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Posts Tagged ‘exchange’
January 17th, 2014 at 2:25 pm
ObamaCare’s Laughable Celebrity Endorsements

If you know a young person who is unemployed, has no health insurance and spends waaay too much time using social media, the Obama administration has just the timewaster they’re looking for.

At tellafriendgetcovered.com, America’s healthiest non-working adults can absorb six straight hours of sales pitches and snarky humor trying to lure them into purchasing an Obamacare-approved health insurance policy that they probably won’t use.

One segment has a balding Richard Simmons bantering with a Miley Cyrus look-a-like. There are also ads featuring Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, and former NBA stars Magic Johnson and Alonzo Mourning.

The one with Hudson portrays the starlet telling a distraught father of a recent college graduate not to worry – his uninsured son can stay on his company’s policy through age 26! All seems well in la-la land as father and son ignore the fact the company will be paying up to four more years to cover someone who isn’t helping the firm increase its revenue.

Sedentary viewers are encouraged to tweet, post and otherwise spread the fleeting joy they get from watching taxpayer-funded, government-directed infomericals. The goal is to create a social media buzz among young adults to increase their enrollment in Obamacare exchange plans.

The move is motivated by desperation. Currently, Obamacare-related enrollments by young and healthy people are at 24%. Originally, the Obama administration estimated that this cohort needed to be at least 40% of Obamacare’s risk pool to make it financially viable. The disparity could be disastrous.

If the White House’s celebrity-themed push doesn’t work, it won’t be for lack of creativity and spending. It will be because a sizeable number of young and healthy people wind up laughing at the administration’s pitch, not with it.

H/T: CNBC

January 15th, 2014 at 6:48 pm
More Women than Men Signing Up for ObamaCare

James Taranto draws attention to an adverse selection problem revealed by the newest federal Obamacare enrollment numbers: More women than men are signing up for health insurance.

The gap between women and men enrollees is troublesome for President Obama’s signature law because women, on average, consume more health services than men. That higher rate of spending drives up the cost of future premiums for everyone.

Of course, women are a larger percentage of the population than men, so as long as the ratio on the federal exchange mirrors the ratio in the population, all should be well.

Except that current enrollment numbers – 54% women to 46% men – don’t mirror the population (where adult women outnumber adult men by a slight 50.3%).

It gets worse. “A 54% to 46% enrollment difference means that only 85.2 males are enrolled in Obamacare for every 100 females,” writes Taranto. Put simply, “Obamacare is missing more than 13 men for every 100 women who’ve signed up.”

Obamacare needs more men in its exchange pool just like it needs more young and healthy people – to pay for others with higher rates of health spending (i.e. women and older people, respectively). That the federal exchange is failing to attract people to pay more for coverage they don’t need is proof that everyday Americans aren’t the sheep central planners envision.

Thank goodness.

January 8th, 2014 at 3:20 pm
Vermont Wants 49 Other States to Fund Its State-Run Single-Payer System

Vermont is ready to start the first state-run single-payer system in the United States. There’s just one hitch: It needs federal taxpayers to foot the bill.

A state law passed in 2011 intends to create a state-run entity that “would largely sideline the insurance industry, and instead set up a government-managed system to collect all health care fees and pay out all health care costs,” reports Fox News.

But apparently, a program whose supporters estimate will save Vermont citizens a total of $1.9 billion from 2017-19 isn’t financially viable unless taxpayers living in the other 49 states chip in.

“In order for Green Mountain Care to fully launch in 2017, the health care exchange would have to get approval from the federal government to use federal money to fund the state program,” says the report.

It’s not clear from the article whether the federal money needed comes from Obamacare insurance subsidies or Medicaid (probably the former), but either way people living outside Vermont must fund a program that won’t benefit them, so that Green Mountain residents can live in a liberal utopia.

Simply put, if a majority of Vermont voters want to have a state-run single-payer system, they should raise their own taxes to the level necessary to pay for it.

January 2nd, 2014 at 7:04 pm
House GOP: ObamaCare a National Security Risk

House Republicans are getting ready to ring in the New Year by focusing on Obamacare’s security risks.

As I’ve written previously, personal information entered into an account on Healthcare.gov – the federal Obamacare insurance exchange – may not be protected from identity thieves.

