Obamacare enrollments surging, HealthCare.gov working better & The Massive Republican Campaign to Sabotage the Affordable Care Act 20NOV13

THE repiglicans and tea-baggers and their corporate masters, the voluntarily ignorant, the haters, the liars, the greedy are all ramping up their attacks on Obamacare. At times the most rabid of those who oppose Obamacare are almost hysterical, lending credence to the need to increase mental health coverage. Their goal is to destroy Obamacare, to take us back to being the nation with the "best health care in the world, if you can afford it". WE MUST NOT, WE WILL NOT GO BACK to the days of people being denied health care because they can't afford it, to people being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions, to children being denied health care because they are uninsured, to families being destroyed financially because of catastrophic illness. There are problems with the launch of Obamacare, but the tens of thousands who have signed up since 1 OKT 13 and the tens of thousands "window shopping" on the government exchange and health care websites and even the numbers of people who tried to sign up but were not able to because of the website problems testify to the need and desire for affordable health insurance. This system will be fixed, and it will work in spite of the obstructionism of repiglicans, tea-baggers and jellyfish democrats. This from Daily Kos and HuffPost......

This should be the day's leading Obamacare news: enrollements across the country are surging, coming in ahead of projections in states across the country.

"What we are seeing is incredible momentum," said Peter Lee, director of Covered California, the nation's largest state insurance marketplace, which accounted for a third of all enrollments nationally in October. California—which enrolled about 31,000 people in health plans last month—nearly doubled that in the first two weeks of this month. Several other states, including Connecticut and Kentucky, are outpacing their enrollment estimates, even as states that depend on the federal website lag far behind. In Minnesota, enrollment in the second half of October ran at triple the rate of the first half, officials said. Washington state is also on track to easily exceed its October enrollment figure, officials said.

Enrollments are moving at a faster clip than during October in these, despite the fact that some people are confused by the problems the federal site has had, not sure if the sites in their own states are working. Covered California's director said that the state has had to change its marketing to remind people that the state site wasn't the same as the federal site, and was working just fine. Unfortunately, so far enrollments on the federal site are still lagging. For example, just  2,991 people in Texas were able to complete enrollment in October, fewer than Kentucky, which has a sixth of Texas' population. But there's better news on the federal site front today, as well. HealthCare.gov is now working for 90 percent of users who have tried again to sign up. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services updated reporters Monday with the news that the site was functioning better, and that it had sent out 275,000 emails to people who had started to create accounts, but couldn't get through the process. CMS says that 90 percent of those people who tried again got all the way through the process. So far in November, 50,000 people have selected a plan in the federal site, up from 27,000 for the entire month of October.
Many people are likely still in window-shopping mode, and enrollments should pick up even more—both on the state sites and the federal site—in the last week or two before the December 15 deadline for insurance to be in place on January 1, and then again in February and March before the final deadline. The Massachusetts experience provides the best model for enrollment patterns, and in the first four months of enrollment just about one-fifth of the uninsured population enrolled.
The people will come. They're not freaked out over what most people perceive as inevitable: a problematic new government program. They're not abandoning support for the program in droves. They're not calling for an end to the program. They're patient enough to give it time to work, even if Republicans and the traditional media are not.

Originally posted to Joan McCarter on Tue Nov 19, 2013 at 09:32 AM PST.

Also republished by Daily Kos. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/19/1256749/-Obamacare-enrollments-surging-HealthCare-gov-working-better?detail=email 

