Topic: . (Read 46178 times)

You know they are having trouble trying to hit their enrollment numbers when they are resorting to these kinds of non-traditional advertising methods.

I remember hearing a lot of obama care ads on the radio, probably around this time last year, and they were very repetitive and annoying. 

Done!

Why not go ahead and do that. 

Well, let's use the pharmacists to push the propaganda.  By all means!  That must be why my Canadian pharmacy recently got banned from US MC/Visa.  We need COMMUNITY ORGANIZING PHARMACISTS!

Holiday Shoppers Are Being Targeted For Obamacare Sign-ups By HHS…





Shoppers this holiday season will encounter a lot more Obamacare.

The Department of Health and Human Services is set to announce a new partnership Wednesday with retail stores, pharmacies and popular websites that will allow them to better spread the word about open enrollment season, according to Politico.

Westfield Shopping Centers, the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) and the XO Group will carry the new outreach approach on Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday to highlight how consumers can sign up for healthcare during enrollment season.

Open enrollment season began on Nov. 15 and ends on Feb. 15.

The Obama administration is excited about the new partnerships and their potential for reaching Americans, “whether consumers are shopping at a mall, online or at their community pharmacy," HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said.

Westfield malls in New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Maryland, Connecticut, Florida and Washington will allow navigators and other enrollment workers to both hand out fliers and use other outreach approach methods.

The NCPA will be hosting calls with HHS officials to train pharmacists on how they can spread the word about open enrollment season, as well as using new tactics to share information with its 23,000 members.

“Community pharmacists are front-line healthcare providers who serve as a critical access point to care for many Americans," Association CEO B. Douglas Hoey said.

Finally, the XO Group will be using its sites — such as The Knot and The Bump — to advertise to women who are set to experience a life changing events such as marriage or childbirth.

The Obama administration has set a goal of 9.1 million enrollees by the end of 2015.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hhs-targets-holiday-shoppers-for-obamacare-sign-ups/article/2556680

The people targeted are the ones writing the articles, the bloggers, anyone doing the hard work, connected to whistle blowers, etc. Nothing really amazing they would learn from people linking to already well established online news and blogs beside the art of url copy-pasting on a thread... Of course the OP could be involved in other stuff, beside wondering about 0bamacare. Since the last election the democrats got the message and know how people REALLY feel about it.

Anyway, the OP can do whatever he wants with this thread. I will simply recreate a new one with the same name.

Last active November 24 but last post is from December 06, 2012, 11:23:25 PM; this account may not be his main bitcointalk account and he wants to protect itself politically speaking. Big Brother is watching.

The strange part is this week I clicked on the OP's statistic. His last post was dated around late 2013. Not anymore :-)

I don't understand why OP did that.

Interesting part of the OP to change the title of this thread to "." so it would not come up when doing a global search for the word obamacare on bitcointalk?


The Grubering of the American People would be a much more accurate title for this thread now


Anyway. I am bookmarking this as it will be hard to re find it from now on and will keep it updated until the OP close the thread eventually...

They want to control everything, the end result is higher costs, lower quality and less innovation. What about a free market with healthy competition? Costs could easily be reduced by 2 or 3 for the same quality.

ObamaCare 2016: If you like your plan, you’ll love it when we pick a different one

Alternate headline: HHS Decides to Make Plan Choices for the Grubes. In a Friday afternoon filled with document dumps, HHS announced that its controversial auto-enrollment plan would be significantly changed in 2016. This year, enrollees who allowed their plans to auto-renew risked running up big tax bills, thanks to annual recalculation of subsidies and base rates. To solve that problem, HHS wants people to allow the Obama administration to auto-enroll them into the lowest-cost plan in their 2016 tier, regardless of what the coverage or deductibles will be:

Another proposal calls for having Obamacare customers be “defaulted” to a lower-cost insurance plan instead of their current plan.

“Under current rules, consumers who do not take action during the open enrollment window are re-enrolled in the same plan they were in the previous year, even if that plan experienced significant premium increases,” CMS said.

