A $350 million website, and SIX people signed up for Obamacare the first day.

If this utter joke wasn't so unbelievably expensive to the American taxpayers, it would be the funniest thing in the history of the American government.

Just wait Bob, by Nov 15, when the Obama admin is supposed to tell us how many have signed up, I'm sure the number will be up to 20 million.

Can you even conceive of the reaction it would get if amazon spent $350 million on a website and as a result got six customers the first day.
Of course what it would do is sink the company forever. Bezos would have to hang his head in shame and there would then be no more amazon.com

But not when it's government.com. When it's government.com everybody keeps his job with the same salary and the same perks and the government continues to rob us all blind in perpetuity.

Come on you guys I think between all our agents and we have around 50 around the panhandle they have submitted around 25, quit making fun of something that works    

I almost got through two, one my computer shut down and the second the website shut down. Now I have written a few without going through marketplace and they paid the higher premium's, but they did not qualify for the subsidy anyway.

I just checked and it's up, this could be a record, it's been up since yesterday morning. I think we're on our way now   

I guess everyone is either going over to SH, community clinic or that other place in town that has navigator's, who by the way are not license insurance agents, a couple of hours of training and don't know their ass from a hole in a ground.

Had a call from the other day from someone on Medicare under 65 disability and went over to a navigator and they filled out a paper application, sent it in and told her she would know something about her subsidy in a few weeks. Nothing unusual here since the website wasn't working that day. SOMEONE FORGOT TO TELL THE NAVIGATOR THAT IT IS ILLEGAL TO DO AN APPLICATION ON SOMEONE THAT IS ON MEDICARE.       

Mr Ichi wrote:Doesn't Gulf Beach Bandit work for the Government?

That's what he say.

ppaca wrote:I guess everyone is either going over to SH, community clinic or that other place in town that has navigator's, who by the way are not license insurance agents, a couple of hours of training and don't know their ass from a hole in a ground.

Had a call from the other day from someone on Medicare under 65 disability and went over to a navigator and they filled out a paper application, sent it in and told her she would know something about her subsidy in a few weeks. Nothing unusual here since the website wasn't working that day.  SOMEONE FORGOT TO TELL THE NAVIGATOR THAT IT IS ILLEGAL TO DO AN APPLICATION ON SOMEONE THAT IS ON MEDICARE.       

Oh no 

http://wtop.com/289/3495649/Obamacare-skit-by-SNL-correctly-predicts-the-future

"Navigator" is a good term for it. It reminds me of that internet browser, Netscape Navigator, which fell on it's ass too.

I could never understand this navigator program anyway, to me it was just another waste of money. Obama admin didn't want insurance agents into the equation but wanted the company's, just doesn't make sense. He is just too far removed from the agency's he assigned to make the rules. Then the HHS, IRS, DOL, SSA and DHL didn't see eye to eye with each other. No one could bring the whole thing together, but maybe now this has opened their eyes. Just saw something scroll across the bottom of TV that IRS is relaxing rules on flexible spending accounts, now some more pages of regulations.

Bob wrote:"Navigator" is a good term for it.   It reminds me of that internet browser,  Netscape Navigator,  which fell on it's ass too.

I thought the same thing. I paid a pretty good price for my first copy of Navigator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was primarily due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser software, and partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after the late 1990s.[1]

The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft Corporation's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows.

The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by Netscape Communicator. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Netscape-developed Mozilla Application Suite, which was later renamed SeaMonkey.[2] Netscape's Mozilla Suite also served as the base for a browser-only spinoff called Mozilla Firefox and Netscape versions 6 through 9.

AOL stopped development of Netscape Navigator on December 28, 2007, but continued supporting the web browser with security updates until March 1, 2008. AOL allows downloading of archived versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser family. AOL maintains the Netscape website as an Internet portal.[3]

I far prefer Firefox over all the rest and that's all I use. And that's even though MS tried to monopolize the browser market.
At least in that case I still had alternatives even when one outfit was wanting to create a monopoly. But government is always a monopoly and that's the most insidious thing about government. Not only is there no competition but even when government has an opportunity to reap the benefits of competition, what does it do? It hires a no-bid utter failure of a business to waste $350 million on a worthless unusable website. And it gets away with it lock, stock and barrel. Nobody is fired for incompetence. Nobody has his salary cut. We all just keep paying the tab for a failed monopoly like always.