Amazingly, “Under current policy, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services is tasked with deciding whether there is a risk of harm and whether individuals need to be notified whenever a security breach occurs,” says Fox News. “Republican lawmakers argue that the notification should not be optional.

A memo authored by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) calls for the chamber to vote on bills that would require HHS and its affiliates to notify the public if a security breach occurs.

Democrats are crying foul, but their opposition is self-serving. The only reason not to support the change to mandatory notice is to preserve the false sense of security that no notice means that all is safe.

President Obama once promised that his is “the most transparent administration in history.” The least he could do is apply that promise to the law that bears his name.

December 30th, 2013 at 7:44 pm
Up Next: ObamaCare Dictator?

Since President Barack Obama refuses to replace any of his political appointees responsible for the epic bureaucratic failure that is Healthcare.gov, liberal supporters of health care reform are trying to turn the crisis into a potential power grab.

“Advocates have been quietly pushing the idea of a CEO who would set marketplace rules, coordinate with insurers and state regulators on the health plans offered for sale, supervise enrollment campaigns and oversee technology,” says a Reuters report.

The move would consolidate responsibility in the hands of one person that reports directly to the White House.

In other words, it would create a “Healthcare.gov Czar,” or, to use the title preferred by FDR when naming such deputies, a dictator.

Since no such position exists in the text of Obamacare, its creation would amount to a unilateral executive action by the President. Unlike the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the proposed dictator would not be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. If created, the position would be immune from virtually any oversight from Congress.

Moreover, erecting a Healthcare.gov CEO within the confines of the White House would be a fundamental rejection of the intended operating structure of Obamacare by the very President who signed it into law.

These reasons, plus others, may explain why the White House is said not to be entertaining such a drastic break with the health law’s basic architecture. Even they fear the likely blowback from a move that further centralizes political control of the health insurance industry.

Still, the fact that Obama’s most liberal supporters are pushing this idea – including Ezekiel Emanuel and wonks at the Center for American Progress – shows that the tendency on the Left is to interpret any problem in implementation as stemming from a lack of power. The endpoint for them is a single-payer system run exclusively by the feds.

Even if this proposal goes nowhere, its currency among the liberal elite shows us where this train is heading. Better to dismantle it before it passes the point of no return.

December 24th, 2013 at 2:02 pm
Extended Obamacare Deadline Explained

If you’re fretting over whether to interrupt Christmas Eve activities to sign up for an Obamacare insurance plan, fear not.

“Today’s the deadline to sign up for health insurance on HealthCare.gov if you want that insurance to start by January 1st. But that’s it,” explains Ezra Klein. “If you don’t sign up today and instead sign up on Friday, or next Tuesday, your insurance will kick in a bit after January 1st. There’s no difference in premiums. There’s no difference in plans. There are no penalties.”

I bolded the last sentence to draw attention to an important piece of information often missed in the reporting about the January 1st start date. As Klein says, “The [individual] mandate only kicks in when people have a coverage gap of longer than three consecutive months during the year. That means that buying insurance any time before the end of March [i.e. the end of the open enrollment period on the exchanges] is good enough to avoid the penalty.”

The upshot: Maybe by March the federal government will have fixed all the problems with Obamacare. Maybe. For now, enjoy the Christmas season.

December 23rd, 2013 at 1:39 pm
Obamacare Enrollment Deadline Extended Again

With the Obama administration fearing a surge of users trying to enroll in an Obamacare exchange insurance plan ahead of the midnight deadline today, government officials and IT contractors extended the cutoff over the weekend without bothering to issue a public notice.

The new deadline is midnight of Christmas Eve.

For those trying to lock-in coverage by January 1st – and thus avoid an IRS penalty – the extension is good news. But for the insurance industry, it’s another unwelcome, unaccountable administrative fiat.

“The extension, said the sources, cannot be overridden by insurance companies if they object to it,” reports National Review Online. “It is the latest of several last-minute, ad hoc rule changes issued by the administration, including last week’s announcement that individuals whose insurance plans were [canceled] may receive an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.”

Until Obamacare is repealed and the federal government is divested of its power to dictate – and change – so many important terms at its whim, volatility in the health insurance market looks like it’s here to stay.

