ObamaCare foul-ups lead to chaos at hospitals
ObamaCare foul-ups lead to chaos at hospitals
By: John Hayward
1/3/2014 10:07 AM
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:
http://www.humanevents.com/2014/01/03/obamacare-foul-ups-lead-to-chaos-at-hospitals/
