(Reuters) – The Obama administration declared victory on Sunday in its effort to get HealthCare.gov working smoothly for the vast majority of users, saying the site had reached a goal of handling 50,000 simultaneous users after a five-week “tech surge.”
In a six-page progress and performance report, administration officials said the troubled website could now handle at least 800,000 visitors per day, with the system remaining up at least 90 percent of the time.
The new performance levels mark significant improvement after the Obamacare website’s disastrous October 1 launch, when it crashed in the face of high traffic volumes and remained down 60 percent of the time for weeks.
But officials remain concerned about high volumes this month, with the potential for large numbers of people entering the site to apply for insurance coverage beginning January 1.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says it will meet its self-imposed deadline of fixing the troubled health care website so that 50,000 people can log in at the same time starting Saturday. Yet questions remain about the stability of the site, the volume of traffic it can handle and the quality of the data it is delivering to insurers.
Round-the-clock repair work since HealthCare.gov went live on Oct. 1 has produced fewer errors, and pages are loading faster.
But the revised site still won’t be able to do everything the administration originally had envisioned. And companion websites for small businesses and Spanish speakers have been delayed.
Still, the White House hopes a more smoothly functioning website after weeks of bad publicity will mark a fresh start for Obama.
Things were hairy there for a couple of months, what with the government shutdown (Republicans’ fault) and the still incomprehensible fail of the healthcare website (all you, Democrats), but slowly and surely, things seem to be turning around, just in time for the holidays.
The best part, though, is that thousands of people are effectively signing up for health insurance through state exchanges and Medicaid, and will soon have a much better experience on healthcare.gov. I went on the site and breezed through the process here in New Jersey. In late October, that didn’t happen.
Of course, this will be a long, messy process. The Saudis and Israelis are wary and nervous about a reinvigorated Iran, and for good reason. Iran threatens the Saudi near-monopoly on oil in the region and their Sunni government is a natural enemy for the Iranian Shiite mullahs who really run the country. Israel is, of course, afraid that Iran will ignore any limits placed on it by a treaty and once their economy improves, will go ahead and build nuclear weapons and use them on Jerusalem.
If you thought it was difficult to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, then this will be well-nigh impossible, but it has to work. Iran once had a vibrant economy and the people are committed to a free-market system. The religious leaders might have to make more concessions to the business sector, as the Chinese Communist Party has done in the name of capitalism, and my sense is that a rising middle class will not look kindly on a regime that would threaten that prosperity with a risky and suicidal strike on Israel. And really, do you think Iran would nuke the Old City, with its timeless Muslim shrines? I might be naive, but I don’t.
As for the Saudis, they have been fed on American weapons and support, while suppressing any free speech or political movements that could give women the right to drive, much less tolerate a free press or alternative political parties. Yet we see them as an ally and the somewhat more free Iranians as the third leg of the axis of evil. Never forget that 15 of the 19 September 11 conspirators were radicalized Saudis. That says something about the level of repression inside that country. I suspect that their bigger fear is what their society will need to undergo in order to compete in a world where Iran and Iraq have freer economies.
Clearly, we are at the beginning of the process and Obama and Kerry have to make sure that Israel is protected from any mischief, nuclear or otherwise. But Israel also has to solve its own problem with settlements and a two state solution to the Palestinian problem. Interesting times indeed.
The Republicans, and some influential Democrats such as Charles Schumer of New York, have lined up against the Iran agreement and the Republicans continue to hope and pray that people don’t sign up for health care. In addition, the House has said that they won’t be voting on the immigration bill this year (though most Americans support a path to citizenship), and this while Chris Christie is considering supporting a Dreamer bill in New Jersey (or at least the idea of one). As long as the GOP hard right continues to play hardball, the Democrats will begin to look better and better as we move towards November. Something to be thankful for?
Problems focusing on things and sudden blurry vision is a sign that may indicate bigger health problems and should never be ignored. If the vision blurs then becomes normal it shows a problem with the eye lens. If the blurry vision is confined to one eye set up an appointment with your optometrist immediately.
2. Obstruction of vision and sudden appearance of visual disturbances such as floaters
If you get sudden visual disturbances such as floaters or flashes of light followed by obstruction of vision you immediately need to schedule an appointment with your optometrist as it can lead to serious vision-threatening disorders like retinal tears, detachment, or hole. These symptoms require proper diagnosis and attention to avoid loss of vision.