December 18th, 2013 at 2:31 pm
HHS Threatening to Expel Insurers That Don’t Give Away Free Health Care

New regulations by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) say that the price of not complying with government demands to lose money will result in being kicked off Obamacare exchanges next year, reports Avik Roy.

“We are considering factoring into the [qualified health plan] renewal process, as part of the determination regarding whether making a health plan available… how [insurers] ensure continuity of care during transitions,” HHS warns.

‘Continuity of care’ refers directly to the massive disruptions in health insurance coverage meted out by Obamacare. With only a fraction of enrollees likely to have paid their premium in time to be covered by January 1, many people who think they are covered won’t be.

But that’s if ordinary rules of insurance coverage apply. In order to avoid another PR disaster, HHS is demanding that insurance companies pay for services even if the claimant hasn’t paid her premium. Refusal to do so would disrupt continuity of care, and thus give HHS – according to its self-serving rule – reason to expel the insurance company from selling plans on an Obamacare exchange.

Roy says this latest move by HHS is lawless and unconstitutional. I agree. But the worst thing about it is that the insurance companies most vulnerable to this type of abuse probably won’t challenge the Obama administration in court, since doing so would likely get them kicked off the exchanges they have spent three years reorganizing their business model around.

This is gangster government.

December 11th, 2013 at 2:48 pm
So Far, Oregon Spending $6.8 Million Per Obamacare Enrollee

Q: What does $300 million in federal grant money to build one of the nation’s most expensive Obamacare exchanges get you?

A: If you’re Oregon, 44 enrollees.

So far, federal taxpayers have spent about $6.8 million per Oregon enrollee. And that doesn’t include the federal subsidies any of these Oregonians might qualify for, nor does it contain the remaining premium amount each enrollee will pay to have health insurance.

Maybe the Obama administration will reverse course and start claiming that Oregon’s exchange is really a job creator since someone got paid with all that money because at this point, it’s certainly not a financially viable health insurance portal.

H/T: Philip Klein

December 10th, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Only 11% of Colorado’s Obamacare Exchange Enrollees are Young Invincibles

It looks like the crass ad campaign aimed at getting keg-standing frat boys and promiscuous coeds to sign up for health insurance on Colorado’s Obamacare exchange is failing badly.

“The White House has set a goal of ensuring that roughly 40% of all enrollees on the federal exchange are young and healthy,” reports CNN’s Political Ticker.

“As of November 30, just 11% of total enrollees in Colorado’s exchange fall into the targeted 18 to 34 age bracket. The majority of new enrollees – more than 60% – are between 45 and 65.”

If this trend holds, it means that the funding ratios for Colorado’s insurance pools won’t work because there won’t be enough ‘young invincibles’ in the system. As I explained in a post about a similar problem in Kentucky, too few young and healthy people translates into an insufficient wealth transfer to older and sicker people.

Right now, Obamacare’s supporters are telling themselves that young people always wait till the last minute to comply, so all will be well when the enrollment period ends in March. That might be true. But if enough young invincibles pay a fine instead of enroll, Colorado, Kentucky and any other state with too few net payers will see next year’s premiums surge through the roof.

Just in time for the 2014 elections.

December 6th, 2013 at 3:00 pm
1 in 4 Young Invincibles Plan to Pay Obamacare Fine

Gallup released a new poll this week showing that a sizeable portion of an important cohort for Obamacare’s success is planning to pay fine rather than foot the bill for most costly insurance.

The so-called young invincibles – defined by Gallup as Americans under 30 years old – is the group whose purchase of health insurance on Obamacare exchanges is most coveted because they are projected to pay for more services than they use. The money made off their premiums will cover the cost of care for older and sicker people in the risk pool.

But the financial coercion desired by Obamacare’s operators could likely hit a snag this year because the penalty for not buying insurance is only $95, or less than any monthly premium available on an exchange.

Unfortunately for Obamacare’s supporters, Gallup says that 26 percent of young invincibles are planning to pay the fine instead of buy insurance. If enough do so, Obamacare’s cost structure gets up-ended, putting the feds on the hook to cover the overruns. Private insurers will then spike premiums in future years to compensate.

The big question is, “What number is ‘enough’?” No one knows the answer.

That’s because the key number for making the Obamacare exchanges financially workable is a ratio. For Healthcare.gov – the federal exchange – the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 38 percent of the risk pool needs to be young invincibles in order for the system to operate.

