Human
Events
Obamacare
foul-ups lead to chaos at hospitals
By
John Hayward
1/3/2014
As
expected, it’s chaos in the hospitals, as the disastrous system
Barack Obama inflicted on America leaves medical staff uncertain
whether patients have valid insurance. This is yet another reason
why it was important for the chief executive to stay on top of his
signature initiative, and order the plug pulled when it became clear
the system was not ready for launch on October 1. But instead, as we
all know, the Empty Chair just assumed everything was going great,
and later claimed he was the most angry and frustrated person in
America when he read the newspapers and discovered Healthcare.gov was
a useless mass of bugs and unfinished code.
Judging
by a report at the UK Daily Mail, there are people who would hotly
dispute the President’s claim of being the most frustrated victim
of the Healthcare.gov fiasco:
Hospital
staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid
Thursday morning because they can’t determine whether their
Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.
Patients
in a close-in DC suburb who think they’ve signed up for new
insurance plans are struggling to show their December enrollments are
in force, and health care administrators aren’t taking their word
for it.
In
place of quick service and painless billing, these Virginians are now
facing the threat of sticker-shock that comes with bills they can’t
afford.
‘They
had no idea if my insurance was active or not!’ a coughing Maria
Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the
town of Springfield.
She
was leaving the building without getting a needed chest x-ray.
‘The
people in there told me that since I didn’t have an insurance card,
I would be billed for the whole cost of the x-ray,’ Galvez said,
her young daughter in tow. ‘It’s not fair – you know, I signed
up last week like I was supposed to.’
Hey,
remember how the Administration was running around and claiming
victory because the system was “fixed” after Thanksgiving
weekend? That was funny as hell, wasn’t it? To this day, Obama’s
team of liars claims they have no way of determining how many valid
insurance policies have been sold through the ObamaCare exchanges. They
throw out a lot of crazy made-up numbers, which the media
dutifully reports as if they were valid facts, but the one and only
metric that actually matters for the moment is how many
fully-processed policies have seen their first completed payment. The
people described by the Daily Mail are learning that the hard
way. Ms. Galvez said no one has even sent her a bill yet.
The
Daily Mail goes on to speculate that Galvez wouldn’t be in much
better shape if she did have valid ObamaCare coverage, because it
stinks – she’d have to pay a $5,500 deductible before seeing any
benefits from her “bronze” plan. She’s paying a whopping $450
per month in premiums – or, rather, she will, when someone gets
around to sending her a bill.
A
similar situation frustrated Mary, an African-American woman small
businesswoman who asked MailOnline not to publish her last name. She
was leaving the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia
with two family members.
‘I
had chest pains last night, and they took me in the emergency room,’
Mary said. ‘They told me they were going to admit me, but when I
told them I hadn’t heard from my insurance company since I signed
up, they changed their tune.’
She
told MailOnline that a nurse advised her that her bill would go up by
at least $3,000 if she were admitted for a day, and her doctor told
her the decision was up to her.
‘Should
I be in the hospital? Probably,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s one of
those borderline cases. I have to think that if I were really in
danger, they wouldn’t give me the choice. But what if I think I’m
covered and I’m really not?’
‘The
emergency room bill is going to be bad enough.’
Remember,
the stated reason Democrats are putting us all through this ordeal
was to make insurance coverage available to people who didn’t have
it before. Those people are going to be exceptionally confused when
they try to use their expensive new benefits and discover they’re
still on the hook for enormous out-of-pocket expenses, to say nothing
of getting turned away because the lousy Soviet-surplus computer
system can’t even determine if they have coverage.
As
for the people who used to have coverage, but ran afoul of Obama’s
Big Lie and saw their plans canceled, Democrats are still trying to
push back against this disgrace by claiming that “only” half a
million people (the Obama Administration), or maybe as few as 10,000
people (congressional Democrats) will end the year without coverage
due to ObamaCare. Even that lowball number from the Democrat caucus
is not at all what they promised, over and over again, when they were
ramming the Affordable Care Act through Congress. Also, those who
lost their preferred plans and were able to make other arrangements
before December 31 still count as betrayed by Obama’s Big Lie. They
were just fortunate enough to work something out with their
providers, saving them from the hell of the ObamaCare exchanges…
which, incidentally, received a 59 percent negative rating from users
according to Gallup, with 29 percent “very negative.” Let’s
see how those numbers look after the hospital and clinic chaos of
January.
More
vignettes of confusion from the Associated Press…
Read
the rest of the article at Human Events
|