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I shared with your producer that we actually put incoming applications aside so we could focus on the ACA related applications that came in over last summer. That's wrong. We should treat each veteran equally and focus on applications, as they come in, not because of special campaigns coming out of D.C.

By 2015, the net impact of ACA changes is expected to result in the reduction of employment-based coverage by 2 million. This reduction is expected to increase to 8 million by the year 2018.

Turdacious wrote:

And that's if you can get a doctor's appointment with a provider in your narrow network.

CGI Federal Inc. (CGI) GIB +0.69% CA:GIB.A +0.70% announced today that the General Services Administration (GSA) has chosen the company as a prime contractor under a new contract vehicle known as One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS). The multi-award contract has an unlimited ceiling, allowing CGI to compete for billions of dollars in complex professional services task orders across all agencies in the U.S. federal government.

GSA oversees the business of the federal government, among other things supplying federal purchasers with cost-effective, high-quality products and services from commercial vendors. CGI is one of 74 awardees under OASIS, an "indefinite delivery indefinite quantity" (IDIQ) contract that will allow awardees to compete on a range of program management, management consulting, logistics, engineering, scientific and financial management services. Awardees will also be able to offer technology solutions as an ancillary service. For the first time, agencies will be able to purchase high-value professional services along with supporting IT solutions through a single contract, saving customers time and money.

A federal appeals court dealt a major blow to Obamacare on Tuesday, saying that millions of Americans cannot get subsidies to help pay for their health insurance through HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange serving most of the country. The court said those subsidies can only be given through the state-run exchanges.

In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that the IRS had incorrectly allowed people to get subsidized through the federal exchange. It did not order the subsidies stopped immediately, recognizing that the Obama administration will appeal.

A loophole in Obamacare regulations has health plans worried that people who bought coverage on the federal marketplace could skip their December payment and insurers would have few tools available to recoup that missed premium.

"People can get a free month of health care," says one insurance industry official, who flagged the issue and requested anonymity to speak openly about the problematic guidance. "If they knew about the rule, they functionally wouldn't have to pay for their last month of coverage."

The loophole stems from federal guidance published July 16. The underlying regulations are meant to protect consumers' rights as health insurance shoppers — but which could have the unintended consequence of making it easier for subscribers to skip out on a payment.

Obamacare guarantees enrollees a three-month grace period if they fall behind on their premiums. Someone who stops paying in March, for example, has through May to make good. So if they don't pay up in March but have a medical bill in May, they can get that bill covered by paying their back premiums. It's only after May that they're really uninsured.

And if someone misses their grace period entirely — doesn't pay in March, or April or May — federal guidance published July 16 specifies that their coverage runs out on the "last day of the first month of the grace period." In this hypothetical example, the person who never paid for March, April and May would still get coverage through March 31.

Pinky wrote:And now people are pulling out old Gruber quotes stating that the lack of subsidies in the Federal exchange was an intentional feature of the act.

Low-income Oregon residents were supposed to be big winners after the state expanded Medicaid under the federal health care overhaul and created a new system to improve the care they received.

But an Associated Press review shows that an unexpected rush of enrollees has strained the capacity of the revamped network that was endorsed as a potential national model, locking out some patients, forcing others to wait months for medical appointments and prompting a spike in emergency room visits, which state officials had been actively seeking to avoid.

"As soon as people got insured, they all showed up at once, wanting to deal with the problems they couldn't deal with for years," said John Guerreiro, a primary care doctor in northwestern Oregon.

Pinky wrote:"Politically skilled" is rarely used to describe an economist.

The couple's ages are 58 and 54. Unfortunately they live in a part of Georgia where community rating factors are higher than all but 4 other places in the U.S.

Turns out a $12,000 deductible plan will run them $1100 month.

Last year a similar plan would have been around $400.

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:"Politically skilled" is rarely used to describe an economist.

He's gone Krugman. It's sad. I liked him as an economist.

Management failures by the Obama administration set the stage for computer woes that paralyzed the president's new health care program last fall, nonpartisan investigators said in a report released Wednesday.

While the administration was publicly assuring consumers that they would soon have seamless online access to health insurance, a chaotic procurement process was about to deliver a stumbling start.

After a months-long investigation, the Government Accountability Office found that the administration lacked "effective planning or oversight practices" for the development of HealthCare.gov, the portal for millions of uninsured Americans.

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:"Politically skilled" is rarely used to describe an economist.

He's gone Krugman. It's sad. I liked him as an economist.

Pinky wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:"Politically skilled" is rarely used to describe an economist.

