Today, I got a bit more aggressive. It’s almost certain now that I’m moving to North Carolina and have to sort out my health care options fairly quickly.
North Carolina has only two insurance companies that are active in the Federal Exchange pool (since NC decided not to have a state run exchange). Those two providers are Blue Cross / Blue Shield that was selected by the OPM, and ConventryOne.
CoventryOne’s web site, if you type in my new home’s zip code immediately comes up (without even hitting the enter key) and says “Sorry, we can’t give you a quote online, please call our 800 number”. So today, I did call the number to demand my insurance quote for 2014. The nice woman I talked with actually works from Illinois. She pretty quickly admitted that Coventry has not yet decided on what the plans and premiums will be – she’ll take my necessary information (zip code, age, smoker, name, phone #, email address) and in a week or two send me information on the quotes once they are finalized.
So knowing there were only 2 companies, and one had not yet given any information to the Feds to put onto Healthcare.gov, I called the Healthcare.gov 800 number (800-F1U-CKYO) to speak with a navigator. This time, I pushed him that I wanted a quote even if the web site wasn’t working. After he asked my zip code, he realized I was in North Carolina [Actually, I was using the web site to get a quote for IL], he declared that Oh, North Carolina is a problem. Nobody has been able to get a quote. The best I can do is take your information, and then you’ll get quote information sent to you in 3 to 4 weeks via postal mail
Now that’s a quite a difference from the PR folks from HHS still saying you can get onto Healthcare.gov and get quotes right away!
(note that states running their own exchanges like California don’t rely on Healthcare.gov)
So the truth is there now for anyone to find. There are no quotes available on the Federal Exchange. There is no cheeze at the end of the maze, and probably won’t be until December, or at least until the threat of a one year delay goes away.
Who cut the cheeze? 😉
Reported today on All things Considered, KY is the #1 state in their healthcare enrollment: 14,000 hits and 7,000 sign-ups. From everything I learned about the early enrollment period was that it would be largely driven by enrolling the lowest income folks who were being assisted by folks paid to help the poor get access to healthcare insurance.
So, with the very high numbers of people on government assistance of some sort in KY, 60 Minutes ran a story last Sunday night about the extraordinarily high numbers of folks on Disability in KY, will the number of enrollees be in the 100,000 range within the next couple of weeks?
What are the odds that 90% of those folks who are not already covered by their employers, will not buy health insurance but just pay the fine?
I’ve read about the coming doctor shortage problem, and probably everyone knows this already, but the number of doctors and hospitals available to patients is going to be sharply limited. The reason for sharply limiting the number of doctors is explained as a way to hold down premiums.
Now, I’m not very smart, and I’m not highly educated, nor do I hold a degree in anything handed out on graduation day, but common sense says if you have too few doctors treating a large pool of patients doesn’t that mean the level of care will decline?
In the Soviet Union, chickens were artificially cheap. You couldn’t raise a chicken for what you could sell it for. The cheap chicken stores never had chickens. Just the idea that a store had something would generate lines tgat were hours long.
The next step in socialism is rationing. You can only buy one chicken a month – but that doesn’t solve the problem that government intervention made the cost of production higher than the sales price.
The next step is preferential treatment. People the government considers important (party officials) get secret shops so the masses won’t know why some people have chickens if they are connected.
The next step is a black market. Black markets don’t exist without government interference in supply and demand. Unauthorized distribution channels open up for people willing to pay a legitimate price to raise a chicken.
The final step is the persecution of the innocent. The person trying to run the government chicken farm with an impossible business model gets sent to Siberia, another 5 year plan is created and they try again
I’d vote for a coup, er a, I mean coop, but Colonel Sanders is already dead.
Yeah, we’re way too late for that, CC. POTUS has been purging the good officers for several years. POTUS has already been taking away the right to own, buy guns ‘n ammo to returning vets in America.
‘Course if memory serves, was it not corporal Chavez who led an effort to replace the gov in the country to the east of Columbia? And he wasn’t just counting votes.
Good synopsis, Art. Just allow me one wiseacre remark.
