Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare)

[lukethedrifter]

Let's trash it go to Universal.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Let's trash it go to Universal.

Yeah baby.

We just had our annual open enrollment talk. HR was hitting us really hard on being better health consumers. Don't take what your doctor is telling you as the gospel. Ask questions. Get a second opinion. Ask if there is a generic equivalent and then see if its free on your policy. Demand to know if a service can be coded as a 'wellness' service.

I don't remember ever hearing anything like that at these things. Maybe its just the new company.

[IMADreamer]

Let's trash it go to Universal.

This. I believe Vermont did just that this week.

[Jocephus]

Yep, this is on the Republicans.

agreed. oh wait, you were being sarcastic. couldn't tell.

[planet planet]

http://www.upworthy.com/in-3-minutes-he ... lans?c=bl3

[Radbird]

Received a mass email with this link today

Lots of fun comments to read, but I ask our GRB programmers to review this one:

A line in the source code that is commented out is not an issue. Users do not see the disclosure - it is commented out. Let me repeat that, it is commented out. Anyone with any knowledge about computer code knows this is less than nothing.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

The problems are many. The Tea Party-fueled legislature passed a law prohibiting the governor from setting up a state health insurance exchange, so the state must rely on the faulty federal government website, HealthCare.gov. So far, only 269 people have signed up for a plan that way, a total dwarfed by the number of residents whose policies have been canceled.
[...]

I would be wary with trusting that number. In Arkansas, last I checked, about 15K had applied through the exchange for insurance and only a couple hundred had bought insurance from the exchange. That's a horrible %. What like 1.33%? But, 7K were found to be eligible for medicair/Medicaid and were getting insurance through that changing the % from 1.33% to nearly 50%.

That may not be the case in NH, after all it is the worst state in the nation, but it probably needs to be mentioned by the story if any extra people are receiving insurance.

[TheoSqua]

Received a mass email with this link today

Lots of fun comments to read, but I ask our GRB programmers to review this one:

A line in the source code that is commented out is not an issue. Users do not see the disclosure - it is commented out. Let me repeat that, it is commented out. Anyone with any knowledge about computer code knows this is less than nothing.

Comments in programming code is designed just for programmers to see. It's to tell you something in the source code that won't actually be written onto the page.

Comments are commonly used to hide old versions of the same code that you may want to reuse. Say you need to see what Terms and Conditions are going to look like on a page to make sure the formatting is correct, but your legal team hasn't gotten around to creating a draft for your terms. You can go out to the internet and steal some random Terms and Conditions and paste it into where yours will go just to see how it looks (a lot of developers use latin for this). Then when your actual Terms and Conditions are given to you, you'll comment out the old stuff so it's in the code for reference and add in the new stuff.

Once you move your code from development to production you should clean up your code and remove unnecessary comments. But a lot of times, especially when you're in a time crunch, this step is overlooked and production code ends up having stuff hidden inside of it that does not belong on the site.

I'd say this is common enough for anything hidden inside code comments to have absolutely no legal binding.

[Arthur Dent]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... h/3650243/

http://toohotforjacobin.blogspot.com/20 ... chive.html

As Our President said countless times, the Obama-Heritage plan is rooted in the eternal verities of choice and competition. Yet choice and competition are precisely why US health inflation is so high in the first place. Every other country uses some form of price control to control costs. The uniquely American solution of the "Demo-plan" was concocted specifically to avoid that scenario.

Why? Because, as a senior Democrat involved in drafting the law explained: “There was no way we had the votes in either the House or the Senate if PhRMA was opposed — period.” And the same went for the hospitals, the insurers, and so on.

The meta-theory behind Obamacare was that since a good law didn't have the votes, it was more realistic to pass a bad law and pretend it was good. Now we are engaged in a great experiment, testing whether that law, or any law so conceived, can long endure; we are met on a great battlefield of that experiment.

So anyway, it turns out that Obamacare did not control U.S. health care costs. As the chart below demonstrates, it did way better than that: it controlled health care costs in the U.S. and the rest of the world at the same time. And it started working before the law was even passed.

[pioneer98]

Yep, this is on the Republicans.

Ha. What was their plan for health care again?

What is on Republicans is spurning health care reform at every single opportunity over the last 40 years. Dubya could have tried to do something with health care, but didn't. He could have taken this issue away from Democrats.

Back in the day, Nixon got the ball rolling downhill by opting for an HMO system. Reagan and both Bushes kicked the can down the road. Inbetween Clinton tried to bring us Hillary-care, which was met with extreme resistance that now looks quaint with how much the Tea Party resisted Obama.