Kathleen Sebelius: Four and One Half Minutes of Political Spin …..Then Spin-Brain-Freeze. Oops!

The entire interview can be seen here: http://www.news9.com/category/116601/video-page?autostart=true&clipId=10001484

ACA/Obamacare: The Deadline Passed for Individual Health Insurance…But Not for Expanded Medicaid

ACA is a scheme predicated on exchange based policies, private exchange based policies and Medicaid. Hence the supposed enrollment numbers appearing in/on various news outlets include Medicaid enrollees.

Open enrollment for exchange based policies ended 03/31/2014 at midnight. Individuals wanting to apply for individual health insurance, for the exception of a life event such as loss of job and health insurance, marriage, child birth, etc., one can no longer purchase an exchange based policy until the next open enrollment. Therefore, if you have the money to purchase coverage or one’s own money along with a taxpayer subsidy to purchase coverage, you have no availability to procure coverage, until the next open enrollment period. Or in the words of the ACA exchange:

　
Coverage options outside Open Enrollment


Open Enrollment for 2014 coverage is over. But you may still have options to get health coverage, including:

Buying a private health plan through the Marketplace — only if you qualify for a special enrollment period
Applying for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) — you can do this any time, all year.(1)
　
However, if you are applying for coverage under the expanded Medicaid option available in roughly half of the states, no such deadline exists:

　

Medicaid and CHIP. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) are joint state and federal programs that provide coverage to millions of Americans with limited incomes and some people with disabilities.

There is no limited enrollment period for Medicaid and CHIP. You and your family can enroll in Medicaid and CHIP any time during the year if you qualify.
Whether you qualify depends on what state you live in, your household size and income, or other factors including pregnancy, family situation, and disability.
Your children could qualify for coverage through CHIP even if you don’t qualify for Medicaid.(2)


Notes:

(1) and (2) https://www.healthcare.gov/how-can-i-get-coverage-outside-of-open-enrollment/
　

ACA Enrollment Collapses: They Came, They Saw, They Did Not Pay.

“With less than seven weeks of open enrollment to go, ObamaCare enrollment — and payments — have slowed to a near-crawl in some states.

Minnesota's exchange enrollment goal of 67,000 seemed within reach on Jan. 4, when signups stood at 25,860.

But after surging by more than 4,000 per week in the prior five weeks, signups collapsed back to November's pace of less than 700 per week.

As of Feb. 1, Nevada had just 14,999 paid enrollees — vs. the state's March 31 goal of 115,000.

Washington state, meanwhile, was slightly more than halfway to its goal of 340,000 signups — but only 88,071 had paid as of Feb. 1.

The January data available from a handful of states raise new doubts about whether ObamaCare's downgraded first-year prospects are still too optimistic.

Further, a spotty payment rate (50% in Washington and 66% in Nevada) creates a risk that the demographics of the paid exchange population may be older — and possibly sicker — than even the national signup data have signaled.”

“No state has provided as much detail about its enrollment through Feb. 1 as Minnesota, and the details are somewhat concerning. (The state counts people who have completed their application and chosen a payment method.)

Only 21% of signups were in the key 18-34 demographic vs. 35% ages 55 to 64. Minnesota officials have been taken by surprise at the share of people signing up for ObamaCare's richest "platinum" coverage, which reimburses 90% of the covered group's qualifying expenses.

Fully 29% have signed up for low-deductible platinum policies — compared to a projection of 5%. Such policies would tend to be favored by people who want to guard against high medical expenses, while someone expecting minimal costs might go for a high-deductible bronze plan.” - ObamaCare Enrollment Slows To Crawl, State Data Show, investors.com, 02/10/2014

Link to the entire article appears below:

http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/021014-689516-obamacare-enrollment-signups-stagnate-lag-2014-targets.htm

Healthcare.gov: Stop Sending Paper Applications! Use Our Unsecured Website! Damn the Cybersecurity, Full Speed Ahead!

'So it's come to this. During the past week, the Associated Press reported today, "Federal health officials," meaning "the Obama administration," began "urging" (i.e., "telling") counselors and navigators around the country to stop using paper applications for Obamacare coverage, "because of concerns those applications would not be processed in time." It seems that either Team Obama or AP (my money is on AP) doesn't mind risking criticism for waiting to let this news out until a weather- and sports-dominated Saturday. It's apparently okay to keep those who don't know any better, i.e., those who went to the trouble of printing a paper app on their own, in the dark.

