I am just wondering is every post eventually going to end up with discussing peanut butter and jelly samiches

Whats wrong with the way it was? If you didn't like if the way it was you could have gone to Canada to get your single payer bullshit...

Oh! By the way you guys are fucked you will never be able to afford this type of health care. it now takes like 52% of all money's collected by our gov. And it sucks shit.

I wonder if I can get some Obama Care to cure frost bite. I sat from 0500 to 0900 on a metal deer stand in 15 degree temps.

The local morning news (which leans left) just reported "according to a survey conducted by the Associated Press, 4.5 million Americans have had their health insurance cancelled."

Yeah, the Affordable Care Act is wonderful... Bullshit. All lies, fairy dust and unicorn jizz.

where is dguidry to defend this clusterfuk of a bill now? Even Mary Landrieu is dropping this thing like a hot potato (even though she voted for it). Too late for her. She has got to go in 2014!

www.heathcare.gov - was ready on Oct 1st - another lie !


Henry Chao, visibly stunned Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) when he said under questioning before a House subcommittee that a significant portion of HealthCare.gov—30 to 40 percent of it—has yet to be constructed.

"We still need to build the payments system to make the payments [to insurance companies] in January," testified Chao, deputy chief information officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that operates HealthCare.gov.


That so-called financial management tool was originally supposed to be part of HealthCare.gov when it launched Oct. 1, but officials later suspended its launch as part of their effort to get the consumer interface part of the site ready. The tool will, when it works, transmit the subsidies that the government is kicking in for many enrollees to offset the costs of their monthly premiums.

Let the ACA do what it was designed to do...... Self explode. It's well on its way already, and is making Obama look like the absolute worst President in the history of America. Hopefully before it does explode, all those bleeding heart liberals can get that shit patched up!

ACA is a TAX - the Obamacare lawyers proved it in the Supreme Court !

Four Years of Lies - in one video...

http://obamalies.net/four-years-of-lies ... video.html

The NEXT BAILOUT ???


The insurance industry may be next in line to receive a hefty government bailout. That’s what could happen if signups for Obamacare fall short of expectations triggering an obscure provision in the Affordable Care Act that makes up any serious losses.

The potential price tag: millions of taxpayer dollars or more over a 3-year period.

Related: Tech Experts on Healthcare.gov: Shut It Down

So-called “risk corridors” were included in the 2010 health law to compensate insurance companies for major coverage losses in the event that far more older and sick people signed up for health plans than younger, healthy people and drove up their costs after they had set the premiums. If actual claims exceed projections by more than 3 percent under Obamacare, the government will compensate the industry for those losses.

The lie about TRANSPARENCY in the Obama administration ?

"As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist's camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the executive branch of government," the letter states, adding that the restrictions imposed by the Obama White House represent a major break from the practices of past administrations.

The news organizations said Thursday that the White House limits on access raise constitutional concerns about infringement on First Amendment press freedoms and have "a direct and adverse impact on the public's ability to independently monitor and see what its government is doing."

The press coalition, which included The Associated Press, major broadcast and cable networks, wire services, online services and newspapers, said the access limits also undercut Obama's pledge to create a more transparent government, and impose "an arbitrary restraint and unwarranted interference on legitimate newsgathering activities."

The lie that you can keep your Doctor !


Insurers are slashing payments to medical practices in many of the plans they sell through the new health-law marketplaces—sparking worries that Americans signing up for coverage will have fewer doctors to choose from if low fees spark an exodus from the plans.


Related StoriesUnitedHealth Group Inc. sent some New York City physicians contract amendments as recently as this month setting rates well below what doctors normally see from private insurance, including less than $40 for a typical office visit and about $20 for reading a mammogram, according to confidential documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

"We have heard from a lot of physicians the rates [insurers] are offering them are very low, and physicians are questioning whether they are going to participate," said Sam Unterricht, a Brooklyn ophthalmologist and president of the Medical Society of the State of New York.

Some of United's rates fall close to what the state Medicaid program for low-income people pays for the same services. The fees for some office visits are less than half of what doctors in the city say they receive for treating people covered by employer-sponsored insurance. Six doctors elsewhere in New York reported lower rates from a range of insurers, including United, but declined to specify rates citing confidentiality agreements.