That means that the critical number for Healthcare.gov isn’t whether it actually enrolls the 7 million people it originally projected; it’s whether 38 percent of whatever population enrolls is made up of young invincibles, says Ezra Klein.

Early returns aren’t boding well, reports Breitbart News. The Obama administration so far has refused to release a breakdown of federal enrollees by age bracket, but the State of Kentucky has. The Bluegrass State runs its own exchange and only 19 percent of its enrollees are between the ages of 18-34 – a span that includes more years than Gallup’s. If that trend holds throughout the enrollment period that runs through March, Kentucky – and any other exchange with less than 38 percent of young invincibles – could face the dreaded ‘death spiral’ where premium costs soar to cover a sicker population that anticipated.

For now, we’ll have to wait and see whether the Obamacare-affiliated exchanges hit the magic number by the enrollment deadline. My guess is that the lack of transparency is directly related to the failure to meet the goal.

December 2nd, 2013 at 6:11 pm
Supreme Court Could Defund Obamacare

Federal subsidies are the lynchpin holding Obamacare together. Without them, insurance plans bought on state-run exchanges would be too expensive for most people to buy.

Which means there’s a huge gaping problem if you live in one of the 36 states that chose to let the feds run the exchange: You don’t qualify for federal subsidies.

“Congress was exceedingly clear that tax credits and subsidies are available to people whose plans ‘were enrolled in through an exchange established by the State under section 1311 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,’” argues Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s Attorney General, in the Wall Street Journal.

“Congress specified that credits and subsidies are only to be available in states that set up their own health-insurance exchange for a reason: It could not force states to set up exchanges. Instead, it had to entice them to do so.”

But if the enticement fails, then citizens are exposed to the full brunt of Obamacare’s increased cost structure for health insurance. That’s the risk the health law’s drafters took. Now the plain meaning of the text should result in a massively unpopular program.

The Obama administration is spooked. If the vast majority of Americans are forced to choose between paying the real price of Obamacare-related insurance or a hefty fine, there will be an electoral tsunami in 2014.

Here’s hoping Oklahoma’s lawsuit gets a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court sooner rather than later.

November 27th, 2013 at 5:08 pm
Another Cowardly Obamacare Delay

The launch of the Obamacare website for small businesses will be delayed until November 2014 – a full year from when it is required by law to go online.

Along with the Obama administration’s inability to create functioning health insurance portals, today’s announcement is yet another craven attempt by Washington liberals to shield themselves from the political consequences of their failures.

By pushing back the federally-run small business exchange (called SHOP) until after the 2014 midterm elections, President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress want to avoid a fresh round of voter anger when the newest website inevitably implodes.

But doing so means that three federal elections will have taken place between the time Obamacare passed into law in 2010 and its full implementation in 2014. That time period will cover half of the Obama presidency. If performance predicts the future, all we have to look forward to in 2014 is more failure.

Republicans should spare Americans the experience and put forward a slate of candidates that run and win on a promise to repeal Obamacare, without delay.

November 22nd, 2013 at 12:35 pm
As California Goes, So Does Obama’s ‘Fix’

California’s Obamacare-aligned health insurance exchange will not bail out President Barack Obama.

Data released by Covered California, the state’s exchange, explains why.

“People between the ages of 45 and 64 have enrolled in California’s health exchange at a much higher rate than their overall portion of the state’s total population, while younger adults’ enrollment levels essentially track their overall population,” reports CNBC.

“If the trend holds up, it could mean that insurance plans are overweighted with older customers, and underweighted with younger, presumably healthier people. Since their premiums are much needed to offset the cost of benefits paid out to sicker individuals, that could lead to higher premium prices in 2015.”

In other words, Covered California – like any other Obamacare exchange – can’t afford President Obama’s costly ‘fix’ that would allow young and healthy people to keep their pre-Obamacare insurance plans and stay out of the post-Obamacare risk pools. As I explain in my column this week, doing so would lead to the dreaded ‘death spiral’ that will doom the Obamacare exchanges.

There’s no other way to say it. California’s refusal to go along with Obamacare’s latest ‘fix’ is a huge blow to President Obama. So far, the Golden State is home to the most Obamacare-related enrollments, so if it’s afraid that adopting Obama’s enforcement delay will put its fiscal sustainability in jeopardy, it’s hard to see how any other state that’s serious about the issue will disagree.

