Insurance Companies

The Obamacare enrollment portal is the gift that keeps on giving endless examples of government incompetence. The latest comes from Bloomberg which informs us that "there’s no way to tell how many people who think they’ve signed up for health insurance through the U.S. exchange actually have, after about 1 in 4 enrollments sent to insurers from the federal website had garbled included incomplete information." Still that particular glitch was not enough to prevent Obama from taking full credit for a "fixed" website after somehow the White House managed to calculate that sign ups soared to 100,000 people, and have taken off since the "fix."

Just when you thought it was safe to step back into the water of the "fixed" Obamacare website, another glitch, this time in sending data on Medicaid, has The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services writing a memo to the 36 states using the federal website last week acknowledging the information wasn't being transferred automatically and saying another system was being developed to send it. Potentially affecting tens of thousands of Medicaid recipients, ABC reports, "Essentially, if you're a consumer on healthcare.gov, it will tell you you're eligible for Medicaid and the state agency will take care of it, but there's no real way for the state Medicaid agency to know anything about it." The information, according to AP, is incomplete with regard to verifying eligibility and as South Carolina's HHS Director notes, "it's going to be a gigantic logistical mess."

As we noted last month, President Obama sat down for an interview with Chuck Todd on November 7 and said: "When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn’t work or it ends up being way over cost." Well, this week we learned that the gap’s been closed. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told us so. In its official report, HHS not only announced that it had “met the goal of having a system that will work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” but wrote that “the team is operating with private sector velocity and effectiveness.” That sure was quick. Reviewing these facts, we suppose HHS could support their claim to “private sector velocity and effectiveness” with some semantic tricks. If you interpret that phrase as referring to the principle contractors’ adeptness at winning huge, no-bid contracts through personal connections, donations, fund raising and lobbying, then it all adds up.

Still unnoticed by a large part of the population is that we have been living through a period of relative impoverishment. Money has been squandered in welfare spending, bailing out banks or even — as in Europe — of fellow governments. But many people still do not feel the pain. Many people believe the paper wealth they own in the form of government bonds, investment funds, insurance policies, bank deposits, and entitlements will provide them with nice sunset years. However, at retirement they will only be able to consume what is produced by the real economy. Savers and pensioners will at some point find out that the real value of their wealth is much less than they expected. In which way, exactly, the illusion will be destroyed remains to be seen.

With just a week to go until the Obama-promised "all clear" healthcare.gov date of November 30, the president is scrambling to boost enrollment in the 11th hour. As reported by Reuters, the administration announced a flurry of fixes to its troubled HealthCare.gov website on Friday that officials said would soon double its current capacity, a crucial step toward getting the system working by a November 30 deadline. It also pushed back a deadline for people to enroll in insurance plans for 2014 under President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act in a nod to millions of applicants who have been unable to sign up because of technical glitches for nearly two months. The reason for the push is that consumers need to make decisions on healthcare plans in December if they want insurance in place by January.

When Barack Obama, floundering in the endless humiliation from the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, gave the country's insurance  companies the "put option" to reject the one-year "cancellation" extension fix stemming from the whole "if you like your plan, you can keep it, period" fiasco, he committed a cardinal sin - he lost control of the situation, because from that point onward the decision was no longer in his court. Furthermore, due to the syndicate nature of insurance companies and state insurance commissioners implementing Obamacare, suddenly the decision was subject to game theoretical facets including cooperation and defection, or rather just defection since at this point the biggest spoils would go to whoever had the initial leverage or rather, defiance of the president. Sure enough, California just flopped on Obama's most recent flip when the state, moments ago, rejected Obama's proposed fix to allow legacy plans to survive for one additional year. Welcome to socialist central planning 101 - where everything that can go wrong, sooner or later does.

