Motley Moose – Archive

From Breaking News at NY Times:

President Obama declared Monday that “nobody is madder than me” about the failures of the government’s health care Web site, but said the technical problems do not indicate a broader failure of the Affordable Care Act.

“We did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a Web site. That’s not what this was about,” Mr. Obama told supporters during 25-minute remarks in the Rose Garden.

That the president even had to say this tells us more about the laziness of the main stream media than it does about the technical shortcomings of a web site.

The Department of Health and Human Services accepts blame for the glitchiness of the web site and is beefing up their technical staff to address it head on:

Over the past two and a half weeks, millions of Americans visited HealthCare.gov to look at their new health care options under the Affordable Care Act. In that time, nearly half a million applications for coverage have been submitted from across the nation. This tremendous interest – with over 19 million unique visits to date to HealthCare.gov- confirms that the American people are looking for quality, affordable health coverage, and want to find it online.

Unfortunately, the experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans. Some have had trouble creating accounts and logging in to the site, while others have received confusing error messages, or had to wait for slow page loads or forms that failed to respond in a timely fashion. The initial consumer experience of HealthCare.gov has not lived up to the expectations of the American people. We are committed to doing better. […]

To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve, our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we are encountering.

Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve HealthCare.gov. We’re also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them. We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service and deploying fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis.

Translation: “We know we had problems, we worked to fix them, and we are going to apply more fixes going forward.”

Facebook was down for a short while this morning, which makes it a complete and utter failure.

But thank goodness Twitter was up:

stages of gop obamcare grief:

1. obamacare is unconstitutional

2. … is legal but bad

3. … is killing liberty

4. … is too hard to get

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) October 20, 2013

You know how long you'd wait to get online to buy affordable health care under the GOP plan? A lifetime (which would be rather short).

— John Aravosis (@aravosis) October 18, 2013

The much ballyhooed “GOP civil war” turned out to be 6 guys with rusted flintlocks as the Republican House terrorists voted to send the Continuing Resolution bill to keep the government funded back to the Senate with more Obamacare hostage-taking amendments. The Senate rejected that bill, demanding a clean CR.

House “leadership” met to hatch a plan to send the amendment festooned CR to conference:

UPDATE September 30, 10:53 p.m. ET:

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy’s office issued the following whip alert announcing a late-night vote on the above plan:

   The House will follow regular order and consider a rule that adopts a motion insisting on our last amendment and requesting a conference with the Senate. This will send the CR, our amendment, and our request for a conference back to the Senate.

WaPo – update 11:20 p.m. ET:

The House Rules Committee just voted to approve House GOP leaders’ plan for a conference committee, but it did so without Democratic support.

The vote was 7-4 along party lines, according to committee chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas).

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) refused to entertain the conference committee plan:

“We will not go to conference with a gun to our head,” Reid said late Monday night on the Senate floor. “The first thing the House has to do is pass a clean six-week C.R. They have that before them they can do that right now.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Senate Budget Committee Chair, via TPM:

After blocking Senate Democrats’ attempts to start a budget conference 18 times over the past six months, Republicans are now scrambling to start a conference committee with mere minutes to go before a government shutdown. This is just the latest absurd and desperate attempt by Speaker Boehner to delay the inevitable–bringing a clean continuing resolution to the floor for Democrats and Republicans to vote on–and to continue pushing the country toward a completely unnecessary government shutdown. If Republicans were truly serious about avoiding a crisis they would pass the Senate’s short-term funding bill to remove the threat of a government shutdown immediately. We won’t negotiate while Republicans are threatening families and the economy with a crisis.

The Senate will be adjourned until 9:30am Tuesday.

Earlier this week, economist Paul Krugman called the “G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive” the “wonk gap” and pointed to the Republican’s weekly address as evidence:

On Saturday, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming delivered the weekly Republican address. […] he demanded repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “The health care law,” he declared, “has proven to be unpopular, unworkable and unaffordable,” and he predicted “sticker shock” in the months ahead.

Instead of “wonk gap”, I prefer to call it “the final nail in the coffin of the modern Republican party”.  

The title is, of course, ironic, but after reading about Chris Cristie’s rejection of Medicaid Expansion under Obamacare for New Jersey, and considering that in light of his position opposing marriage equality in New Jersey, I began to think about the linkage between these two seemingly distinct issues.

While watching the NewsHour’s excellent coverageof the SCOTUS decision in US v. Windsor to throw out Section 3 of DOMA,  I found this quote from Kathleen Sibelius :

Today’™s Supreme Court decision finding the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional is a victory for equality, which is a core belief of this administration. It is also a victory for families, especially those children whose parents’ legal same sex marriages can now be recognized under federal law.

As a result of today’s ruling, the federal government is no longer forced to discriminate against legally married same sex couples. The Supreme Court’™s decision on DOMA reaffirms the core belief that we are all created equal and must be treated as equal. The Department of Health and Human Services will work with the Department of Justice to review all relevant federal statutes and ensure this decision is implemented swiftly and smoothly.

Please feel free to use the text below to let your representatives know your opinion on this issue. Select and copy the text below then click here to send a message to your congressional representative and senators.

President Obama and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have called for “choice and competition” as part of health care reform.  However, the health insurance industry has been given immunity from the federal anti-trust laws under the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945.  Without Congressional repeal of this Act, Americans will not have real “choice and competition” because the insurance industry will continue to operate outside the free market.

In 2007, a bipartisan coalition of Senators, including Sens. Harry Reid, Arlen Specter, Patrick Leahy, and Trent Lott, presented the Insurance Industry Competition Act, which sought to repeal McCarran-Ferguson.  The House also presented companion legislation at the same time.  These Congressional representatives spoke out against the blatant collusive and non-competitive actions of the insurance industry in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  This bill, however, was not passed, but Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has introduced a similar bill this year, which is currently stuck in committee.

Real Health Care Reform requires choice and competition, and repealing McCarran-Ferguson is part of fostering this competition.  Like every other industry in America, the health care insurance industry should be required to abide by our federal anti-trust laws and regulations.