And no I'm not naive. I realize every corporation would become a monopoly if given the chance.
That's why I always say both government and private corporations are NEVER anything more than a necessary EVIL. I worship neither and I would never turn my back on either.
And my take on this has nothing whatever to do with political partisanship. If I had my way, Bush and Cheney would have been impeached long ago for creating that monstrosity called the "iraq war".
Monopolies, be they democrat or republican or corporate, by their very nature are evil at the core.

Bob wrote:If this utter joke wasn't so unbelievably expensive to the American taxpayers, it would be the funniest thing in the history of the American government.  

How are we poor bastards expected to believe what we see on the TV or read in newspapers and magazines?
Everything, all of what I just mentioned is CONTROLLED by Corporations who tell the media what to print or say.
Everyone has a price that will produce the desired answer.
For the right amount of money an educated scientist will denounce global warming.
A politician will denounce ANYTHING.
A preacher will denounce Jesus.

Yella wrote:How are we poor bastards expected to believe what we see on the TV or read in newspapers and magazines?
Everything, all of what I just mentioned is CONTROLLED by Corporations who tell the media what to print or say.
Everyone has a price that will produce the desired answer.
For the right amount of money an educated scientist will denounce global warming.
A politician will denounce ANYTHING.
A preacher will denounce Jesus.

Obama or Bush or Romney or McCain or Gore will say anything to their advantage.
Carl Gallups will say anything to his advantage.
Sean Hannity and Rachael Maddow will say anything to their advantage.
And most of the citizenry will accept from all this only what they wanted to believe to begin with.

That's the society we're now living in.

This is not a big deal. They needed to sign up 39k a day until the end of March to reach 7 million. The over reaction to a bad roll out does not change the need. People need transparent comparisons of policies. However, my guess is that it will be very difficult to catch up when they have lost over a million applications in the first month, and another million by the end of November.

They will fix it, but the catch up would indicate that the first year of this program will end up with a couple million short on the open enrollment this year. I think you will need a couple cycles of penalty and choice in options to find the market for these products, and the bad roll out does not change the fact this will take a few years.

I still think the rollout is a FU, but three to five years will be the true test.

2seaoat wrote:This is not a big deal.

You're exactly right.  When government does this it's just par for the course.
But if you had done this with your construction business,  or I had done this with my pinball and jukebox business,  you and I both would both have been looking for other occupations.  
When you and I are the "deciders",  we goddamn sure have to know what we're doing or we go down the tubes.  But when government "deciders" don't have a clue what they're doing,  they don't go anywhere.  The Obamas and Paloosies and Reids and Bushes and Cheneys and all the rest stay right on top of their thrones.

There are constant proposals to put those other government employees the public school teachers on a merit system.  I'm all for that,  but the politicians need to be put on a merit system as well.

Nothing pissed me off more than when I had to listen to that democrat congress bitch start spewing all those platitudes to sebalis (or whatever her weird name is) in that hearing.
"you are such a distinguished and capable woman who was willing to sacrifice everything to do such good for your country".

Fuck you lady and sebolis and the horse you both rode in on.  Try getting a fucking job in the real world.  
When I went in those redneck bars to do my job and fix the goddam bowling machine,  all I ever got was a drunk telling me "get out from behind that machine buddy and I'll give you a fucking quarter if that's what you need".
Not once did any fucking drunken redneck tell me how wonderful I was for sacrificing everything for the good of the country"   lol

But if you had done this with your construction business,

Not so quick Bob......I did a monumental screw up on a roll out of a website and business. I had invested 90k in development of a paperless system which coordinated Title companies, real estate offices, and lenders in a residential for sale by owner website which shared the governments database of property records and created a cloud back in 2000. It was a decade before its time and it still is where we will go in real estate and title work in the next decade.

We ran thousands and thousands of dollars of ads in a targeted market and people were excited and flooded the website. I actively worked in the design of the website, but my key consultant had insufficient experience in the scale of this roll out which was going national and his choice of a database back end was completely wrong. Our web site came crashing down as a design flaw on the back end limited concurrent users accessing the properties listed on the website to 10. We were getting 100s of concurrent users on the first day after the ads. It took us a month to back out of this mess, and met with the major title companies, and in fact Chicago title the largest title insurer in America actually made changes in their system based on what we had done, but we failed. A simple back end throttle that a developer who was doing ma and pa ecommerce web sites had no understanding of a national venture roll out where thousands could be concurrent users of the back end database. When we finally got SQL server licenses in place and beta tested it, the boat had sailed. It was a failure. Thousands of folks fail in the journey to success. It is the beauty of America. They will get this right.