He's gone Krugman. It's sad. I liked him as an economist.

He's clearly more fair-minded and consistent about the ACA than Krugman is about anything. I've seen him make comments that were critical, but he still defends the bill and seems interested in maintaining his relationship with the administration.

The co-op’s wildly inaccurate enrollment projections are evidence that co-ops mispriced their plans–some setting prices too high with others setting prices too low. Co-ops that had the largest enrollment relative to their initial projections, an indication that they set their initial premiums too low, expect large payments through ObamaCare’s Risk Corridor program. The 10 co-ops that enrolled more than 125% of their projected initial enrollment expect aggregate Risk Corridor receipts of about $81.6 million in 2014. As a comparison, the 11 co-ops that enrolled fewer than 75 percent of their projected initial enrollment expect aggregate Risk Corridor receipts of only $1.3 million in 2014.
In addition to OMB’s projection of a large loss to taxpayers from co-ops’ inability to fully repay the loans that they received, taxpayers appear to be on the hook for bailing out co-ops that significantly underpriced their plans in 2014. Moreover, policyholders with coverage through these co-ops should expect large premium increases in future years when the co-ops can no longer rely on taxpayers to heavily subsidize their revenues. In addition to the co-ops, many other insurers also appear to have underpriced exchange plans for the 2014 plan year, likely due to their expectation of receiving a taxpayer bailout.

baffled wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:"Politically skilled" is rarely used to describe an economist.

He's gone Krugman. It's sad. I liked him as an economist.

Speaking of Krugman, have you read Niall Ferguson's takedown articles?

Turdacious wrote:

baffled wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

Pinky wrote:"Politically skilled" is rarely used to describe an economist.

He's gone Krugman. It's sad. I liked him as an economist.

Speaking of Krugman, have you read Niall Ferguson's takedown articles?

No... like I need another rabbit hole... and they're pretty interesting, thanks.

The cost of health insurance for individuals skyrocketed this year in California, with some paying almost twice what they did last year, the state's insurance commissioner said.

But Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones predicted that insurers will ease up in the coming year to prevent California voters from approving tough new rate controls on the November statewide ballot.

For 2014, consumers purchasing individual policies paid between 22% and 88% more for health insurance than they did last year, depending on age, gender, type of policy and where they lived, Jones said Tuesday.

He said he has authorized a study of health insurance rates after receiving numerous complaints about rising costs.

"The rate increase from 2013 to 2014, on average, was significantly higher than rate increases in the past," Jones said in a news conference in Sacramento.

Year two of Obamacare “won’t be perfect,” a top Obama administration official said today as the government’s website to sell health insurance plans continues to be developed.

Healthcare.gov was built primarily by CGI Group Inc. (GIB/A) of Montreal. While top Obama administration officials publicly blamed CGI for not meeting the terms of its contract, the company wasn’t severely punished, losing only about $267,000 of their fees, Woods is scheduled to testify.

If you enrolled in a health plan through an Obamacare exchange in the past 10 months, you could be forgiven for assuming that your work was mostly done—that if your income didn’t rise significantly, and you were satisfied with your plan, you were good to go until, say, your employment or marital status changed.

But you actually have to re-enroll every year. And there’s no guarantee that a) your existing plan will still be available, b) its premiums won’t increase, or c) the government’s contribution to your premium won’t fall.

Items a) and b) will be familiar to anyone who’s purchased insurance before. Item c) is an artifact of the formula the government uses to calculate subsidy values. Congress understandably didn’t want to structure premium assistance in a way that encouraged people to buy the most expensive plans on offer. So they tied it to the cost of something less prone to inflation, called the “benchmark plan,” which is the second-lowest cost silver-plated available in a particular exchange. If the benchmark plan doesn’t change then neither do the relative subsidy values. But if the law works as expected, and lower-cost plans become available on the market, then the value of the subsidy will decrease relative to the cost of your plan.

That means beneficiaries who do the easy thing and re-enroll automatically are likely to discover at some point in 2015 that they’re on the hook for more money than they were this year. Others, who decide to initiate the Healthcare.gov process all over again, might find cheaper plans, but those plans might not carry the same cost-sharing arrangements or provider networks that their current plans do.

This is not a glitch, like the Healthcare.gov software failure or the provision of the law that unintentionally withholds subsidies from the families of people whose employers offer them, and only them, affordable coverage. It’s a natural outgrowth of the scheme. It’s one of the many concessions liberals made to conservative Democrats and that conservative Democrats in turn made in a doomed attempt to entice Republicans to support the ACA and avoid the smear that they supported a government takeover of health care.