3. Headaches
Working on computers for an extended time can cause headaches, however loss of vision and improper vision also cause them. Concentrating on tasks for an extended time leads to headaches in the front of your head and gradually moves toward the sides.
4. Holding books away from you
If you are holding books, newspapers, or other reading material farther away than usual from your eyes you may need reading glasses. As we age our eye lens weakens, disturbing the focus and image formation and calls for an eye check-up.
5. Misjudging distances
People who need glasses often find it difficult to judge distances and end up misjudging them. This problem can arise while doing everyday tasks like parking the car. If your eyes are not working together we fail to perceive the depth of objects and find it difficult to judge distance.
6. Getting tired easily
If you find that you are getting tired faster doing tasks for shorter duration, it indicates there is a disturbance in the focusing process. Our brain and vision are synchronized so that if our eyes work perfectly our brain remains fully active and awake avoiding fatigue.
7. Sensitivity to light
Sensitivity to light is a perfect measure of your eyes’ health. If you do not respond to a sudden change of light normally it may indicate serious eye disorders including infection.
8. Squinting
Frequent squinting is a sign we need an eye examination. The reason squinting improves vision is that it reduces pupil size and clears vision. However squinting is not the permanent solution to your eye problem, it indicates vision-related problems.
9. Watery eyes
If you often find your eyes filling with water without sad or happy emotions, it means there is a problem with your eyes. Our eyes generally get watery when we feel very emotional or are sad, crying without reason calls for an eye check-up.
10. If you haven’t had an eye check-up in two years
If you have not visited your optician for two years, its time to do so. Several changes take place in our eyes in 2 years and should be monitored by an expert optician for sound health of your eyes.
Congratulations House Speaker John Boehner for successfully enrolling in the Affordable Care Act; Aka: Obamacare.
It was about an hour after Boehner’s office said he couldn’t sign up for Obamacare coverage on the District of Columbia’s exchange, that his office said, he had officially enrolled.
Boehner’s office wrote, “Kept at it, and called the DC Health Link help line. They called back a few hours later, and after restarting the process on the website two more times, I just heard from DC Health Link that I have been successfully enrolled.”
Responding to Boehner’s earlier failed attempts to sign up for coverage, the District’s exchange — known as DC Health Link — said it recently identified some system errors after enrollment.
“We recently discovered the fact that after enrollment, some users have been receiving a random error message,” DC Health Link communications director Richard Sorian wrote in an email. “Despite the message, these individuals have been enrolled. Our call center has been able to quickly resolve these matters. We are working on a system-wide update that will eliminate this soon. Users will be able to verify their enrollment in their secure, online account.”
Boehner’s office on Thursday afternoon said he originally received an error screen when he tried to sign up for coverage. “Guess I’ll just have to keep trying…” his office wrote at the time.
I plan to enroll too, but I’m not a ‘shop on Black Friday’ kind of person. I’ve been waiting for things to settle down. After I enroll, it will be like Boehner and I are BFFs. Isn’t that exciting?
Stuff not covered: How long did it take to enroll for coverage by an insurance company before Obamacare?
Don’t get me wrong. What’s happened over the past five weeks has been a colossal, epic failure on President Obama’s part. All he needed to say about the health care law was that you could keep your insurance if it met minimum standards, and then he needed to repeat those standards. He also needed to repeat the benefits of the law, from covering preexisting conditions to free physicals, checkups and flu shots. But Obama thought that passage of the law was enough and that the government didn’t need to publicize what was on public record. Big mistake. Now he’s gotten caught in a web that the right wing has been spinning since 2010. It’s ugly. It’s sobering. It’s a mess. And it hurts.
And now for the good news. Obama’s opponents are still the same gang that shut down the government, opposes marriage equality, wants to voucherize Medicare and cut $40 billion from the food stamp program, denies global warming, thinks transvaginal ultrasounds are effective public policy, supports testing public school students at the expense of a real curriculum, opposes immigration reform and continues to want to deport large numbers of Hispanics.
In the 1990s, my father used to say that Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton. The Tea Party and John Boehner are the best things to happen to Barack Obama. His approval ratings are down now, but they’ll rebound because the right wing hasn’t changed.
Their main vulnerability is their belief that the health care law has imperiled every part of Obama’s agenda. What they forget is that prior to the shutdown, the GOP’s ideas were extreme and unpopular. My sense is that they’ll get even more extreme because they see Obama at a critical point in his presidency. Healthcare.gov will not make the Republicans look any better on women, Hispanics, social programs and, yes, health care.
