Despite being a Republican, I don't automatically come out against everything done by Obama and the Democrats. I think about what's happening, and try to make a reasonable, independent evaluation.
I had mixed feelings about Obamacare. This is because I believe that our current (pre-Obamacare) health care system is in great need of reform. It's a broken system. It has so many major flaws that major action really needed to be taken.
I agreed with some of the goals and rules of Obamacare. "No lifetime maximum" was one of them. Other parts, such as allowing 26-year-olds to get insurance on their parents' plan (but not 27-year-olds) were really lame and likely pandering for votes. All of these things went into effect awhile ago.
However, the "meat" of Obamacare was not to take place until January 1, 2014 -- the "Health Exchanges".
Simply put, the primary goal of Obamacare was to allow -- and in fact force -- all Americans to get health insurance.
Mitt Romney did something similar in Massachusetts.
I actually supported the principle behind this.
There was indeed a problem where some self-employed and unemployed couldn't get health insurance, where they were denied for the slightest of pre-existing conditions. This created a game of roll-and-reroll between the public and the insurance companies, where people would lie about their conditions to get insurance, and in turn insurance companies would sometimes look for every flimsy reason to deny payment for major procedures whenever someone needed to finally use their insurance for something big. It was (and still is) a disaster.
At the same time, many uninsured thought it was their right to get free/cheap health coverage when they got sick, yet didn't pay into the system when they were healthy. If they didn't get this coverage, they cried foul. Also wrong.
Unfortunately, I didn't like the Obamacare solution to this problem. I agreed with the necessity to fix the problem, and I agreed that the problem existed. I did not like the solution.
Simply put, Obamacare is a shell game. It will not lower the staggeringly high cost of health care that our country is facing. Instead, it just shifts around the cost. The healthy will be paying a greater share of the costs to support the sick. The young will be paying a greater share of the cost to support the old. Keep in mind that the system was already like this, but Obamacare pushed it to more of an extreme.
There are lots of falsehoods being shoved down our throat by pro-Obamacare forces in the media.
"Your rates probably won't go up if you have existing care" -- FALSE
"If your rates go up, it probably won't be that much" -- FALSE
There are, of course, exceptions. If you were paying huge money to insure yourself due to a pre-existing condition, your rates will go down. If you were stuck with an expensive COBRA plan after losing your job and unable to get individual insurance, your rates will go down. If you are poor enough to qualify for government subsidies, your rates will go down.
But for the majority of Americans, the out-of-pocket rates will go up -- in many cases, WAY up. It varies from state to state.
My rates will indeed be increasing by a lot, and I'm not even particularly young.
Obamacare has been under such attack by Republicans (some justified, some not-so-justified), that the White House is now extremely paranoid about "price data harvesting". That is, they don't want all of the rates to be easily viewable and harvested by the anti-Obamacare forces. They do not want a clear, concise report about Obamacare rates to be published by Republicans, with links back to the official Obamacare site for verification.
So what did they do?
They designed their site where you only see YOUR rate. This accomplishes two things for the White House:
1) It prevents Republicans from harvesting all of the Obamacare cost data and providing clear links to the site to prove their claims about increased costs to Americans.
2) It makes sure that people's subsidies are applied first before showing ANY rate, thereby giving poorer Americans the false impression that health insurance got a lot cheaper (rather than the fact that the government is footing much or all of the bill). It also prevents the poorer Americans from being startled by the high rate and being unable or unwilling to figure out their true rate from the subsidy.
Now, the problem here is that it's much harder for a web server to process data than to simply display it.
Displaying data is light on computer processing power, so provided that the site has enough bandwidth, it is easy for a website to display pages to a large number of users simultaneously.
However, PROCESSING data (in this case, the information people enter about themselves), is very tough on the server, and if you multiply that by millions of simultaneous requests, the server will crash.
Since you need to enter your info in order to see any useful information on the Obamacare site, it is creating a huge processing burden on the server, and the whole thing keeps crashing.
There are two huge problems with this:
1) This is an embarrassment for the White House. It's unbelievable that, with all of the money behind it, they could not build a robust enough site to handle the processing. It's like they hired a bunch of n00bs to implement this, which is already a really bad sign that the Obama administration is in over their heads, and this is just one of many failures we can expect as this is implemented.
2) Why haven't they backed out their "enter-your-info-first" model at this point, and made it easier for everyone to view all plans and prices? This would stop the crashing immediately, but it's more important to the White House to keep the existing model and cover up the real price increases most Americans will face.
Here is a Forbes article about it. It doesn't do the best job explaining the technical aspect of the crashes (the processing versus displaying thing, explained above), but otherwise it's pretty right on:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapoth...ns-true-costs/
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Originally Posted by tony bagadonuts