"Our goal is to provide exchange members with a robust choice of providers," said a statement issued by United. The insurer added that it would "offer physicians the choice of participating at rates that are above Medicaid and comparable to historical rates." Few New Yorkers have historically purchased coverage on the individual market, and doctors say their rates for most employer-sponsored plans are much higher. The company initially notified doctors of new rates in April.

WellPoint Inc.'s Anthem unit in Connecticut offered Steven Levine, an ear nose and throat specialist in Trumbull, rates for exchange plans he said "were not what a reasonable person would consider acceptable." He says he declined the contract.

A spokeswoman for Wellpoint said that in designing its exchange plans, it "focused on affordability to allow the maximum number of individuals to purchase coverage."

The exchange plans are expected to cover more than 20 million people by 2016. Doctors have long protested declining or stagnant rates from government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and had looked to the exchanges to usher in more privately insured patients.

More physicians may leave the plans as awareness of the new rates spread, doctors and experts said. Many doctors surveyed in September by the Medical Group Management Association said they weren't aware of the fees they would be offered for treating patients gaining coverage on the exchanges. Of those that had heard, 37% said the rates offered were lower than Medicare, and 18% said they were lower than Medicaid rates, according to the survey.

The 2010 health-care law itself doesn't include any requirements limiting physicians' payments or restricting insurers' arrangements with doctors. But in order to keep prices low for exchange plans, many health insurers cobbled together narrow networks of doctors who agreed to lower their fees.

But United's move, affecting plans designed around broader physician networks, is meant to rein in costs, too. Some doctors said they had learned of the fee cuts even as consumers began picking health plans. As a result, consumers may end up selecting doctors who haven't yet agreed to participate in the plans. United is giving doctors who don't want to accept the rates 30 days to opt out.

State-run Medicaid programs are being expanded in some states under the law. The program has long grappled with problems in patients' access to services because not all doctors are willing to accept the generally low reimbursements.

Experts worry that a stratified system could emerge for the insured, where people who get health insurance through their jobs can go to a broad slate of doctors, while those newly covered in the exchanges get fewer choices. Depending on their plan, people may be able to see an out-of-network doctor and get some level of reimbursement. But many plans on the exchanges are HMO-style closed networks.

"It is going to be very tough for consumers to have accurate information about which physicians they really have access to," said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a Washington think tank.

The lie that employer based insurance won't be affected !


The "Cadillac Tax" on above average employer plans

By Dan Caplinger
November 22, 2013

Controversies have been abundant lately regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. But with so many people focused on the immediate issues surrounding the rollout of health care insurance exchanges, few are looking at other impacts the law will have down the road, including the Obamacare Cadillac tax on high-value employer-provided health insurance.

In the following video, Dan Caplinger, The Motley Fool's director of investment planning, takes a closer look at the Obamacare Cadillac tax and its impact on you and your health insurance coverage. Dan notes that Obamacare imposes a 40% excise tax on employers that provide insurance coverage that costs more than $10,200 for single policies or $27,500 for family policies. Even though the tax doesn't take effect until 2018, employers are already taking steps to address it. Dan discusses recent moves by Walgreen
to move workers to private health-insurance exchanges, as well as Boeing's concerns about the impact on the benefits it will provide to employees. Dan concludes with a look at the impact on UnitedHealth, WellPoint , and other insurers, which stand to lose out if high-priced policies fall by the wayside.

dropped another small buck this season. Just can not seem to get ligned up on the big one.

I could not believe how many geese flew over me this morning.

Nice. 15 deg weather will freeze your butt to the stand. Lol. Too bad you didn't have your shotgun you coulda got two in one hunt. Lol


1648 with a stage 331/4 paddle

The lie that your information is safe and secure !


Related: Is the Embattled IRS the Next Obamacare Nightmare?

George suggested that the IRS should strengthen its management controls, as well as provide additional training to employees involving uploading data to implement fixes.

The IRS responded to the auditor, saying it has already issued a new manual to staff to help improve monitoring practices.

