end does not justify the means.
commieBob says: “No sane politicians (not even the old Reform Party) advocate against it. Brian Mulroney (the Canadian equivalent of Thatcher and Reagan) called it a sacred trust.”
Hostage to the sacred 47% who don’t have to pay for it.
The problem is not the idea of having an NHS style health care system in the US. The NHS actually works pretty well, although of course you can always find instances where it goes horrendously wrong. But you could do the same within the private sector too.
The problem is the way that the tax is being raised in order to fund it. In a nutshell it is being done in a way that feels very unfair to many people. It feels like a robbery. No matter which way you cut it, it is a redistribution of wealth, and not necessarily from rich to poor in every case either!
Americans are in general uncomfortable with redistribution of wealth, because it smells like Socialism/Communism and in the opinion of many, mine included, that is the most evil, destructive, soul-destroying, anti-human political movement which ever existed on this planet.
The other problem is, and really this is the bottom line, is that nobody really trusts Obama in general anymore. He has been such a let down in so many ways, which I will not enumerate here, that people simply don’t trust him. People are thanking God that there is a two-term limit. What wisdom the founders had!
That is not a partisan issue though, I think that the entire political establishment has lost all credibility on both sides. As an example, the “shutdown” is completely bonkers fiasco the likes of which I never thought could happen (even though it has happened before but I had never heard of it).
The real, fundamental, root of the issue is that Americans are generally an uneducated, ill informed and unaware population. No offence, but that is true of the “average” American whose intellectual diet consists mainly of daily doses of the TV show “Ellen”, the “poetry” of rapper Jay-Z and the cultural influence of Miley Cyrus. That is the way that the political classes like things to be, that is the way it is, and that is why America has become the way that it is today.
Jtom says:
October 13, 2013 at 3:26 pm
For those outside the US: most of you are concentrating on the end result and are ingorant of the means being used to achieve it.
———–
That’s not the problem. I think Obamacare is absolutely ridiculous and helps no one. However, bashing Canadian healthcare as an example of a failed system is just plain lying. Yes, there are always improvements that can be done. But these improvements are so minor and so far removed from where the US is right now that comparing the two is an exercise in propaganda.
Being in New Zealand where people are 4.5m and sheep 45m we have an enviable semi-socialist situation. There are private insurers too and they may provide speedier treatment for elective surgery but not for the routine acute misadventures of life. The total medical and pharmacy costs for my family at home aged from 6- 74 are presently under $US800 a year. At 74 I make up the bulk of the costs.
Pharmac, a government agency, bulk funds medications and we pay a token amount for prescriptions (included in the $800). Apart from extraordinary new experimental medicines almost everything is available. We are limited to the brands that Pharmac has contracted for but there is no evidence that we are any the less healthy because of Pharmac’s choice. The alternatives are available at your own expense.
Hospital costs and ambulance costs are generally free to residents. Accident costs are met through compulsory payroll levies and motor vehicle registration charges. Even if you are injured playing sport or fall off a skate board you don’t have the worry about having to meet medical costs.
I have found there is little point for us having private insurance because anything needing immediate attention will be dealt with free including at the local public hospital A & E. When I collapsed last year the ambulance paramedics put a line into my bone to stabilise me and showed skills and care way beyond my expectations. I was being attended to in person by a cardiac specialist team within the hour. Medical insurance would have given me no advantage: I would still have been taken to the public hospital for trauma care.
We are fortunate because of the small size of our country. IT is well advanced and medical records, test results and scans are all on line throughout NZ. The systems being essentially public aim to provide efficient services within budget. There has to be in such a system priorities and I have no concern that despite my aging I will lack any appropriate care in the future. The system seems very tolerant in patching up those who have failed to adequately or even deliberately not cared for themselves.
Despite all the benefits the taxes are not that high: we have an income tax of $US8cents to $US26.5c/$USD (NZD $0.105-$0.33) with a Goods and Services taxes (VAT) of 15% on consumer purchases including local authorities charges. However there is a generous negative tax for families and accommodation so less than 40% of the country effectively pay any net tax. I don’t think that such a system is dampening will to work but that we are constrained like most societies by lack of employment and deliberate outsourcing offshore.
I cannot comment on the politics of ACA but I know well the problems of mass scale roll out of a new nationwide tax system having been responsible in the 70’s for implementing the (then Western) Samoa National Provident Fund where 10% of the countries salary and wages were to be directed into personal retirement savings accounts. We had a quarter of the country enrolled at the end of the first 3 years and accounting on that scale still remains difficult. IT does not provide solutions to conceptual problems: scope and concept are outside the field of view of most programmers.
Kevin O’Brien
“…which will result in a triage system that will let Granny die.”
Obamacare – Another government shovel-ready program?
Look, the web pages are something from California. Does anyone really think that ANYTHING from California’s Government works or at least works correctly?
Every province in Canada runs their own health care system, different sign-up rules, the works. So you need to identify the province. Most of the stories about long waits are complete BS. But not in Ontario, though.
Page 336 of the final certified text of the ACA on health.gov says specifically that if you don’t pay the penalty, nothing happens to you. This is remarkable language in a bill because it states that the Secretary of the Treasury cannot make any laws about it.
If you have your own insurance provider now and want to stay with it, that’s fine. I don’t know where you got the idea that you have to sign up for the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).
The Act specifies that everyone should have insurance.
This is nonsense. From the ACA, page 333
My company insurance stayed the same with respect to benefits, and my contribution dropped by approximately 10%. I am still eligible to participate in the HSA ( before tax $5550 placed into an interest bearing account that is usable for medical care, and the balance carries over year to year).
BTW, Blue Cross and Blue Shield premiums for my state are unchanged based on the BCBS quote website. I checked in Sept, and again a few days ago — price is exactly the same for family of 5 Total Blue — $506 a month.
Obamacare boils down to certificates on a website? Please. It’s a petty complain… and more so considering there is plenty to complain about Obamacare.