This HND piece deals with the quite scary matter of infections from the bad bug Vibrio vulnificus. While such infections are nothing new, there has been a rash of fatal ones recently. We give some background on this pathogen, and relate the tragic case of a Florida man who succumbed to it in 28 hours. No antibiotics could even touch it.
Read the complete article.
I have an upcoming HND piece that will delve into the problems at healthcare.gov, but for the moment, enjoy this one from Michelle Malkin:
Behold the Hollywood bubble. This week, actress Olivia Wilde starred in an Obamacare propaganda video targeting young people. “You can sign up for health care online in 10 minutes,” her co-propagandist chirped as she cheered. Cue the laugh track. Back on planet Earth, Americans nationwide are still struggling with the $634 million online health care exchange nightmare.
One reader asked me to share his story. Like me and 22 million other citizens in the private individual market for health insurance, he recently received his You Can’t Keep It cancellation notice. Here’s what happened when he went online to find alternatives.
“I live in New Jersey, but work for a small company based out of Massachusetts. For years, we were all insured through the company from a plan that originated in Massachusetts. However, as soon as Obamacare was passed, we were “audited” by the insurance company, and it turns out only 50 percent of our company is based in Massachusetts, and therefore we did not qualify as a company under the law. Apparently, you need 51 percent based in the state. About five days prior to our insurance policy renewal, we were told we could not (renew), and I had to scramble to purchase a much more expensive individual policy with much higher costs.
“Fast-forward two years. I now receive a new letter from my insurance company, Horizon Blue Cross, (informing me) that the plan that I have now is being discontinued and I need to pick a new plan.
“On Oct. 1, I tried to get into the exchange for New Jersey that is run by the federal government. I earn too much for a subsidy, but I wanted to see what my options were and how much more this was going to cost.
“I created an account and tried for four days to get in. Each time it said my password was invalid. I tried to use the “forgot password” option so they could send me a link to reset. When I got the link, the system kept saying that it didn’t recognize my user account. When I tried to re-create the user account, it told me that one already existed. I called the number several times, and they all told me the same thing: Try back later. The glitches are being worked out.
“I (then) created a new account under (my wife’s) name. After several attempts, I was able to get in. Over the weekend, I spent at least four hours trying to fill out the application. Each time, the website crashed. When I got back to work on Monday, I tried one more time. Lo and behold, the application was submitted. At this point, President Obama must be thinking ‘great, a success story.’
“Well, my options came back, and voila: According to the government, I’m not eligible for any private plans. I received a notice that my entire family is only eligible for Medicaid! I make a decent salary. I’m not eligible for a subsidy, let alone Medicaid.
“This morning my wife received a call. Apparently, it was the exchange. She explained to them that we are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid. The person on the phone told her, “That is what the system says you are eligible for. If you want, you can file an appeal.”
“So now back to a change in plans. I currently have a Point of Service that covers benefits 70 percent after a large deductible, with somewhat large co-pays for doctors. Horizon Blue Cross does offer a similar plan (to the one being canceled) for about the same, but the problem is that my children’s pediatricians are not in it (so much for keeping your doctors).
“The only plans that the doctors take involve a 40 percent deductible with higher co-pays. So now I have fewer options and not more. There is another new company offering coverage where I am, but it has zero out-of-network benefits and a smaller network. Either way, everything is changing for me with higher costs.
“I hope you can somehow relate this story to the public at large to let them see that the whole process is a joke. The automatons who know nothing are just collecting a government check and getting health care paid for by me with my tax dollars, when I cannot even get my own.”
In sum: Obama lied. His health plan died. He can’t keep his doctors. He couldn’t sign up in 10 minutes for health care. He’s being steered toward a government plan he doesn’t qualify for or want. And he can’t get his personal information back from the online Obamawreck black hole.
1-800-T-O-T-A-L-F-A-I-L.
Here's the link. Some highlights...
Rep. Robert E. Andrews (D-N.J.), who played a key role in passing the health-care law and has worked on its implementation, said he told White House officials early this summer he had been hearing from insurers that the online system had flaws.
“Nothing I told them ever surprised them,” Andrews said in an interview. “The White House has acknowledged all along something this massive was going to have implementation problems.”
Two allies of the administration, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the controversy surrounding the rollout, said they approached White House officials this year to raise concerns that the federal exchange was not ready to launch. In both cases, Obama officials assured them there was no cause for alarm.
David Brailer, who worked as HHS’s first national coordinator for health information technology during the launch of the Medicare drug benefit in 2006, said the administration could have anticipated that the opening of the federal exchange would trigger a rush of Americans onto the Web site, either as onlookers or outright buyers.
He pointed out that the exchange was built to accommodate 50,000 to 60,000 visitors at a time — fewer than half as many as the enrollment site for the Medicare drug benefit could handle. The number of older Americans eligible for the drug benefit was far greater than the group of uninsured people who will be allowed to buy insurance through the health exchange, Brailer said, but many elderly patients didn’t have home computers at the time, compared with the near-universal access to the Web that exists across the United States today. For a new program that’s had as much advertising as the Affordable Care Act, building a Web site for just 60,000 people at a time “is weird. The math just doesn’t add up,” he said.
John Engates, chief technology officer at service provider RackSpace, said the government should have been able to prepare for the type of traffic that the site has experienced.
“I think that any modern Web company would be well prepared for a launch of this scale,” said Engates. “We’re not talking about hundreds of millions of people and we’re not talking about complex transactions. This isn’t downloading full movies off of Netflix. The question I have is: Did they have enough time to prepare and did the people doing the work know what they were doing?”
Yup. Best and the brightest. Smartest president EVAH. Think the reliably liberal and Obama-loving Washington Post is hedging its bets?
This would all be hilarious, if it weren't so pathetic.
As many of us with some knowledge of website programming have suspected, the problems with the enrollment website have little to do with being "oversubscribed." Rather, the problem is in the very design of the site. According to this article:
Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems.
For instance, when a user tries to create an account on HealthCare.gov, which serves insurance exchanges in 36 states, it prompts the computer to load an unusually large amount of files and software, overwhelming the browser, experts said.
If they are right, then just bringing more servers online, as officials say they are doing, will not fix the site.
"Adding capacity sounds great until you realize that if you didn't design it right that won't help," said Bill Curtis, chief scientist at CAST, a software quality analysis firm, and director of the Consortium for IT Software Quality. "The architecture of the software may limit how much you can add on to it. I suspect they'll have to reconfigure a lot of it."
One possible cause of the problems is that hitting "apply" on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user's computer and the servers powering the government website, said Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. He was able to track the files being requested through a feature in the Firefox browser.
Of the 92 he found, 56 were JavaScript files, including plug-ins that make it easier for code to work on multiple browsers (such as Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer and Google Inc's Chrome) and let users upload files to HealthCare.gov.
It is not clear why the upload function was included.
"They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time," Hancock said.
He said because so much traffic was going back and forth between the users' computers and the server hosting the government website, it was as if the system was attacking itself.
Hancock described the situation as similar to what happens when hackers conduct a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attack on a website: they get large numbers of computers to simultaneously request information from the server that runs a website, overwhelming it and causing it to crash or otherwise stumble. "The site basically DDOS'd itself," he said.
Obamacare does nothing at all to increase the number of doctors and nurses; it does nothing to lower the cost of health insurance; and the basic sign-up site does not work, so God knows what the rest of the IT will be like. In other words, this monstrously awful legislation was written by people who don't know anything about health care, don't know anything about health insurance, and don't know anything about health care IT!
But, in keeping with the folks in charge, while they are blindingly ignorant, they don't even know...that they don't even know.