The auditor’s warning comes 4 ½ months after the IRS inadvertently posted thousands of Social Security numbers on a government website. Additionally, a security breach in November 2012 revealed that 74.7 GB of data was stolen from South Carolina’s Dept. of Revenue, exposing Social Security numbers of 3.8 million taxpayers along with credit card numbers and bank account data. The sense of urgency shared by the auditors and taxpayers alike, however, is apparently not shared by managers at the IRS.

This is just the latest in a spate of IRS audits that reveal a major lack of oversight at the agency, raising serious concerns about whether it’s positioned to take on new and crucial responsibilities under the Affordable Care Act, which will require the IRS to store even more sensitive healthcare information from taxpayers.

Under the new law, the IRS will enforce 45 new tax-related provisions, including imposing new taxes on medical devices and Medicare, overseeing new itemized deductions for medical expenses, and imposing penalties on uninsured Americans who fail to purchase coverage on the new exchanges. - Follow Brianna Ehley on Twitter @BriannaEhley

Giga if you dont like whats going on..... youre racist....

but on a serious note if you think that any of these problems are acceptable on any level you need to grow a brain... if you got a debit card from your employer for misc purchases while on the job and that card got "lost" and eventually your employer lost money due to fraudulent purchases you can bet your ass you wont have a job for much longer...

The lie that Obamacare will lower health care costs !


On Wednesday, the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a report claiming that "the ACA is contributing to the recent slow growth in health care prices and spending."

These assertions border on nonsense.

National spending on health care is projected to reach a record $2.9 trillion in 2013, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This is more than 25% above pre-recession spending levels in 2007. Health-care expenditures per capita and as a percentage of GDP are also at record highs, expected to top out this year at $9,216 and 18% respectively.

The lie that employer based insurance will not be affected !

Small business employes almost 50 % of working Americans - yet the
SHOP to service small business will not be available for another YEAR !

What will we do in the meantime ??? Now that our policies are cancelled ???


CHICAGO (AP) — The Obama administration is delaying yet another aspect of its troubled health care law, putting off until next November the launch of an online portal to the health insurance marketplace for small businesses until the hobbled HealthCare.gov website is fixed.

The move, announced Wednesday, was needed because repairs are still underway to the federal website, which is the primary way for individuals to apply for insurance, and that has priority, federal officials said.

Wednesday's setback was the latest in a stream of missed deadlines, which has proven politically costly for Obama as his signature domestic achievement comes under withering criticism for its bungled rollout.

The administration also postponed a Spanish-language sign-up tool this week. It recently pushed back the enrollment deadline for individuals: People who sign up by Dec. 23 can get coverage that starts on Jan. 1. In an earlier delay, businesses with more than 50 workers were given until 2015 to meet the requirement to provide health insurance without paying a penalty. And the deadline date for individuals to avoid penalties for failing to get coverage was pushed back six weeks.

~

This summer, on the eve of Independence Day, the White House announced a one-year delay in the mandate for large businesses to provide health insurance to their employees. Small businesses face no such mandate, although employees have an individual mandate to carry insurance.

Republicans and opponents of the ACA jumped on the small-business delay as yet another example of how the president “bit off more than he can chew” with the health-care law.

“Business owners across this country are already having health care plans for their employees canceled by this law, and now they’re told they won’t have access to the system the president promised them to find them different coverage,” House Speaker John Boehner (R) said in a statement. “Instead, they’ll have to resort to a system you’d expect to see in the 1950s.”

The lie that new Obamacare plans are better !

ObamaCare's Plans Are Worse

How the Affordable Care Act raises prices and limits medical choices.

Nov. 29, 2013 7:05 p.m. ET

Even as President Obama reluctantly granted Americans thrown off their health plans quasi-permission to possibly keep them, he called them "the folks who, over time, I think, are going to find that the marketplaces are better." He means the ObamaCare exchanges that are replacing the private insurance market, adding that "it's important that we don't pretend that somehow that's a place worth going back to."


U.S. President Barack Obama meets with health insurance chief executives at the White House in Washington November.

Easy for him to say. The reason this furor will continue even if the website is fixed is that the public is learning that ObamaCare's insurance costs more in return for worse coverage.

Mr. Obama and his liberal allies call the old plans "substandard," but he doesn't mean from the perspective of the consumers who bought them. He means people were free to choose insurance that wasn't designed to serve his social equity and income redistribution goals. In his view, many people must pay first-class fares for coach seats so others can pay less and receive extra benefits.

