If the American Health Care Act is so unwanted by the people as we keep being told, why are connections to the internet site constantly clogged? Is it a plot or is it because there are too many people trying to gain access?
It appears that reports of widespread enrollment are largely exaggerations by proponents of the law.
It has been reported that at least one state's exchange servers were hit by Denial of Service attacks. The 5 million visitor number thrown out by CA for day one was quietly revised downward to less than 500,000. The actual number of enrollees thus far is just over 7000 and none of these people are actually "in the system" yet because CA says its staff hasn't been trained to process the applications...Awesome.
I read that Louisiana and Kansas have ZERO enrollees as of yesterday...
Here's an anecdotal description of what's actually happening in the populous: [Link: ac360.blogs.cnn.com]
All of that said, BCBS's servers have been completely overrun this week with policy holders scrambling to find a way to lower their increased premiums, so even non-governmental types cannot handle the concentrated onslaught of panicked citizens [which may indicate that this isn't a good approach].
I want to respond in detail to BP and FPC, but I've got to do something billable for a while--maybe tonight.
In the meantime--to clarify--I was not asserting that malpractice insurance premiums were the SOLE or CHIEF driver of medical costs. I was merely responding in a focused way to BP's assertion that citing medical malpractice costs as a cause for high prices is a "logical canard." I also purposefully focused on a specific cost that affects individual doctors--who are human beings--since there's such a societal penchant for discounting the challenges they face as individuals.
That said, here's the NIH's tally of estimated medical malpractice-related costs:
The NIH doesn't attempt to break-out malpractice insurance premiums alone, but the costs of medical malpractice insurance and damages pay-outs tallied about $10 Billion in 2008. You may say "pish-posh," I say that's significant when you understand that we ARE paying for it.
I completely agree that defensive medicine is a far more significant driver of rising health care costs, as is shown by the NIH report. OCare attempts to remedy this by restricting payments for preventative testing that a panel of experts/bureaucrats deems unnecessary while doing little else to absolve doctors and hospitals of the liability they must still incur if anything goes wrong.
And just to reinforce my irrational and inflexible ideology, here's what radical right wing extremist conservative Tea Bagger Dr. Drew thinks will inevitably happen as a result of OCare :-)
"Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble." [Sir Henry Royce]