“We are considering alternative options for re-enrollment, under which consumers who take no action might be defaulted into a lower-cost plan rather than their current plan.”

Although CMS said it is considering allowing state-run Obamacare exchanges to implement that default option in 2016, the agency is eyeing using that option on the federal Obamacare exchange HealthCare.gov starting only in 2017.

While the defaulted option could protect customers from sticker shock once their now-pricier plan renews, the option also increases the likelihood that people will find themselves in a plan that doesn’t include their preferred doctors or hospitals.



The ObamaCare sales pitch has really progressed, has it not? We started at If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, which Politifact belatedly called the Lie of the Year once ObamaCare rolled out in 2013. After that, the White House line was If you liked your plan, it’s because you were too stupid to know what’s good for you, but you’ll like what you can pick now. Finally, we’ve arrived at You’re still too stupid to choose your own plan, so you’ll like what we tell you to like.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it follows the basic message of Jonathan Gruber ever since Congress passed ObamaCare. This system was set up by people who have contempt for Americans exercising free choice, and it was designed to remove choice in favor of elitist diktats.

Peter Suderman points out that the actual solution to this problem is to turn off auto-renewals and instruct people to enroll each year for their coverage. That’s what most employers do as well; every employer for which I’ve worked has required their employees to enroll each year in order to make sure they are informed of pricing and coverage changes. HHS won’t do that, though, because they’re afraid of the attrition:

It’s not just auto-reenrollment. It’s auto-reassignment, at least for those who pick that option. Basically, if you like your plan, but don’t go out of your way to intentionally re-enroll, the kind and wise folks at HHS or state health exchanges might just pick a new plan—perhaps with different doctors, clinics, cost structures, and benefit options—for you. And if you want to switch back? Good luck once open enrollment is closed. There’s always next year.

A hassle? Maybe. But have faith: They know what’s best.

Presumably the idea came up because, even though by some measures premiums aren’t rising by large amounts this year, premiums for many of the lowest cost and most popular plans from last year are rising quite a bit. And since HHS decided over the summer to institute auto-renewal, and since the majority of Obamacare enrollees are expected to take no action and thus stay in their current plans, the reality is that under the current system a lot of enrollees are likely to see large premium hikes, just because they didn’t shop around for a new plan.

This sort of problem was more or less inevitable with automatic renewal, which was probably instituted as a way to shore up enrollment and prevent too much attrition in year two. The easy, straightforward way to fix it would be to turn auto renewal off. But that might result in lower enrollment. And anyway, why go the obvious route when there’s the possibility of having federal and state health bureaucrats make even more choices for you?



At the moment, this is a proposal, not yet a rule change. There may be some room in it to give users the option to turn off auto-renewal, although one might imagine just how difficult it will be to find that option in a notoriously-unfriendly system.  Don’t expect HHS to back away from this plan, though, especially after having 1.3 million enrollees disappear from their system in just 5 months this year.

It’s becoming a real clown show, bro. Or maybe a clown shoe, Mary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/22/obamacare-2016-if-you-like-your-plan-youll-love-it-when-we-pick-a-different-one/

But I’m in a unique position when it comes to Gruber. My public criticism of him goes back to 2010, when he exhibited precisely the traits of deception and evasiveness that have gotten him in trouble now. In fact, he has become an avatar of not only Obamacare, but of liberal paternalism, a caricature of the snotty know-it-all technocrat who will make decisions for people without consulting them. That some of this perspective actually shows up in the health care law is a major reason for its difficulties, and a bigger problem for Democrats going forward.

Here’s what we were talking about in January of 2010. Gruber was a go-to source for dozens of journalists during the ACA debate. But my Firedoglake colleague Marcy Wheeler discovered that, while Gruber was talking to journalists and writing op-eds in favor of the law, he didn’t disclose that he was paid $392,600 by the Department of Health and Human Services to produce technical models that estimated the effects of changes in insurance coverage. Labeling Gruber now as an “advisor to the administration” neglects the fact that he never mentioned that relationship to many reporters.