Democrats chose to lie about how disruptive their proposed reforms would be. The president reassured people that they could keep their plan (which sometimes, oops, they can't) and that premiums would fall by $2,500 per family (the savings were never supposed to be specific to premiums, and the projected savings in overall costs haven't fully materialized). He probably lied about this stuff because he saw what happened to Bill Clinton when he didn't lie about it enough in 1993.

The lies about subsidies, penalties, and the IRS !



ObamaCare's Next Legal Challenge
The law says subsidies can only go through state-run exchanges.


By SCOTT PRUITT
Dec. 1, 2013 6:38 p.m. ET
Oklahoma City

As millions of Americans see their health-insurance premiums increase, have their coverage dropped as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and are unable to use the federal exchange, Oklahoma has sued the Obama administration. The Sooner State and several others are trying to stop the government from imposing tax penalties on certain states, businesses and individuals in defiance of the law. If these legal challenges are successful, the deficit spending associated with the new health-care law could be reduced by approximately $700 billion over the next decade.

While the president's health law is vast and extraordinarily complex, it is in one respect very simple. Subsidies are only to be made available, and tax penalties for not signing up for health insurance are only to be assessed, in states that create their own health-care exchange. The IRS, however, is attempting to enforce tax penalties in all states—including Oklahoma and the majority of the other states that have declined to create their own exchanges. Citizens and businesses in these states must use the federal exchange instead.

Enlarge Image

Bloomberg News

The distinction is critical, because under the terms of the law it is the availability of government insurance-premium subsidies that triggers the penalties against businesses if they fail to provide their employees with health insurance that the administration deems acceptable. This is a huge problem for the administration, which desperately needs to hand out tax credits and subsidies to the citizenry to quash the swelling backlash against the law.

When Oklahoma first raised this challenge in 2012, many experts predicted that the Sooner State would "go it alone" in pursuing this legal strategy. Not so. In Indiana, the state and 15 school districts have filed a lawsuit against the IRS, the agency that collects the penalties. Business owners (who, like the state of Oklahoma, would be subject to penalties as employers) and individuals in Virginia and the District of Columbia have done the same. In the D.C. lawsuit, the presiding judge recently rejected the Obama administration's attempt to have the case dismissed, as the judge in the Oklahoma case did in August.

Motions for summary judgment will soon be filed in federal district courts, and our court system will determine whether what the administration has called its "improvements" to the ACA—essentially by ignoring some of its provisions—are lawful.

They are not. Congress was exceedingly clear that tax credits and subsidies are available to people whose plans "were enrolled in through an exchange established by the State under section 1311 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." Even so, the administration argues that Congress intended for all Americans to receive subsidies regardless of whether they enrolled in health-care coverage through a state exchange or a federal exchange. But to arrive at that conclusion you have to ignore the plain language of the law. And nowhere in the law did Congress authorize the IRS to provide the credits or subsidies to those other than citizens who buy their insurance through an exchange established under section 1311 of the ACA—i.e., a state exchange.

Lies about the website working !


For all of the efforts by tech specialists to improve the site, officials still are scrambling to repair and install functions on the "back end" of the Obamacare system that are needed to finalize enrollments with insurers. That could create another headache for the administration starting in January, if the enrollments for some who sign up for coverage via the website are not finalized before their coverage is supposed to begin.

"The real challenges remain, and that's downstream," said Rick Howard, research director for the technology consultant Gartner. "The real error rate will be in the billing transactions and how accurate the billing information is and how accurate the premium calculation is."

The administration said that in meetings with insurers and healthcare officials this week, it will refocus attention on the functions needed to handle insurance payments, including federal subsidies for low-income consumers buying coverage.

Without those functions working properly, HealthCare.gov and websites for 14 state-run marketplaces could have difficulty operating in 2014.

America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, has said because of the system's administrative shortcomings, some insurers are receiving inaccurate or duplicative information about enrollees.

At the White House on Monday, Obama spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged that "the work is not done" on the website.

Carney added that the waiting page that some visitors saw was created in part because officials knew that Monday would put a strain on the system.

"We absolutely anticipated that on this day in particular, because it is the first workday after the deadline we set ... to make sure that the website was functioning effectively for the vast majority of users, we would see a surge in visitors," Carney said.