November 9th, 2013 at 4:02 pm
Latest Obamacare ‘Fix’ Could Cost Billions

Another day, another leaked attempt to make an end-run around Congress.

In the wake of the widespread insurance policy cancellations forcing individuals onto Obamacare exchanges, Obama administration officials are letting it be known that they are working on an “administrative fix” that would somehow provide financial relief for those affected that don’t qualify for federal subsidies to offset the health law’s higher premiums.

This trial balloon seems to be the necessary corollary to President Barack Obama’s promise Thursday night “to work hard to make sure that [people losing their individual policies] know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

Even if that means rewriting the law without Congress, and exploding the cost of Obamacare.

As written, Obamacare subsidies are capped at 400 percent of the federal poverty line, which translates into an annual income of no more than $46,000 per year for an individual.

But, “In June 2009, the CBO evaluated a draft proposal from the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee that offered subsidies as high as 500 percent of the federal poverty level,” writes Philip Klein.

“In the period from 2014 through 2019 alone, CBO estimated that the exchange subsidies would cost $1.2 trillion.” Dropping the cut-off level to 400 percent of FPL reduced the cost estimate to $458 billion over the same six year period.

If the Obama administration elects to go this route, Klein says expect to see another famous presidential pledge come under fire: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. I will sign if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”

October 29th, 2013 at 4:51 pm
Obamacare Subsidies Could be Illegal

If you think Obamacare-approved insurance is expensive now, imagine how high it could go if the Supreme Court rules federal subsidies illegal.

Currently, there are four lawsuits making their way through the federal judiciary. I’ve profiled one from Oklahoma previously, and its arguments are essentially the same as the others.

In a nutshell, the text of Obamacare makes federal subsidies available to people buying health insurance on state-run exchanges created under Section 1311 of the law. The law says nothing about subsidies being available for insurance bought through federally-run exchanges created under Section 1321.

The Internal Revenue Service tried to paper-over the problem by issuing a regulation that made subsidies available on both sets of exchanges, but that’s being vigorously challenged as an illegal affront to the plain meaning of the Obamacare statute.

As Sean Trende notes, this challenge to Obamacare, if successful, wouldn’t kill the law outright. That might make voting against the IRS’s power grab more palatable for Chief Justice John Roberts, who cast the crucial fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate last year.

Of course, if the subsidies aren’t available to people in the 34 states where HHS is operating an exchange, then the system will implode. Even with subsidies many people are struggling to pay for the higher costs. Take them away and a huge political backlash will be unleashed.

If any of these cases gets to the Supremes, let’s hope they stick to the law and leave the politics for Election Day.

October 18th, 2013 at 12:06 pm
Obamacare Fed Exchange Problems Run Deeper than Reported

Yuval Levin has a must-read summary of the problems crippling Obamacare’s federal health insurance exchange, Healthcare.gov.

The summary is based on Levin’s interviews with sources in the Obama administration and in the health insurance industry.

Key problems include:

·    Overly Complex: A “late-in-the-game decision to require users to go through a complex account-creation process before even reaching any coverage options.” Not only does this block users from seeing prices up front, the slap-dash decision is the main reason people can’t access the site.

·    Inadequate Oversight: The Obama administration did not hire a general contractor to oversee the IT project, opting instead to keep oversight in-house. The inability of health policy people to adequately manage the technical details meant big problems were not understood until too late.

·    Erroneous Subsidy Calculations: So far, this hasn’t gotten much attention because only a few people have been able to complete the purchasing process. But as Levin points out, if the front-end log-in problems get resolved, the back-end problems regarding faulty subsidy calculations could severely undercut both consumers’ and providers’ confidence in the system. If millions of people buy insurance with a subsidy they don’t qualify for, that’s millions of angry voters who will owe a refund to the IRS come tax time.

Today, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) gives more detail into this burgeoning crisis.

“Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations,” reports the paper.

The reality is that the dissatisfaction with Healthcare.gov is likely to get much worse. With the shutdown saga behind us, perhaps some politically savvy conservatives in Washington can figure out a way to turn the growing frustration into a mandate for delay.

