Sunday, December 1, 2013

Obamacare: A Fraud on Consumers

Although the Obama administration is saying that it has met its Sunday deadline to enable 80 percent of users to purchase health care insurance packages online, the outlandishness of this claim is patent. As reported today in a New York Times article entitled "Insurers Claim Health Website Is Still Flawed" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/business/white-house-praises-gains-on-health-site.html?hpw&rref=health&_r=0) by Robert Pear and Reed Abelson:

"Weeks of frantic technical work appear to have made the government’s health care website easier for consumers to use. But that does not mean everyone who signs up for insurance can enroll in a health plan.

The problem is that so-called back end systems, which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers, still have not been fixed.

. . . .

The issues are vexing and complex. Some insurers say they have been deluged with phone calls from people who believe they have signed up for a particular health plan, only to find that the company has no record of the enrollment. Others say information they received about new enrollees was inaccurate or incomplete, so they had to track down additional data — a laborious task that would not be feasible if data is missing for tens of thousands of consumers.

In still other cases, insurers said, they have not been told how much of a customer’s premium will be subsidized by the government, so they do not know how much to charge the policyholder."

Or stated otherwise, the Obamacare website can cause you to believe that you have enrolled in a health care plan, although there is no assurance whatsoever that this is the case.

In the private sector, this would be deemed a fraud, i.e. the sale of goods and services without knowing if they are deliverable.

Query: If you think you have health care coverage, yet you don't, and a health care problem arises in the future, who is responsible?

But why worry?  The Obama administration is trying its very best, so let's cut it some slack, right?

1 comment:

  1. I see another problem - hospitals sign contracts with few plans.

    ReplyDelete