Health website transactions fail 10 percent of time: U.S. official.
By Caroline Humer
4 hours ago


Insurers warn of problems with Obamacare enrollment surge Reuters One in 10 Obamacare applications has trouble getting to insurers MarketWatch Small health insurers fear Obamacare woes will tilt playing field Reuters U.S. scrambles to boost Obamacare enrollment as deadlines loom Reuters (Reuters) - As millions of people shop online for new insurance plans under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law, about 10 percent of applications to the main website are not being accurately transmitted, a government spokeswoman said on Friday.

The error rate has improved since HealthCare.gov's disastrous debut on October 1, which created a political crisis for Obama as opponents and supporters of the law questioned whether the most sweeping social program since the 1960s was rushed well before it was ready. Last week, the White House wrapped up a five-week emergency effort to fix the most obvious of the website's technical problems.

But the current level of mistakes deeper into the system are creating a new workload for insurers to verify the details of their new members and could lead to unwelcome surprises for consumers if there are mistakes in new policies that take effect on January 1.

HealthCare.gov relays information about new customers in so-called "834" transaction forms to the private insurance companies that provide the health plans. The portal serves people in 36 states while 14 states are running their own online marketplaces.

"We believe nine of 10 transactions are being successfully transmitted," the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, spokeswoman Julie Bataille said at a news briefing.

Previously, Bataille has said the majority of errors had been fixed in these transactions but had not defined either the current or past rate of mistakes.

More lies about website ??? Is it a 10 - 20 - or 30 percent error rate ???



AP

The Obama administration has spent the last few days touting progress and fixes to HealthCare.gov, the federal health exchange website that has been plagued by dysfunction for most of the two-plus months it's been online.

But a significant, lingering problem on the back end of the site is still causing complications for insurance companies. And it could provide a rude awakening next month for consumers who thought they purchased a plan through HealthCare.gov.

At issue are "834s," the enrollment forms sent to insurance companies after a customer enrolls in a plan. Glitches on the site have led to garbled, incomplete, or missing forms. The Washington Post reported Monday night that the issue has affected about one-third of customers. The White House disputed the number, but did not offer one of their own.
In fact, the White House has been mostly reluctant to talk about the issue, beyond acknowledging that it's a major problem and pledging to fix the issue.

Here is a bit of truth - not from a Washington source !

David Lenihan wrote :
.Please…CMS and HHS…..do not make artificial deadlines for yourselves. In all liklihood you will not meet them and create political as well as real problems for yourselves and your users (us citizens).

834 electronic transactions are at the heart of “eligibility” in the Obamacare system. They do not just flow to health plans with information….they bounce back and forth between systems when applicants enroll. It is this that is a mess that can’t be easily fixed….hence the caution on deadlines. In particular, requests back and forth with the IRS (a critical component) do not bounce off of modern systems….but rather old main frames that are frankly not up to the task of doing what Obamacare requires of them. The govt would be better off eliminating all connectivity to the IRS for technical reasons alone.

While this program had/has noble intentions….it just doesn’t work. Needs a re-design, re-build (coding) and certainly testing……maybe a year or two worth of work by qualified people….longer otherwise.

Lies to local insurance agents and broken promises persist !
Obamacare is hurting local insurance agents we know and trust - pushing
consumers into a "broken system" on a "broken website" ! ! !


(AP) — When insurance agent Kelly Fristoe recently spent 30 minutes helping a client pick a mid-level health plan and the federal marketplace website froze, he called the government's hotline and tried to finish the application. But the operator refused to credit Fristoe as an agent on the application, meaning he wouldn't get the commission or be listed as the follow-up contact if his client needed help again later.

The Wichita Falls, Texas, insurance agent is one of many brokers around the country finding frustration as they try to help customers navigate the Affordable Care Act's marketplaces while earning the commissions they've long built their businesses around. Some insurers and insurance agents are calling on President Barack Obama's administration to allow them to bypass healthcare.gov and enroll consumers directly amid growing complaints about problems with enrollment information generated from the website.