The health care mess will also leave the front pages soon because the website will be fixed and more people will successfully sign up for care. Also, fiscal negotiations are just around the corner and the right has left itself vulnerable because they’ve pretty much promised not to shut the government down again and they’d be even crazier than I think they are to not raise the debt ceiling. Plus, the press will get tired of this story and move on to other things.
In the end, though, the real advantage is that we’re talking about trying to insure people against catastrophic expenses by providing them with health insurance. Never forget that.
She was so happy to finally get affordable healthcare, this constituent wrote a thank you letter to her congressman. Here is a story you will never see on Fox News. And since Fox won’t cover it, you will never hear any Republicans in Washington talking about it.
After her husband died in February 2012, Amy Bowman was diagnosed with breast cancer. She tells her story that she was eventually able to continue 0n her husband’s insurance for a year. But cancer is a serious pre-existing condition and Amy knew that getting insurance after her year was out would be almost impossible.
After searching, Amy was able to continue her insurance at another company, but they monthly price for her policy was extremely high. On a monthly basis, Amy Bowman’s insurance policy was almost $1500.00. But she was able to sign on and shop for healthcare on the marketplace provided by Obamacare, and received a health policy with provision for dental benefits, for about half of what she was paying before.
(Reuters) – The House of Representatives on Friday approved a Republican bill that would allow insurers to continue to offer for another year healthcare plans that do not comply with the higher standards of benefits under President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law.
The vote in the Republican-majority chamber was 261-157 for the measure sponsored by Republican Representative Fred Upton. Thirty-nine Democrats supported it despite a White House veto threat. The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate and become law.
When the Obamacare website rolled out, millions of Americans accessed the website and were greeted by the picture of a model of a smiling woman. Well she has a name, and she has feelings, and she is speaking out against the hate being directed towards her and her family from the Obama haters, better known as Republicans.
In an interview on ABC, Adrianna spoke about the cowards hiding behind their computers sending hate her way. “They have nothing else to do but hide behind the computer. They’re cyberbullying,” Adriana told ABC’s host Amy Robach. “I mean, I don’t know why people should hate me because it’s just a photo. I didn’t design the website. I didn’t make it fail, so I don’t think they should have any reasons to hate me.”
Adriana, who requested her last name not be used, said that the hate coming from the haters hurt, and expressed her concern for her family.“Like I said it was shocking. It was upsetting. It was sad. We were having a hard day when we read all this,” she recalled. “And in a way, I’m glad that my son is not old enough to understand, because you know whatever happens to you, it hurts them too.”
So the Republicans are jumping in unison on Bill Clinton’s statement that Obama should “fix” Obamacare to allow people to keep the garbage insurance plans if they want to. To these people with such short attention span, Bill Clinton is the only person of importance in the Democratic party to make such a request.
But if they were listening to the President last week in an interview with Chuck Todd of MSNBC, these same dim-wits would have heard the President himself say that he and his team are working on ways to fix this problem in the healthcare law. White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked about this in a recent press conference, and had to remind everyone that what Clinton said is actually a moot point, because it is already being looked into.
JULIE PACE, ASSOCIATED PRESS: I wanted to get your reaction to a comment that President Clinton made in an interview that was posted today. He was talking about health care, he said, President Obama should honor his commitment to people who have lost their health care or losing their health care under the president’s law, even if it means changing that law. Does the president agree with the comment?
JAY CARNEY: I think as you saw the president say in an interview with NBC last week, the answer’s yes. The president has asked his team with looking at a range of options — as he said — to make sure that nobody is put in a position where their plans have been canceled and they can’t afford a better plan even though they’d like to have a better plan.
You heard the president address this very issue in his interview last week. And I think it’s important to note that President Clinton, in that interview, also said, and I quote, ‘the big lesson is that we are better off with this law than without it.’ And he said, quote, ‘the enrollment period did not come off well because the national website wasn’t ready. But this happened once before. It happened when President Bush put in the Medicare drug program for seniors, which was not as complicated but had exactly the same problem with the rollout. It was a disaster. There were people that lost their prescriptions for their existing medicine and they fixed it.’
So, the president, as you know, has pledged to ask his team, tasked his team to look at potential actions that could be taken to address this problem, because his focus is on making sure that people get quality and affordable health insurance.