The New York Times wrote a harsh correction to an op-ed Gruber wrote for them, noting, “Had editors been aware of Professor Gruber’s government ties, the Op-Ed page would have insisted on disclosure or not published his article.” In fact, Gruber signed a contract with the Times that obligated him to disclose his consulting work, which he neglected to do. He also didn’t disclose to the New England Journal of Medicine, another publication with a formal disclosure policy.

In response, Gruber claimed that his stated beliefs were consistent throughout, regardless of his affiliation with HHS. But the point is that politicians used his quotes to tout the health care law by explicitly portraying him as an independent expert. The DNC sent 71 emails highlighting Gruber’s analysis without mentioning his work for HHS. On the floor of the Senate, Bob Casey defended his position by citing “Dr. Gruber at MIT, not my words, not the words or the analysis of some senator or House member on one side of the debate or the other.”

Gruber was virtually the only source cited in discussion of the “Cadillac tax” on high-end insurance policies, and the theory that lowering insurance premium prices will lead to concomitant rises in wages. This claim was seriously challenged at the time, and the debate revealed a key element of Gruber’s style. Gruber tried to cite rising wages in the late 1990s and correlate them with moderating premium price increases, when tight labor markets were surely a bigger reason. When challenged, he would add caveats to his claims; in fact, the Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel confirmed that Gruber privately told him he exaggerated the case for wage growth. (By the way, how are wages doing these days, one year into Obamacare?)

This was my biggest problem with Gruber’s contributions to the debate. When talking with someone either inclined to agree with him or too ignorant to know the difference, Gruber made bold, sweeping statements. When talking to someone who actually knows a thing or two, he became more equivocal. He didn’t fully disclose facts in the same way he didn’t fully disclose his working relationship with the administration.

This tendency toward selective disclosure has antecedents in Obamacare itself. In the second year of open enrollment for the insurance exchanges, top officials have recently urged customers to shop around for new insurance deals, rather than auto-renew their old policies. Obamacare subsidies are tied to a benchmark of the second-lowest plan available in the marketplace. If that benchmark changes, even if a customer’s auto-renewed plan doesn’t raise prices, they will lose some of their subsidy benefit, causing cost spikes from 30-100 percent in some cases, according to a study from consulting firm Milliman.

Auto and home insurance generally doesn’t work this way, because of the lack of ties to federal benefits. For the consumer, this means digging through insurance options, figuring out if the new plan covers the same doctors as the old plan, having to weigh adapting to a new network over paying a higher price. This basically imposes a tax on people’s time. (And let’s hope that back-end difficulties don’t cause people to be put into two plans at once, or get lost in the system.)

Despite this belated media push, most people will simply auto-renew their policy: 68 percent, according to Gallup. They will only discover later the wide variance between their payments in year one and year two. And they will justifiably decry a bait-and-switch. Polls showing Obamacare users like the system might want to wait until this sticker shock comes along around January.

Conservatives will exhibit extreme hypocrisy in getting angry about this, by the way, as the system reflects their position that health care consumers should be “smart shoppers.” But they will throw President Obama’s words at him again, that if Americans liked their insurance plan, they could keep it. In this case, the president never said “if you like your plan, you can keep it, but it will cost you, and you really should shop for a new one every year.


http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2014/11/21/Why-Gruber-gate-So-Devastating-Democrats

SMOKING GUN: OBAMACARE SUBSIDIES FOR STATES WITHOUT EXCHANGES INVENTED 2 YEARS AFTER LAW PASSED



[...]
In his white paper, Vorse writes: "[T]he Obama administration and the Department of Health and Human Services required states establishing their own exchange to build a tax credit calculator. However," he continued, "for two years after passage of the law, they did not require the same for the federal exchange. These actions provide additional support that the Obama administration and HHS understood that only states that established their own exchanges were entitled to tax credits—the exact opposite of what they have been arguing in federal court."

Vorse presents a compelling case that after the President signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) on March 23, 2010 "the IRS initially began developing a rule to make tax credits available only on exchanges established by a state. As the findings outlined below show, HHS had a similar understanding of the law."