See, there’s the problem, the Ruskies never understood very well of the value of ‘free range’ chickens.
i do not like obamcare in a house
i do not like obamcare in a box
i do not like obamcare in a car
i do not like obamcare in a tree
i do not like obamcare in a train
i do not like obamcare in the dark
i do not like obamcare in a boat
i do not like obamcare with a mouse
i do not like obamcare with a fox
i do not like obamcare with a goat
CC, you’re in the majority. So, why don’t the Republicans step away from the fight and give POTUS his way? What would happen if the ‘Libs’ got what they voted for?
Most Americans are against raising the debt ceiling and are not pleased about how Obama has handled the “shutdown”.
At some point it is time to make a stand and at least stop increasing the money borrowed from the Chinese. Republicans led by Cruz think this is the time to finally make a stand. We will see if they are right.
Does Rush have a point when he says ‘increasing the debt ceiling’ would not be the end of the world? Is the Constitution the problem? No, of course not, but Obama’s disciples think it is the problem.
Perhaps the best way to make the point is to look at what so-called journalist Andrea Mitchell, wife of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, thinks about lifting the debt ceiling when she was asked, “Why is Obama not treating everyone fairly? Why are certain people asking to be excluded from the ObamaCare mandates?”
Why not give everyone the same exemption as big business, Obama’s family, and other favored individuals? What do you think Andrea Mitchell’s answer was to that question?
The frustration for me is that when the democrats control the White House, they tend not to pass much, but when Republicans are on charge, they give away the store – George Bush and Medicare Part D being the most recent example. Richard Nixon gave us the EPA and OSHA and Revenue Sharing, sucking local and state governments into dependency on Federal money to buy fire engines, etc.
“The Drug Enforcement Administration was created by President Richard Nixon through an Executive Order in July 1973….” from their own website.
…and Ronald Reagan gave us the crack epidemic by cracking down on marijuana smugglers – causing them to switch to something smaller and less bulky and requiring far fewer loads for the same profit.
Do you like Obamacare with your prostate?
I talked briefly last night to my niece who is the freshly minted General Practitioner. She started her job as an official doctor about 5 weeks ago (having finished her residency). She is already having second thoughts and even invoked Ayn Rand and what will happen if she (and other GPs) get pushed into even more patients and longer hours. She gets up at 5:15 am and last night didn’t finish her paperwork until 10 PM – and she isn’t yet up to her full patient load. She’s quickly going to be forced to become the doctor she didn’t want to become, rushing from patient to patient.
Art Stone, one in 51,000: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2452537/Administration-sources-Obamacare-website-received-just-51-000-completed-insurance-applications.html
That sounds plausible. Keep in mind all the “application” does is gets you the ability (in theory) to see a comparison of plans. The number completing enrollment via the federal exchange using the website is probably 1, +/- 1. State exchanges are working somewhat better. The article does point out however that at the current pace, maybe only 1.5 million people will be able to compare plans before open enrollment ends. They’re at least two orders of magnitude undersized, and systems don’t scale linearly unless they are properly designed.
You’d think that with 50 states, there would be some possible way to divide up the data. 😉
Until someone moves to a new state in the middle of the enrollment process. Some states are more equal than others. The typical way this is done is something like when the application record is being created, a random number from 1..n is generated and built into the application number, and then that number is used spread the workload over 1..servers each of which has separate database infrastructure. The key to linear scalability is to have no point in the system where 100% of the activity is going through a single choke point.
You’ve never had to wait for Google Search to give you an answer just because a lot of people are online. They would not be reinventing the wheel and they already know everything about us anyhow.
How much workload do you think there is for 51,000 application in 7 days? Amazon sells that many books in a day. 😉
I didn’t look real hard, but a source in 2010 guessed Amazon was going to sell 30 million books for Kindle, which is around 82,000 a day – but of course Amazon sells a lot more than books. They also do a lot to support the sales like “if you like that, you might like this”, running the logistics of distributing a physical product, etc
And of course they run the Amazon cloud for the NSA already