—
But it’s a waste of time. These Republicans would only hear what they want to hear, and Clinton’s statement plays right into their gameplan – creating enough noise about Obamacare, in hopes that Americans would not buy into the law, thus making it a failure.
President Obama has certainly got himself into a pickle over his health care law, but that really shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to the issue since 2009 when the law was first formulated. Throughout its life, the ACA has been the bastard child of this administration. They haven’t explained it well from the outset, let it meander all over the map when it was being debated (remember the special Nebraska amendment to the law?), didn’t publicize the law’s benefits, allowed the rabid opposition to define quaint terms such as “death panels” when referring to it, and now is struggling to fix a flawed website and clarify why the president would say that you could keep your insurance if you liked it when, in fact, you cannot.
Other than that, it’s been smooooooth sailing.
But then I accessed my memory banks and remembered that our old pal GW Bush also had a health care rollout that was rocky from the start and involved the same kind of Congressional contretemps, but a more damnable set of lies and threats than the Obama Administration ever considered.
Recall the situation in 2003. The Bush administration was already projecting the largest deficit in American history–$475 billion in fiscal year 2004, according to the July 2003 mid-session budget review. But a big election was coming up that Bush and his party were desperately fearful of losing. So they decided to win it by buying the votes of America’s seniors by giving them an expensive new program to pay for their prescription drugs.
Recall, too, that Medicare was already broke in every meaningful sense of the term. According to the 2003 Medicare trustees report, spending for Medicare was projected to rise much more rapidly than the payroll tax as the baby boomers retired. Consequently, the rational thing for Congress to do would have been to find ways of cutting its costs. Instead, Republicans voted to vastly increase them–and the federal deficit–by $395 billion between 2004 and 2013.
However, the Bush administration knew this figure was not accurate because Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, had concluded, well before passage, that the more likely cost would be $534 billion. Tom Scully, a Republican political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services, threatened to fire him if he dared to make that information public before the vote. (See this report by the HHS inspector general and this article by Foster.)
It’s important for Democrats and other supporters of the ACA to see the long term benefits of the law and that it’s working very well in states that have set up their own exchanges. If more states had done this, without the right wing hissy fits that are causing myriad problems, we would not be talking about a mammoth political problem. We would be talking about how seamlessly the program is working and how people were now getting insurance for less than they were paying, or were getting it for the first time, ever.
The lesson here is patience. The website will be fixed and the law will begin to help the very people it was meant to help. Like all laws, though, it will not help everyone, and there will be winners and losers. Right now, the losers have the spotlight. The winners will emerge later, but they will emerge.
If nothing else, the press is having a field day, or a month anyway, with the government shutdown and now the contretemps over the health care website and law. I’m sure you’ve read the articles and have seen the overblown videos from both sides of the political divide. There aren’t more for me to add.
What’s been lost in the tree-to-tree debate is the forest of actual health care and the health of United States citizens. Yes, President Obama should have said that those people whose insurance policies do not meet the minimum standards set by the ACA would indeed need to upgrade them. That inattention to detail is exactly what can derail a noble point, especially given the rabid opposition he faces in Congress. But the larger point is that more people will have better health plans, and, presumably, better health.
The other issue that’s been buried is the relative success of the exchanges in states that have functioning representative democracies and not one-party GOP monopolies who don’t seem to care whether their poorest residents get Medicaid relief or, in the case of New Jersey, a governor who aspires to national office. In states such as New York, Oregon, Kentucky and California, people are signing up for health care and, for the most part, are finding it both easy and cost-effective to do so (OK, OK…here’s a link).
Which proves that the law is working and that it’s here to stay and that ultimately it will do what it set out to do and the GOP knows it. That’s why they only have the political issue to focus on. By next October, the ACA will be a net plus for the Democrats. The website will be fixed and more people will be demanding that all states fully cover their Medicaid populations.
There will be no place to hide for those who believe that it’s an American right to be sick and have other people pay for it, or for those who perversely call it freedom when people are denied access to a government entitlement like Medicaid, or who say it’s un-American for the government to provide access to checkups, physicals, reproductive health or to have insurance companies cover people with preexisting conditions.
I’ve always believed that if you do the right thing, eventually the people in your orbit will notice and reward you for it, even if at times you are punished for your good deeds. The health care law and the sentiment behind it is worthy, moral, ethical and in the best sense of the word, healthy. This, in the end, is what will ensure its success.
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