Significantly "in order for an exchange website to offer tax credits, it must have a tax credit calculator that allows individuals to view the actual cost of their coverage after tax credits have been applied to their premiums." Vorse notes that "official documents show that while HHS moved quickly after [Obamacare's] enactment to help state governments make tax credits available through state-based exchanges, for nearly two years, it developed its HealthCare.gov website without any effort to offer tax credits on the federal exchange."

The timeline of events highlighted in Vorse's report begins in March 2010 and ends in May 2012:

March 23, 2010 – President Obama signs the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) into law.

January 20, 2011 –  "Nearly three months after issuing its first guidance document, HHS releases the Cooperative Agreement to Support Establishment of State-Operated Health Insurance Exchanges, the governing agreement for establishing “state-operated” health insurance exchanges. That document provides significant insight into HHS’ views at the time. This agreement specifies 'state-based' or 'state-operated' exchanges 17 times. The terms 'federally facilitated exchange' and 'federal exchange' are never used."

February 16, 2011  – "HHS awards millions to states to develop key technology and collaborate with other states but keeps HealthCare.gov out of the picture."

Prior to Early March 2011 – "Early drafts of tax credit regulations specify tax credits are only for state established exchanges. After a months-long investigation into the development of the IRS’s tax credit rule, a Joint Staff Report to the U.S. House of Representatives published on February 5, 2014, concludes: 'Early drafts of the proposed premium subsidy regulation contained the statutory language restricting tax credits to Exchanges established by the State.' This language was removed from those drafts in early March 2011."

March 16, 2011 – "HHS creates an online system for states to share technology with other states but not with HealthCare.gov."

March 23, 2011 – "Louisiana announces that it will not set up a health insurance exchange."
July 15, 2011 – HHS issues a request for comments that suggests it has not started developing a tax credit calculator. HHS releases draft rules for health insurance exchanges and qualified health plans, and requests comments on whether a model tax credit calculator would be helpful for the states. This request suggests HHS has not yet started developing a tax credit calculator.
September 30, 2011 – "HHS signs a contract with CGI Federal to develop HealthCare.gov with a revised Statement of Work. The contract does not mention a tax credit calculator and includes only five references to tax credits. All of these references are unrelated to HealthCare.gov providing tax credits."

January 11, 2012 – "Seven states [Kentucky, Maine, New Mexico, North Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia] request written opinion from Attorney General on federal exchange tax credits so they can make a decision" about whether or not to establish their own health care exchanges.

January 18, 2012 – Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber says "if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange that means your citizens don't get their tax credits."

March 27, 2012 – "The IRS distributes Final rules/Interim final rules. One noteworthy comment in the filing is that the IRS took 'recommendations into account' for HealthCare.gov as a model tax calculator. By this time, HHS has been granting money and requiring states to develop tax credit calculators for 18 months, yet still the federal government is only considering building a model tax calculator."

May 3, 2012 - "HHS revises the CGI contract Statement of Work. The revised statement of work has three significant modifications:
   1) A tax credit calculator is now required on HealthCare.gov (there are seven references to a tax credit calculator in the modified statement of work compared to none in the original);
   2) HHS will from this point forward collaborate with states; and
   3) CGI is now required to go on 10 to 12 state visits to share technology.
In short, more than two years after the law passed, HHS has finally decided it must start developing a tax credit calculator for HealthCare.gov."

May 16, 2012 – "HHS finally distributes HealthCare.gov guidance. The guidance says that states operated as part of HealthCare.gov are entitled to premium tax credits."

May 23, 2012 - The IRS issues a rule that interprets Section 36B of Obamacare as meaning subsidies should be made available to residents of states that do not have their own healthcare exchanges.


When the Supreme Court rules on King v. Burwell in June of 2015 it will add what may be the most important entry to  this timeline, one that could well mark the death knell for Obamacare.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/11/20/Smoking-Gun-Obamacare-Subsidies-For-States-Without-Exchanges-Invented-By-Admin-2-Years-After-Law-Passed

It’s Time For Leftist Gruber Truthers To Give It A Rest


Gruber was an Obamacare architect who helped draft the law. This is a fact regardless of whether it's currently convenient for the Left.