October 16th, 2013 at 2:08 pm
More Employer Mandate Madness

Even though it’s been delayed for a year, Obamacare’s employer mandate is still giving business owners cold sweats.

North Georgia Staffing, a family-owned boutique staffing agency, currently employs 18 full-time workers and 400 temporary workers. Next year it plans to add another 200 temps.

The problem facing Debbie and Larry Underkoffler, the owners, is whether to extend the same insurance coverage to all workers or pay a $2,000 per employee fine, they told Fox News.

The projected fine would be $400,000, while giving all workers an Obamacare-approved plan would top $2 million.

The Underkofflers’ case is particularly galling because prior to any government mandate they already provide their workers – both full-timers and temps – with access to health insurance.

Yet under Obamacare’s system of mandates and penalties, it makes better financial sense for the Underkofflers to dump their temporary workers on Georgia’s federally-run exchange and pare back benefits for the full-timers. In both cases, workers are projected to pay more for health insurance and get less.

All this makes perfect sense, however, if you agree with Obamacare’s primary goal of increasing the number of people with health insurance by regulatory fiat.

North Georgia Staffing, supporters would argue, is laudable but an outlier. Most temporary workers don’t have health insurance. The way to (somewhat) pay for the cost of covering them is to either (1) make employers eat the price increase, or (2) use the fines when they refuse to (partially) fund the federal subsidies temps will use to buy insurance on an exchange. If that means that some owners and workers will pay more for less, it’s a worthy sacrifice to increase access to health insurance for others.

That’s the baseline policy argument for Obamacare’s employer mandate. No doubt it doesn’t poll as well as “If you like your doctor and insurance you can keep it,” but at least it’s the truth.

October 11th, 2013 at 1:55 pm
Fire Sebelius?

Tom Bevan thinks so.

“Any corporation that allowed a COO to mismanage a new product line as important to its image as the Affordable Care Act is to Obama’s would be contemplating their severance package,” writes the Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics.

“The fact that Republicans haven’t called for Sebelius’ scalp should tell Democrats all they need to know about how much conservatives think she is hurting Obamacare’s cause. If the president cares about rescuing his signature policy initiative, he should consider putting it under new management right away.”

Though cathartic, I’m not sure Bevan’s idea helps the GOP all that much.

True, if Obama fired Sebelius it would touch off a huge confirmation battle over her successor as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the agency overseeing Obamacare’s implementation. But since Democrats control the Senate, confirmation would be won eventually.

Better, I think, to schedule a series of high-profile congressional hearings to grill Sebelius, her deputies and the contractors responsible for the glitch-heavy federal insurance exchange website. Sebelius is fast-becoming the bureaucratic face of Obamacare – let her try to defend it.

The tone coming from House GOP members should be sharp but measured. Already, Speaker John Boehner has used a line that would be devastating to repeat to every pro-Obamacare witness at every hearing:

“How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?”

Then there are the simple questions Sebelius couldn’t answer in a cringe-inducing appearance on The Daily Show.

Host Jon Stewart – an Obamacare supporter who thinks America deserves a single-payer system – got no good answers from Sebelius about why Healthcare.gov stinks and businesses get a one year mandate delay but individuals do not.

In response, Sebelius said – without a shred of evidence – that the site is getting better, and that individuals can delay the mandate, so long as they pay a fine.

If that’s the best she can do with a friendly host, imagine the possibilities under good cross-examination at a House hearing.

No, Obama shouldn’t fire Sebelius until House Republicans get a chance to turn up the heat.

October 10th, 2013 at 4:21 pm
Cost of Obamacare Website Compared to Tech Giants

Healthcare.gov, Obamacare’s federally-run, error-prone health insurance exchange, costs north of $500 million, according to the best information available.

To put this in perspective, compare that amount to the operating budgets of some of the tech industry’s biggest names:

·    Facebook operated for six years before passing the $500 million mark in 2010

·    Twitter operated for five years on $360.17 million in total funding

·    Instagram used $57.5 million before being bought by Facebook last year

·    LinkedIn has raised $200 million, while Spotify has raised $288 million

Despite the huge funding disparities, however, all of these private sector firms fielded much better online products than the glitch-filled, click-and-crash monstrosity offered by the Obama administration.

After more than a week of operation, Healthcare.gov is doing little more than waste people’s time.

Defunding never looked so good.