The so-called 'back-end' problems could mean that consumers who think they've successfully signed up for a health plan, may find themselves unable to access their coverage come January. The problems include enrollment information that's rendered practically useless by errors, duplication or garbles. Efforts to fix the issues are underway. Health officials have been vague about the scope of the botched applications insurers are receiving and what steps they're taking to fix the problems.

Nearly 70,000 agents and brokers have been certified nationwide to sell health insurance on the federal exchange. Many say they could be the troubled health law's best ambassadors with the potential to boost lackluster enrollment figures — only about 27,000 had enrolled via the federal website nationwide in the first month. But instead, many agents said they're continually met by obstacles.

"You look at this dismal number they have of how many people have enrolled on healthcare.gov," said Fristoe. "If they would just relax and loosen up, because me and all of my associates across this nation want to help these consumers get enrolled into the market."

But the problems have persisted, prompting the head of the National Association of Health Underwriters to write the president Tuesday, urging him to make additional fixes a priority, saying agents have a significant backlog of clients with incomplete applications.

"We want to make it clear that a number of back-end technical obstacles still exist for health insurance agents and brokers trying to actively support the federal marketplace," said CEO Janet Trautwein.

Insurance industry executives also met with Obama last month and encouraged him to let them take a more active role in enrolling consumers in the 36 states relying on the federal website. Brokers' frustrations with the website are amplified by the pressure they face to add customers to offset reductions in their commissions under the law.

Among the complaints, agents say the website isn't always crediting brokers when they help enroll consumers — meaning they're losing out on commissions. Once an application is started, consumers can't go back in and add a broker's name if they help midway through the process. Federal health officials said there are 975,000 customers who have started an application but not selected a plan.

Agents say they're also still waiting on the federal government to add a promised feature on the website that would easily connect consumers with local insurance brokers.

The Lie - HealthCare.gov is "working smoothly for the vast majority of users" ! ! !





Federal exchange sends unqualified people to Medicaid
Jayne O'Donnell, USA TODAY 8:42 a.m. EST December 8, 2013

Brokers are reporting that some of their clients are in insurance limbo as they wait for the error to be corrected by HHS or their states.

Holly Hawkins, with husband Jacob and their 18-month-old daughter, is due with another child in February. She worries her Medicaid dispute won't be resolved in time.

More complete Medicaid files going from HHS to states this week even though the federal health care exchange is incorrectly determining that some people are eligible for Medicaid when they clearly are not, leaving them with little chance to get the subsidized insurance they are entitled to as the Dec. 23 deadline for enrollment approaches.

State and industry officials haven't quantified the problem yet, but the National Association of State Medicaid Directors may release information next week after following up on reports from around the country, says Executive Director Matt Salo.

Here's what happens: When consumers applying for insurance put their income information into subsidy calculators on HealthCare.gov — the exchange handling insurance sales for 36 states — it tells them how much financial assistance they qualify for or that they are eligible for Medicaid. If it's the latter, consumers aren't able to obtain subsidies toward the insurance, although they could buy full-priced plans.

If the Medicaid determination is wrong, consumers should file an appeal with the federal marketplace, says Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters, but she says she does not have an estimate on how long that would take.


Brokers are reporting that some of their clients are in insurance limbo as they wait for the error to be corrected by HHS or their states so they can reapply.

Jessica Waltman, top lobbyist for the National Association of Health Underwriters, says she's heard a number of reports from around the country of people making as much as $80,000 a year being told they qualify for Medicaid on HealthCare.gov.

"I have heard on multiple occasions from brokers in various states over the past eight weeks that they have had wacky Medicaid determinations with people who clearly make way too much money for Medicaid," she says.

HealthCare.gov is "working smoothly for the vast majority of users," says Peters, but she noted some people may have technical difficulties or complicated family or tax situations that require extra assistance.

HHS has added more call center employees and in-person assistants for people who need extra help, she says.

But insurance brokers say that when people call the HealthCare.gov "800" number to explain that they can't possibly be eligible for Medicaid, they are told they are eligible if the site says so.

"It's a very, very unfortunate state of affairs," says Waltman.

HHS said it will begin sending Medicaid application files to states this week given that HealthCare.gov's mechanism to transfer accounts to state Medicaid offices still isn't working. The data received up until now haven't given states enough information to determine Medicaid eligibility, says Salo, but he hopes that, as promised, the new files will.

