ACA (Obamacare) updates for 2014

Reminds me of this line from "Men in Black"

"There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT! "

Reverend Revelant wrote:

Rick wrote: Sounds like a reasonable bill to me... not sure why having an extra layer of protection/warning is a bad thing.

Because by law, the federal government does not have to report on hacking breaches of their systems.

But KMart does and will probably get sued. I love the way the government always gets to live by different rules than the rest of us.

LOL wrote: Reminds me of this line from "Men in Black"

"There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT! "

Isn't that the truth. lol

And buried in the Sat. New York Times...

In addition to the difficulties many face in proving they have coverage, patients are also having a hard time figuring out whether particular doctors are affiliated with their health insurance plan. Doctors themselves often do not know if they are in the network of providers for plans sold on the exchange.

But interviews with doctors, hospital executives, pharmacists and newly insured people around the country suggest that the biggest challenge so far has been verifying coverage. A surge of enrollments in late December, just before the deadline for coverage to take effect, created backlogs at many state and federal exchanges and insurance companies in processing applications. As a result, many of those who enrolled have yet to receive an insurance card, policy number or bill.

Many are also having trouble reaching exchanges and insurance companies to confirm their enrollment or pay their first month’s premium. Doctors’ offices and pharmacies, too, are spending hours on the phone trying to verify patients’ coverage, sometimes to no avail.

“The system wasn’t really built to handle this kind of glut of new patients,” said Dr. Curtis Miyamoto, a radiation oncologist at Temple University Hospital who is president of the Philadelphia County Medical Society. “So it’s resulting in us having some delays in getting people verified, and therefore delays in their care.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/11/us/en ... itics&_r=0

I wonder if these delays and f'ups results in anyone dying?

And for all our Spanish speaking citizens...

Mirroring problems with the federal health care website, people around the nation attempting to navigate the Spanish version have discovered their own set of difficulties.

The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late.

A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form.

And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read "for the caution of health."

"When you get into the details of the plans, it's not all written in Spanish. It's written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them," said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/heal ... ePage=true

This is an insult to Spanish speaking folk, especially those who need healthcare and they thought that this was going to be a new option for them to explore.

This would have been an insult to my ex-wife.

So are you suggesting that is the required amount of code to make a workable healthcare website, or is that how much is needed to make a government bureaucratic nightmare website?

I would think there is always a better and more efficient way to skin a cat, but the government never works that way.

Rick wrote: So are you suggesting that is the required amount of code to make a workable healthcare website, or is that how much is needed to make a government bureaucratic nightmare website?

I would think there is always a better and more efficient way to skin a cat, but the government never works that way.

I think she is suggesting that there is no way there are that many millions of lines of code... period.

No matter how many lines of code, it's a known fact that the code for properly crediting, paying, calculating subsidies etc... the back end... is either missing or terribly miscoded.

And there has been a new warning about security. It appears that 20 security issues that were pointed out to the programmers/HHS months ago have not been fixed.

BOSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A cybersecurity professional warned that the U.S. government failed to implement fixes to protect the HealthCare.gov website from hackers at a congressional hearing that Democratic lawmakers claimed was politically motivated.

"HealthCare.gov is not secure today," David Kennedy, head of computer security consulting firm TrustedSec LLC, said at a Thursday hearing of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

He said "nothing has really changed" since a hearing of the same committee in November, when he and three other expert witnesses said they believed the site was not secure and three of them said it should be shut down immediately.

"I don't understand how we're still discussing whether the website is insecure or not," Kennedy told the committee. "It is insecure - 100 percent. It's not a question of whether or not its insecure, it's what we need to do to fix it."

http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-u-gover ... ector.html

Code, no code, good code, bad code... it's all relative. Bottom line... there are still problems, big problems.

And don't even get me started on some of the state websites.

Reverend Revelant wrote:
Code, no code, good code, bad code...

Great title for a modern Dr. Seuss book... Sebelius could be the main character!