We're entering a bizarre end-of-the-year edition of Silly Season in which the news media is laser-focused on the wrong things. As stories about the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act begin to dissipate, it looks like we've segued into an especially nonsensical "MSNBC Anchor Wants to Poop in Palin's Mouth" meets "Wacky Toronto Mayor Does Wacky Stuff" news cycle.
Lost in the mix, of course, is the ongoing far-right effort to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.
I'm not talking about the myths and propaganda -- the "death panel" nonsense and the like. This is serious business: the well-financed, broadly implemented sabotage campaign designed to rig the law for failure, while also making it more difficult for Americans to receive insurance.
Sabotaging the Website
We've known for quite some time that most Republican governors refused to open health insurance exchanges in their states. 27 states don't have exchanges and therefore uninsured residents are shuffled over to the Healthcare.gov website to buy a policy.
However, earlier this month, we learned that Republican Party leadership directly urged those governors not to do it -- chiefly to burden the federal exchange with a heavier load.
Worse yet, the ACA contained zero funding for the development and implementation of the site, and there's no way the congressional Republicans would ever authorize more money for it. It's unclear why the federal exchange was unfunded in the law, but one thing's for sure, a House of Representatives that voted 46 times to totally repeal the law wouldn't have coughed up a dime to rectify the oversight.
So, what happened? A cash-starved Healthcare.gov development process, which precipitated serious glitches when October 1 rolled around -- problems that should never have occurred.
And those glitches might've been exacerbated when right-wing hacktivists reportedly conducted "denial of service" attacks against Healthcare.gov -- deliberate attempts to overwhelm the website's servers. CNN reported on Monday:

Hackers have attempted more than a dozen cyber attacks against the Obamacare website, according to a top Homeland Security Department official. The attacks, which are under investigation, failed, said the official. Authorities also are investigating a separate report of a tool designed to put heavy strain on HealthCare.gov through a so-called distributed denial of service. It does not appear to have been activated.

What else?
Sabotaging the Medicaid Expansion
Americans for Prosperity, funded by Charles and David Koch, launched advertising campaigns to strong-arm state lawmakers to block the expansion Medicaid in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Once again, in the 26 states that blocked the Medicaid expansion, we're left with five to eight million people who are consequently unable to afford exchange policies but who also make too much money to qualify for Medicaid.
In Alaska yesterday, Governor Sean Parnell, a Republican, obviously, rejected the Medicaid expansion thus denying health insurance to 40,000 Alaskans. Parnell said, "I believe a costly Medicaid expansion especially on top of the broken Obamacare system is a hot mess."
That's a lie. Fact: the federal government pays the entire cost of the Medicaid expansion for 2014 through 2016. The states pay nothing. So it's not costly at all. In fact, it's free for the first three years.
What happens when the expansion is blocked throughout more than half the nation? Potentially millions of pissed-off working class Americans due to what's perceived as punitively expensive Obamacare premiums -- premiums that are only too expensive because Republican governors blocked the Medicaid expansion.
There's more.
Sabotaging ACA Marketplace Enrollment
Speaking of the Koch brothers and Alaska, a group called Foundation for Government Accountability launched a campaign to convince Alaskans to deliberately not buy insurance policies in order to undermine ACA enrollment goals, and, naturally, to express their self-defeating hatred of President Obama. Smart.
A pair of websites, along with accompanying Facebook pages, were launched back in September: dontenrollalaska.org and knowthefactsalaska.org. And go figure:

Based in Naples, Fla., the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit that "promotes public policies that achieve limited, constitutional government and a robust economy that will be an engine for job creation across the states." One of the foundation's directors is Robert Levy, the chairman of the board of the Cato Institute, the Washington, D.C. think tank with a long and complicated relationship with the Koch brothers.

Yep. All roads lead back to the Kochs.
There's something especially visceral and sinister about well-protected billionaires telling middle class Americans to go without health insurance in order to, you know, kick Obama in nuts.
At the end of the day, if not enough people enroll in the exchanges, the law entirely falls apart. Combined with everything else, that's sabotage, plain and simple, while the Koch brothers can rest assured knowing they'll never be without quality healthcare, so screw it. Let fly. After all, the traditional press won't really cover it with the same hard-nippled vigor with which they've covered the buggy website, or with which they've almost universally blamed the low enrollment numbers on the president.
For that, much of the press is an active, though not entirely knowing conspirator in the sabotage plot. And there's no indication any of it will change any time soon.
Cross-posted at The Daily Banter.
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