If there were any shreds of hope left that the stunning decline of the middle class could be turned around, Obamacare has absolutely destroyed them.  Over the past decade or so, the middle class in the United States has been absolutely eviscerated.  The number of working age Americans without a job has increased by 27 million since the year 2000, median household income in the U.S. has fallen for five years in a row, and the poverty numbers in this country are spiraling out of control.  And now here comes Obamacare.  As you will see below, Obamacare is causing millions of Americans to lose their current health insurance policies, it is causing health insurance premiums to explode to absolutely ridiculous levels, and it is systematically killing jobs even though the employer mandate has been delayed for a while.

Responding to his administration’s ongoing struggles with the launch of Obamacare, President Barack Obama announced a proposal today that would enable insurance companies to grant one-year extensions to the health plans of Americans who would otherwise face cancellation. Here are some of Obama’s other plans to fix the troubled rollout of his signature health care law...

• China to Ease One-Child Policy (WSJ), China announces major economic and social reforms (Reuters)
• Consumers line up for launch of PlayStation 4 (USAToday)
• Trust frays between Obama, Democrats (Politico)
• Yellen Stands by Fed Strategy  (Hilsenrath)
• Hero to zero? Philippine president feels typhoon backlash (Reuters)
• Brussels warns Spain and Italy on budgets (FT)
• Moody’s Downgrades Four U.S. Banks on Federal Support Review  (BBG)
• CIA's Financial Spying Bags Data on Americans (WSJ)
• Germany Digs In Against Risk Sharing in EU Bank-Failure Plan (BBG)
• Bill Gates wants Norway's $800 billion fund to spend more in Africa, Asia (RTRS)

The overnight global scramble to buy stocks, any stocks, anywhere, continued, with the Nikkei soaring higher by 2% as the USDJPY rose firmly over 100, to levels not seen since May as the previously reported speculation that more QE from the BOJ is just around the corner takes a firm hold. Sentiment that the liquidity bonanza would accelerate around the world (with possibly more QE from the ECB) was undented by news of a surge in Chinese short-term money market rates or the Moody's one-notch downgrade of four TBTF banks on Federal support review. The release of more market-friendly promises from China only added fuel to the fire and as a result S&P futures are now just shy of 1800, a level which will almost certainly be taken out today as the multiple expansion ramp continues unabated. At this point absolutely nobody is even remotely considering standing in front of the centrally-planned liquidity juggernaut that has made "market" down days a thing of the past.

"Unfortunately, today’s administrative state gives so much power to unelected bureaucrats—who are protected against any meaningful control by voters—that they can alter, manipulate, and change the law almost at will. The result is a breakdown in the rule of law and an arbitrary system in which the government operates, not according to predictable standards and meaningful rules, but according to political whim and in arbitrary, day-to-day, ad hoc manner."

Between last night's dismal reality of enrollees in Obamacare, the collapse to record lows of Obama's approval rating, and the growing disillusionment among the President's own party have forced the administration to "fix" Obamacare. As Politico reports, the president’s proposal would allow insurers to offer plans in 2014 that were previously slated to sunset this year, but require the companies to let consumers know how — if at all — their policies don’t comply with the minimum benefits of the Affordable Care Act, according to a source briefed on the proposal. Insurance companies are not amused as risk pools will need to be adjusted. We leave to our policy-changer-in-chief to explain the nuances of this fiasco and why this is not a "fold", not an admission that the law is FUBAR, and not in any way similar to the Tea-Party's suggestion that Obamacare be delayed by one year...

When one steps back from all the frustration, all the confusion,  all the failures both in the rollout and the mass behavioral experimentation, and the fact that the math just doesn't work, the primary stated purpose behind Obamacare was simple: to provide uniform, affordable (the A in ACA) healthcare for all Americans. But especially to those who are currently uninsured. At least such was the utopian, egalitarian vision behind its conception. Which is also why, stripping away the political posturing, the html coding errors, the funding issues, the biggest failing of Obamacare would be if it opened, and none of America's uninsured came. Sadly, this last nail in Obamacare's coffin, has just been confirmed with a just released Gallup poll which found that a tiny 18% of uninsured Americans - the primary target population for the exchanges - have so far attempted to even visit an exchange website.

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