2seaoat wrote: It was a decade before its time

Totally an apples and oranges comparison.

The website template for healthcare.gov was invented and perfected long ago. All it required was the most elementary calculation resulting from three lousy little variables. Age, income and the state you're in.
Routine web design that's been accomplished successfully thousands of times. The software to do something as elementary as that is probably available as freeware by now. lol
And then there's the lack of capacity issue which was so monumentally incompetent that only six people were able to sign up the first day. lol

And even after those government hacks spent a third of a billion dollars on it. lol

Gimme a break, seaoat. It's just like when a billion dollars in cash piled up on pallets in Baghdad up and disappeared. It's Wrong Way Corrigan all over again and the fact that you or anyone else is still defending it is just mind numbing.

But the real scandal is not this website foolishness.

Here's an article called "Romneycare in Massachusetts - Six years later".
And all I have to read is one thing...

"It's not been successful in what it didn't try to do- in that it didn't try to control cost and it doesn't."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/romneycare-massachusetts-years/story?id=16614522

Obamacare is just a national version of that same state "solution". It's not going to do a goddamn thing to control costs. And because of that it's eventually going to fail.
I know because right now I'm personally coping with the costs and believe me that IS the problem.

Come on Bob medicine is such a noble art. It also is a business where people will give you their last dime with only a promise of success.

thing to control costs. And because of that it's eventually going to fail.

Here we disagree. I think this is the one area where we are seeing immediate benefit. The pace of inflation in our medical system has not been this slow in 20 plus years. The cows have been out of the barn, and the first attempt to corral them is a cluster F.......but we will coral those cows, and costs will be reduced. Just the limit on Administrative costs alone is a line drawn in the sand. One state cannot fight inflation in medical costs, however fifty state comprehensive reform can do the same. Sorry, we hear news after news about hospitals and lay offs.....streamlining while you argue this will fail......you see failure in this environment of specific criticism of some sub par insurance carrier sending a letter to 3% of the folks, yet you will fail to be fair and measured weighing the advantages this process has brought to this broken system.......first and foremost, we are one step closer to medicare for all, and the simple fact about medicare for all.....it is simply setting the revenue at the right level. Medicare has been a stunning success, and if we quit giving 300 billion subsidy to grain, 85 billion subsidy to big banks, maybe we could pay into the insurance pool and create a sound actuarial model which covers all citizens and quits wasting American resources as the 17% of our gdp and double the costs of other medical delivery systems will finally find some sanity.

2seaoat wrote:  The pace of inflation in our medical system has not been this slow in 20 plus years.  

When I was told this year that I may need an SNL biopsy for melanoma,  I went on the internet to get an idea of the cost.   The average cost being reported was $15k.   When I had the procedure done here in Pensacola which is known to have a relatively low cost of living,  the price turned out to be $29k.

Yes the growth in health care costs has slowed since 2008.  Same as the growth in the price of real estate dropped.  That's what happens when you have the worst recession since the Great Depression.
That's like Obama bragging about the growth in the budget deficit having slowed.    But we're still borrowing a trillion dollars a year regardless of that.  And the cost of health care is still rising regardless of a major recession.

Obamacare Or Not, Healthcare Costs Are Set To Soar

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomasphilipson/2013/10/31/obamacare-or-not-healthcare-costs-are-set-to-soar/

and this...

Total health care spending in the United States is expected to reach $4.8 trillion in 2021, up from $2.6 trillion in 2010 and $75 billion in 1970. To put it in context, this means that health care spending will account for nearly 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), or one-fifth of the U.S. economy, by 2021.

http://www.aetna.com/health-reform-connection/aetnas-vision/facts-about-costs.html

and this...

Health Care Costs Are Still Rising Faster Than Workers Can Keep Up  

http://www.businessinsider.com/health-care-costs-are-still-rising-faster-than-workers-can-keep-up-2013-8

Total health care spending and health care inflation are an apple to orange comparison. I stated the inflation has been reduced since the Affordable Care Act, and I certainly did not say that total health care costs would be going down as the babyboomers age and reach retirement age. We will see the out of control health care inflation of the last 20 years being reduced under the Affordable Care Act.