October 25, 2013
Dear Everyone:
The month is October and we all know what that means:
Open Enrollment. If
you’re in a health plan, this is about the only time that you can change
from one plan to another, excluding important life changes like, for
instance, dying. If you’re
dead, you can opt out of any health plan you happen to be in.
Or not. Up to you.
If you can’t get health insurance, The Good News is the “Affordable Care
Act”, which the
Republicans keep calling, derisively, “Obamacare”.
Conversely, the Democrats call it “Romneycare” after
Mitt Romney
who was the Republican governor of
Massachusetts when that state
implemented a public health care program that Obamacare is
ever-so-loosely based on.
This is sort of the National version of
sibling rivalry.
Basically, both plans call for all citizens to have health insurance.
Should a citizen choose not to “participate” in the plan, i.e.,
buy health insurance, a penalty is assessed.
Conversely, all health insurance companies are required to make
the insurance available to everyone.
This, of course, has been the main sticking point:
Insurance companies exclude anyone who might cost them too much
money.
Remember: Insurance
companies are owned and operated by Rich People.
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for Rich People is to Stay
Rich and Get Richer. So
insurance companies deny coverage to people with “pre-existing
conditions”**. And to people
who can’t afford the premiums.
Obamacare is supposed to help Poor People get the insurance,
partly with those aforementioned penalties.
And it forces insurance companies to cover people with
“pre-existing conditions”.
So recently a lot of people who couldn’t afford insurance, and/or have
“pre-existing conditions”, have been flocking to the new
website set up
to help them. And the
website promptly went down under the deluge.
What amazes me is why everyone is so surprised.
This is classic “Information Technology” (IT, emphasis on the
“technology”) modus operandi.
Remember, I used to work in IT.
ITs SOP is “RINFIL”.
Translation: Release It Now,
Fix It Later.
Of course, the technicians blame the users, aka customers, for making
“last minute” changes before the Release.
These are the same technicians who swear up one side and down the
other that they will set a “freeze date” beyond which no changes, no
matter how “important”, will be made.
Then they ignore their own rules and blame the users/customers
when problems arise too late to “fix”.
So now the Republicans are crowing that Obamacare is hopelessly broken.
This is like claiming that the movie is bad because you don’t
like the times and theaters listed on
Fandango.
The website is not Obamacare and never has been.
Take a breath, people.
Getting back to the aforementioned Open Enrollment, which closed today,
I set up a side-by-side comparison of the five plans available to me
here in California and came to the most obvious conclusion:
The lower the monthly premiums the higher the deductible.
Then I remember what “Marshall”, who is in the “medical
profession” (he herds the doctors in their group) said about a great
many
Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO), i.e. insurance companies:
“They’re all the same as long as you don’t get sick.”
Love, as always,
Pete
**What’s a “pre-existing condition”?
Example: Female.
You were born with a
uterus.
That’s a “pre-existing condition”, so you’re not covered.
Another example:
Mental health problems.
Being “crazy” is not covered.
Alternative: The
deductible is more than you make in a year.
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