The difference between Target and the government is that a) the government is exempt from requirements informing consumers of data breaches, and b) the governmnet cannot be held accountable for breaches. Target can be sued and is being investigated by the government.
Relevance to ACA? Like the DMV site, use at your own risk. You have no recourse if they screwed up security.
I work in computer security, and you are wrong about the government not being accountable. Privacy Laws and computer security laws apply to the government as well.
Today’s post by Charles Gaba on ACMSignups.net is an interesting and fact filled response to an individual who raises many of the same criticisms posted in this thread.
Worth a read - Gaba has been studying and posting enrollment numbers much more deeply than anyone in this thread (unless someone here has a website they haven’t told us about 
)
He concludes that at this point the ACA has resulted in 12.75 Million newly covered individuals - even after removing cancelled and unpaid policies and pre-existing Medicaid.
That is a lot closer to a third of eligible enrollees than 1 in 10.
Yeah, I love how the newly covered beneficiaries under expanded Medicaid and up-to-age-26 provisions shouldn’t be included in the tally of ACA enrollees, because…I dunno, socialism. :dubious:
And no, you can’t repeal the ACA because the GOP will never have the numbers in the Senate to overcome a surefire Dem filibuster. From a purely practical standpoint, that’s where it ends.
In a bit more esoteric way, repeal is impossible for a number of other reasons:
The GOP can’t undo the hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D that went into healthcare.gov. They can’t turn that website into an Obama relic, either.
The GOP can’t magically undo the tens of thousands of pages in ACA regulations that have defined what this law actually means.
The GOP can’t magically repeal the law and expect all of the states who have embraced it wholeheartedly (CA, VT, NY, etc.) to not sue the living daylights out of them.
But, y’know, blah, blah, blah…ACA is terrible because I say so. :smack:
And when the government screws up, they can be sued, right?
2ManyTacos, take your stats up with Gallup and the other two polling organizations. Maybe the uninsured are liars.
Do you mean this Gallup poll from March 7?
The one titled “Majority of Uninsured Say They Will Get Insurance”. Or is there a later poll exposing the lies of the uninsured?
Seemssome commentators think that all it would take is a simple majority. Reid, having used the nuclear option, has set a precedent that the Republicans may be perfectly willing to use to repeal the PPACA in 2017.
Even some Democrats thought using the nuclear option was a bad idea… when they were the ones who might be disadvantaged by such a move. One said it would cause “gridlock will only get worse” if the nuclear option is used. A second said it was a “naked power grab.” A long-time Democratic Senator called it an “abuse of power.”
If they have the votes and political cover to do so, I fully expect the Republicans would use the nuclear option to repeal the PPACA.
What exactly does it mean once the enrollment period ends on March 31? Its not like the ACA will only be for the people who signed up during that period. I assume there will be a cut off date for enrollment and a start date for when the law’s active. Anyone signing on after that still gets these ACA approved health care plans, it’ll just start later?
Yes. Open enrollment for insurance that starts in 2015 runs from November 15, 2014 through February 15, 2015. So if you miss the March 31st deadline, you can’t get insurance that starts before January 1, 2015. Of course, there are exceptions.
The GOP doesn’t even need to end the filibuster. They can repeal a large part of it through reconciliation.
Plus if the Democrats lose two straight elections due in large part to ACA, and the law remains toxic, at some point they’ve got to give it up.
More likely, you’ll be left wondering what happened, and then deciding it didn’t happen at all. Just like in 2012.
Hmmm… “open enrollment” in health insurance has traditionally had a very specific meaning - that you could enroll without regard to prior health conditions.
Under PPACA I am not sure if a person enrolling outside of the open enrollment period (and without a special enrollment period) could be subject to health underwriting. The alternative is that a person with a pre-existing condition who didn’t enroll in the open enrollment period would be barred from enrolling the other 9 months of the year?
Best 2 out of 3.
No, at some point Republicans have to give it up. Right now, opposition to the ACA is the only thing that unites the Republicans. As people gain the benefits and they realize it isn’t the beginning of the Marxist Apocalypse, the frothing-at-the-mouth opposition will disappear. Republicans will learn to live with it, just as they’ve learned to live with Social Security and Medicare (all the while, never quite giving up the hope of the destruction of both). The great ACA Backlash of 2012 didn’t happen, Democrats won the White House, retained the Senate, and made gains in the House while getting more House votes nationwide than the Republicans. This great tsunami just isn’t going to happen, and in 2016 Democrats will once again control the House, Senate, and White house. There won’t be a black guy in the White House for Republicans to paint as the great Communist Muslim Terrorist, it will be a competent woman. So the Republicans’ masturbatory fantasies about impeaching Obama and repealing the ACA are just that- fantasies. When they decide to come back to the real world, they’ll discover it has passed them by without a thought.
Unless they meet one of the special enrollment conditions, that is correct. They can always buy an individual plan outside of the exchanges, but they won’t get any subsidy or cost sharing, so they will pay the full price.
You snooze, you lose.
All the firms I worked for treated Open Enrollment as the period where you could change plans. Pre-existing waiting periods only applied when first employed.
Medicare treats Open Enrollment the same way, as does the ACA. No pre-existing waiting or underwriting is allowed for either, but coverage only starts after the Open Enrollment.
(Since the ACA has eliminated underwriting, the only example I know of is for MediGap plans IF you signup after 65 and a half.)
Deval Patrick has left the door slightly open, but he’s more realistically running mate material.
Who’s politically bulletproof, btw.
In my hypothetical, if Republicans keep winning elections based on opposition to ACA, why should THEY be the ones to give it up?
Sure, if the law becomes popular and the Republicans fail to win elections opposing it, that’s a situation where they will have to reconcile themselves to it. BUt if they win in 2014 and 2016, it would be kinda stupid to abandon the promises that got you elected in the first place.
Anyway, it should be noted that while I get a lot of grief for my 2012 predictions, liberals like Bob keep on making a prediction that has yet to even come close to fulfillment anytime soon: that ACA’s popularity is just around the corner:
Democrats have been waiting for ObamaCare to become popular for four years.
And counting.
Congressional leaders and senior White House advisers have been saying since 2010 that public opinion will turn their way sometime soon. Be patient, they have told anxious members of their party again and again.
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“I think as people learn about the bill, and now that the bill is enacted, it’s going to become more and more popular,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in March 2010. “So I predict … by November those who voted for healthcare will find it an asset, those who voted against it will find it a liability.”
“I think that [the Affordable Care Act] over time, is going to become more popular,” David Axelrod, then a senior adviser to President Obama, declared on the same show in September of that year. Two months later, Democrats ceded six Senate seats and 63 House seats to Republicans.
ObamaCare helped catapult Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) to the speakership of the House, and demolished dozens of Democratic political careers.
Democrats now face the prospect of a second midterm drubbing in 2014, and the healthcare law is even more unpopular than it was last time around.