Motley Moose – Archive

The president spoke Tuesday on the Affordable Care Act.

The bottom line is this law is working and will work into the future.  People want the financial stability of health insurance.  And we’re going to keep on working to fix whatever problems come up in any startup, any launch of a project this big that has an impact on one-sixth of our economy, whatever comes up we’re going to just fix it because we know that the ultimate goal, the ultimate aim, is to make sure that people have basic security and the foundation for the good health that they need.

Now, we may never satisfy the law’s opponents.  I think that’s fair to say.  Some of them are rooting for this law to fail — that’s not my opinion, by the way, they say it pretty explicitly.  (Laughter.)  Some have already convinced themselves that the law has failed, regardless of the evidence.  But I would advise them to check with the people who are here today and the people that they represent all across the country whose lives have been changed for the better by the Affordable Care Act.

And my main message today is:  We’re not going back.

So if you’ve already got health insurance or you’ve already taken advantage of the Affordable Care Act, you’ve got to tell your friends, you’ve got to tell your family.  Tell your coworkers.  Tell your neighbors.  Let’s help our fellow Americans get covered.

Affordable Care Act News and Commentary:

We'll look back at ACA's passage and say: How could a major industrialized nation have had 45 million people with no health insurance?

— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) December 3, 2013

Charlie Pierce

In case it hasn’t dawned on you by now, the assault on the Affordable Care Act has absolutely nothing to do with anything except an ideological — nay, theological — resistance to the notion that the government (which is, I hasten to remind everyone, us) should do anything to help construct and maintain a social safety net. People who are not us need to have the freedom to die offstage. This assault simply will not stop, and anyone who thinks that the ACA eventually will “out-succeed” the attacks on it is being extraordinarily foolish. There are wealthy and powerful people in this country — and these wealthy and powerful people have enough intellectual and political ‘ho’s at their disposal — that it will not matter through the decades how well the ACA comes to work. The attempts to weaken and destroy it simply will never stop.

Report: Obamacare To Cost ‘Billions Of Dollars Less Than Originally Projected’

Among the GOP’s myriad criticisms of the Affordable Care Act, one of the loudest has centered around the law’s price tag. But according to one report, Obamacare won’t be as costly as expected.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that “the government is expected to spend billions of dollars less than originally projected on the law.”

The adjusted estimate is a result of the law’s Medicaid expansion and the subsidies for private insurance plans proving less costly than initially anticipated. According to the Times, economists say that the law has also benefitted from a weak economy over the last half-decade, during which time health spending has slowed dramatically.

Could A Tech Giant Build A Better Health Exchange? Maybe Not

Oregon has spent more than $40 million to build its own online health care exchange. It gave that money to a Silicon Valley titan, Oracle, but the result has been a disaster of missed deadlines, a nonworking website and a state forced to process thousands of insurance applications on paper.

Administration Won’t Quantify HealthCare.gov’s Back-End Problems

Administration officials boasted Monday that a significant bug on HealthCare.gov’s back-end had been fixed, but then would not say how many people had been affected by the issue.

Julie Bataille, spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters that one bug involving Social Security numbers was responsible for 80 percent of the errors in data being transmitted to insurers when people submitted their applications through the website. That error — a significant source of concern for insurers — has been fixed, she said.

But when multiple reporters pressed Bataille to quantify what number or what percentage of applications had been transmitted with bad data, she said she could not provide any additional information.

The Next 5 Fixes That Obamacare Needs

The White House has a to-do list of sorts, with items that need to be checked off over the next year. Here are five.

– Fix The Back-End Of HealthCare.gov

– Roll Out The Spanish-Language Version (CiudadoDeSalud.gov)

– Get The Small-Business Marketplace Ready For 2015

– Prepare To Enforce The Employer Mandate In 2015

– Start Getting The Word Out