"Claims from some states about our process for testing the Medicaid eligibility and enrollment systems are inaccurate," says Peters. "We are eager to work with states to ensure their systems are functioning properly and to extend Medicaid coverage to those who are eligible through the generous Medicaid funding made possible by the Affordable Care Act."

HHS is working "extremely hard" to make sure people will have coverage no matter what on Jan. 1, says Salo. While states support that goal, "some want more assurances that people enrolled in Medicaid are actually eligible," he says.

HHS has told states they won't be penalized if they enroll people in Medicaid who HHS erroneously said were eligible, says Salo.

That's little consolation for consumers who can't buy subsidized insurance on the exchange because of apparent mistakes.

Jacob Hawkins of Plano, Texas, makes about $50,000 a year as a self-employed pool builder, yet his family of three was deemed eligible for Medicaid. His wife, Holly, is due to have their second child in February and is worried she won't have insurance in time. She filed an appeal of the Medicaid determination, but doubts it will be approved before the Dec. 23 deadline.

"I'm frustrated, mad and there's no one to help," says Hawkins.

Being married with a $50,000 income will get you a decline from Medicaid, even with a pregnant wife, says Hawkins' broker, Connie Louanne Trebing. " I know, because I just had a couple declined in a similar situation," she says.

Some of the files of those supposedly eligible for Medicaid in Texas include people who don't live in Texas and who are already signed up for Medicaid, says Stephanie Goodman, spokeswoman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

Illinois expects about 19,000 files shortly from HHS. Illinois state spokesman Mike Claffey says he doesn't know how many may have problems, but Chicago broker Jordan Wishner says seven of them will be from his office and definitely will be wrong.

He has three clients of his own and an agent in his office has another four who are clearly above 138% of the federal poverty limit ($32,499 for a family of four), yet are being told they are eligible for Medicaid, which blocks their efforts to buy subsidized insurance.

"What am I supposed to do with the clients that are being told they qualify for Medicaid when they actually do not?" asks Wishner, who owns The Health Insurance Shoppe, a retail insurance store. "Send in an appeal with 16 days left? Seriously?"
With this much uncertainty, "it's frustrating that there is no place for a broker to get help with errant cases and try to avert problems," says Waltman.

More bad news I heard the other day the same company that fucked up Canada's gun registry is the same one doing your health care web site. they took over 10 yrs to get it right and was one of the major reason it got scraped. So ona good note it might be so fucked up they will need to re- do.

The lie - "you can keep your doctor" - the reality you can't keep your hospital !

Some of the Best Hospitals Are Off Limits

Americans purchasing health insurance on the federal and state exchanges may be in for an even bigger shock when they discover some of the best hospitals in the country out of reach, even when those hospitals were previously available to them under their personal policies. That’s because most of the top hospitals in the country will accept insurance from only one or two companies operating under Obamacare.

Obamacare regulations and government subsidies are likely to make insurance more affordable for millions of Americans, as President Obama and senior aides have repeatedly boasted. But many insurers have responded to Obamacare caps on premiums by offering top-tier hospitals and physicians far less money for services rendered. And they’re responding by strictly limiting the number of policies they will accept.

Obama’s Health Care Promise Named “Lie of the Year”.

By Rob Garver

He apologized on network television, and his aides have been doing damage control for weeks, but President Obama’s repeated assertion that under his signature health care law, “you can keep your health plan” continues to haunt him.

This week, the political fact-checking website PolitiFact named the president’s statement, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” the organization’s “Lie of the Year.”
Related: Top Tier Hospitals Excluded from Obamacare

PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote, “Boiling down the complicated health care law to a sound bite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief. Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.”

When Obamacare implementation began, its supporters said the program needed about seven million people to enroll by next March. Of that number, advocates said, a large portion -- about 40 percent -- had to be young and healthy, to cover the costs of insuring older, less healthy Americans.

As Obamacare's problems mounted, and it became more and more likely the system would not hit those marks, supporters began to lower their standards. First, they said Obamacare will be fine even if far fewer than seven million sign up. Then they said it will be fine even if far less than 40 percent are young and healthy.

Now, it's becoming apparent why Obamacare advocates are putting on such a confident face: They have no backup plan if their national health care scheme fails.