Jonathan Gruber was a key architect of Obamacare who was intimately involved in the drafting of the legislation.

That is a fact. It is not arguable. It is not assailable. It is backed up by overwhelming contemporaneous evidence long before Gruber became a controversial figure whose loose lips threatened to sink the Obamacare ship. And the people who pimped Gruber as the all-knowing health care savior who single-handedly built the model that guaranteed a future of health care glory were not Obamacare’s critics. They were its most ardent proponents.

Gruber’s numerous video-taped remarks have caused enormous problems for the pro-Obamacare left. Enormous. And the problems are directly related to the lawsuits challenging the validity of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rule that says patients in states without state health care exchanges are eligible to receive federal subsidies to offset the obscene costs of their health insurance plans. The text of the Affordable Care Act repeatedly states that federal subsidies may only flow to those who purchase their plans from an exchange “established by the State” as opposed to one established by the federal government.

Unfortunately for the Obama administration, states weren’t all that keen on the whole state exchange idea. So most of them balked. And when it became clear that states would not do Obama’s dirty work in establishing their own exchanges, the IRS came to the rescue and promulgated a rule stating that federal subsidies would be available to everyone.

Without the facade of federal subsidies to help mask the massive cost increases caused by Obamacare, the already rickety law collapses. And the best part about the whole legal controversy over the IRS rule is that the self-styled brightest minds of the leftist online commentariat never saw it coming. As I wrote back in July, if nothing else, the whole Halbig hullabaloo just goes to show how bad most leftist wonks are at their jobs.

The latest uproar over Gruber proves it once again.

Now, to their credit, they seem to finally understand how bad Gruber’s comments are for the pending Supreme Court case about the IRS rule. And his comments are damaging because they fly in the face of the government’s arguments about the absurdity of believing that the law meant to prevent subsidies from flowing through federal exchanges. But in one of his many videos, Gruber clearly states that what the government says is absurd is actually the precise outcome intended by those who designed the law: the federal government wanted all 50 states to establish exchanges. What better way to coerce them into doing that than by making federal subsidies contingent upon the establishment of a state exchange? What the Obama administration’s legal briefs say is absurd is exactly what the law’s architect said was the end goal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtnEmPXEpr0#t=168

And therein lies the latest mission for Obamacare’s dimwitted online propagandists: let’s just tell everyone Gruber wasn’t the law’s architect! Yeah, that’s the ticket. Enter Jonathan Chait:


http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/18/its-time-for-leftist-gruber-truthers-to-give-it-a-rest/

Jon Stewart Calls Obama's Latest Scandal 'Pretty Slimy'

... draft the legislation, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, that is not only precisely what will happen — but that was the intention of the tax. …

At a town hall meeting on health care on July 23, 2009 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Obama explained that the thinking of the Cadillac tax was to target plans that spend unnecessarily and excessively, thus driving up health care costs, such as a $25,000 plan, “so one that’s a lot more expensive and a lot fancier than the one that even members of Congress get.”

The thinking, Obama explained, was that “maybe at that point what you should do is you should sort of cap the exclusion, the tax deduction that is available, so that we’re discouraging these really fancy plans that end up driving up costs.”

The President at that point hadn’t yet signed off on a Cadillac tax (he would eventually) but he did make the pledge: “what I said and I’ve taken off the table would be the idea that you just described, which would be that you would actually provide — you would eliminate the tax deduction that employers get for providing you with health insurance, because, frankly, a lot of employers then would stop providing health care, and we’d probably see more people lose their health insurance than currently have it. And that’s not obviously our objective in reform.”

That promise is completely at odds with how Gruber describes not only that provision of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, but the intention of that provision.


http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/18/politics/gruber-obamacare-promises/index.html


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CNN repeatedly asked the White House to respond to Tapper’s report, but only got a “no comment.”

All of #GruberGate in Two Minutes