So you shouldn't use paper. But the vastly under-reported but inarguable fact is that HealthCare.gov isn't secure; experienced IT security experts strongly warn against using it. So consumers shouldn't be going online either, meaning that there's no defensible way to apply for coverage before the end of the year.’ - As Feds Say to Stop Using Paper Obamacare Apps, AP Again 'Forgets' That HealthCare.gov Is Not Secure, Newbusters, 12/07/2013


‘For the love of Jiminy Cricket, how much cybersecurity incompetence are American citizens expected to accept and excuse while also footing the $660 million bill? Online security experts say the “new and improved” Healthcare.gov site may actually be more insecure now than before it was fixed!

An operational progress report quoted Jeffrey Zients, a management consultant on repairs to the Obamacare site, as stating, “The bottom line -- HealthCare.gov on December 1st is night and day from where it was on October 1st.” Well if this is “day,” then it’s an Arctic Alaskan daytime with no sunlight as “experts” blindly attempt to bolt on security to a system that was developed without a care about the security or privacy of Americans.

David Kennedy, founder and principal security consultant of TrustedSec, warned that the Healthcare.gov was not secure. In fact, Kennedy previously told CNBC that it’s hard to bolt on security after a site is developed and that “no security was ever built into the Obamacare site.”

So how many of the security risks were eliminated now that the administration “fixed” the site? None according to what Kennedy told the Washington Free Beacon. “It doesn’t appear that any security fixes were done at all.” He added:

“There are a number of security concerns already with the website, and that’s without even actually hacking the site, that’s just a purely passive analysis of [it]. We found a number of critical exposures that were around sensitive information, the ability to hack into the site, things like that. We reported those issues and none of those appear to have been addressed at all.”

“They said they implemented over 400 bug fixes,” he said. “When you recode the application to fix these 400 bugs—they were rushing this out of the door to get the site at least so it can work a little bit—you’re introducing more security flaws as you go along with it because you don’t even check that code.”

Well that’s just peachy keen and that’s before considering the “hacker” threat. But, hey, it’s not like the feds are required to notify citizens if there is a breach; after all, it’s so much easier to leave that headache to each state. Just ask Vermont, since Vermont Health Connect had to admit to a security breach that allowed “improper access to another user’s Social Security number and other data.”

Kennedy also said that:

the team working on Healthcare.gov is more likely to hide its security flaws than address them. When it was revealed that the most popular searches on the website were hack attempts—confirmed by entering a semicolon in the search bar—the website simply removed the tool.

“The top results were hacker attempts,” Kennedy said. “Their fix for it wasn’t, ‘Hey let’s restrict people from inputting malicious code into the website,’—because that’s how hackers break into websites—it was, ‘we’re just going to completely disable that entire function completely, and not even show the search results back.’”

“We’ve deployed 12 large, dedicated servers,” states the operation progress report. Oh goodie gumdrops, it “can now handle about as many shoppers as the average custom T-shirt site,” pointed out Human Events. The site has “a remodeled 404 Error page that pretends to be a ‘waiting room,’ where you can ‘queue up’ and leave an email address to be notified” when it’s your turn to fill out all your private info.

Julie Bataille, Director of Communications, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, summed up the newly “fixed” site’s progress report [pdf] as having an upgraded and reconfigured firewall that protects the system while allowing “more than five times the network throughput.” The “improved shopping” experience on Healthcare.gov supposedly can handle 50,000 people logged on to the website at once, and “more than 800,000 visitors a day;” but even with a lower number of “shoppers,” the Associated Press reported that many visitors faced “the same old sputters and even crashes.” ‘ - Healthcare.gov more vulnerable to hacking & privacy breaches after 'fix', Computerworld, 12/03/2013



Links to above mentioned articles appear below:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2013/12/07/feds-say-stop-using-paper-obamacare-apps-ap-again-forgets-healthcaregov-

http://blogs.computerworld.com/application-security/23226/healthcaregov-more-vulnerable-hacking-privacy-breaches-after-fix