Happy ObamaCare Day. Head on over to www.healthcare.gov and sign yourself up for some juicy health insurance. You deserve it.
Meanwhile, in Cuckooland, the government is shut down for lack of appropriations. The House finally agreed to assign conferees to negotiate on the budget, which is plenty rich considering their history since Obama was reelected. As a condition of raising the last debt ceiling, they insisted that the Senate pass a budget, which they promptly did. Then, the House suddenly reversed course and refused to assign conferees to negotiate a budget.
[Harry] Reid noted on the floor Monday night that Democrats repeatedly sought to set up conference negotiations over the budget for fiscal year 2014 only to be blocked every time by Senate Republicans.
Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said the GOP offer was “the latest absurd and desperate attempt by Speaker Boehner to delay the inevitable—bringing a clean continuing resolution to the floor.”
She said Republicans blocked 18 efforts to go to conference on the budget.
The assignment of conferees is actually a significant concession on the Republicans’ part but it is kind of hard to understand, and it comes in a gun-to-the-head context that the Democrats immediately rejected.
Every spring, Congress is supposed to pass a budget resolution that isn’t binding, but does provide guidance to the appropriations subcommittees on how much money they have to devote to all the various government departments, agencies, and programs. Those subcommittees are then supposed to “do their job,” as the president puts it. In the years since the Republicans retook the House, the Senate had not bothered to pass a budget since they knew they could never come to an agreement with the House on the numbers. The Republicans seized on this failure as a campaign theme, and hit the Democrats over the head with it repeatedly. That’s why they insisted that the Senate pass a budget this year. They didn’t expect the Democrats to be able to do it, but the Democrats did so with little problem. As soon as they did, the Republicans realized that they were now in a bind. If they appointed conferees to negotiate with the Senate, they would have to spell out what kind of cuts they want (which would be tremendously unpopular) and they would have to make concessions (which would divide the caucus). So, they simply refused to appoint conferees and decided to take the government hostage.
By appointing conferees now, they have basically signaled that the game is over. Yet, they have done it with the government shut down. The Democrats are insisting that they won’t negotiate under these circumstances, and that the House must first open the government for 90 days. Once the House acts, the Senate will agree to a conference, and the Republicans will face all the problems they sought to avoid.
Happy Obamacare Day, indeed!
But don’t everybody rush right over there. That would overstress the response time of the system and possibly force it to its knees. Anyone who has rolled out new software for actual use will understand what I am saying.
There are reports that the system doesn’t work with Firefox, but forces you to use Microsoft Internet Explorer. It that is true, the contractor building the system violated a standard government guideline. But I doubt that it’s true; Firefox might have some quirks if the developer essentially coded it for IE.
No doubt all of these issues will be identified from problem reports and fixed within two or three weeks and thereafter folks will most have flawless operation.
On the shutdown. The Democrats should now change their ultimate demands to having a budget process that does not get delayed as a strategy and stripping the debt ceiling limitation completely out. The debt ceiling serves no legitimately budget control purpose as long as you are operating with a budget.
But for now, the Republicans have the government they have always wanted because it isn’t totally shut down. Only the parts that Democrats support are shut down. That is a big problem is this “shutdown” becomes the “new normal”.
So, the Democrats don’t support Social Security and the military? What are you talking about?
The Republicans are hog happy with this shutdown. They can start arguing that the things that shutdown are are the Democrats wasteful spending. If the media with its “balanced” approach lets them get away with that and the public also does not feel inconvienced–hey, we can privatize the National Parks–the Repubican will have shifted the debate.
How you see government operating right now (excepting Social Security) is Grover Norquist’s wet dream.
Don’t blithely assume that you will see the same backlash as quickly as was the case in 1995-1996.
But the main thing I am talking about is that the Democrats need to get tougher on their demands to end it. None of this 90-day “grand bargain” talk. The government must function at full capacity. And none of this let’s raise the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling always has been a meaningless political stunt to put the onus back on the President. It is time to eliminate it as a factor altogether.
The Republicans in the House broke the government. Time for some humiliation of them instead of “meeting them halfway”. If’n Mr. Manchin and some of the other jelly-spines might get some backbone.
As for the military, why is the NSA still scooping up non-essential data that hinders instead of helps its ability to sort out terrorist communications? They need to do more than after-the-fact analysis that says “Oh we saw that three days before it happened; we just didn’t do anything because it wasn’t ‘operational’.”
It could be true as most government sites operate with IE. my dept just started allowing us to use Chrome but some things have to be done in IE. I kind of doubt it tho.
The public does not exclusively operate with IE. A sizeable bunch of the public operates with Firefox for security reasons. This is a public-facing website. It doesn’t matter what the government operates with internally, it should start with the assumption that it must accommodate the public–basic rule of customer service.
As a developer, IE has been the biggest pain in my ass for years and years. It’s like the hemorrhoids of web browsers.
Having coordinated introductions of software into production, I agree. IE encourages IE-specific coding, which makes a mess of customer service.
The system is down at the moment. I suspect a hell of a lot of traffic “drove it to its knees.”
The Washington website is definitely down. The national site appears to be up at the moment.
According to Wonkblog, Kynect had processed 1000 applications by 9:30. I also read that the NY site had 2,000,000 visitors. And coverage doesn’t start for a few months more, so these are good signs.
Would someone clarify. I am under the impression that the request for conference is on the CR only. If that’s true it is completely inane and just a stall tactic!
well, yes, it is to reconcile differences in the CR, but the CR is a budget bill.
That is correct.
http://news.yahoo.com/government-shutdown-imminent-barring-an-unlikely-last-minute-deal-165129660.ht
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I thought the final CR out of Boner’s Boneheads required the individual mandate to be delayed, as well as set up this “conferees” bullshit. If it’s just having some conferees meet on something that will never go anywhere, then Reid perhaps should go along.
We’ll see how the blame game works when some polls come out. The corporate media will report this as “DC in gridlock, pox on both houses!”, so what the fools will conclude is anyone’s guess.
In some ways, it doesn’t really make a hell of lot of difference how or when this latest self imposed crisis is “resolved” and when the paralyzed gub’mint re-opens. We have been in national gridlock situation since 2010, where the federal gub’mint is at a complete impasse. We are simply going to lurch from manufactured crisis to crisis. There is no viable way out of the impasse for a variety of reasons, both structural (filibuster) and manufactured (such as the Great Repub Gerrymander)
As many have noted the situation resembles the decade prior to the Civil War. A minority of states/voters has decided to wreck the national gub’mint and they are not going to change their minds or accept reforms. Our institutions have failed us, since they are completely poisoned by committed disciples of the “conservative” movement. The spectacle of white male “conservatives” stating they are standing up for small business and low income people who have to buy health insurance is comic, but reported as quite serious arguments by the useless corporate media.
The Tea Party shutdown is just a somewhat steeper drop in altitude as we continue our national descent—next up the debt ceiling. That should take us down another 10,000 feet, if not crash the engines. After the catastrophic election of 2010, this was inevitable.
The Onion: U.S. On Verge Of Full-Scale Government Hoedown
The Onion: Man who understands 8% of Obamacare vigorously defends it against man who understand 5%
I did a preliminary run-through for my brother-in-law, who is in his mid-50’s and hasn’t had health insurance for over 20 years. The bare-bones catastrophic health insurance policy he has looked into was going to cost him almost $6000 per year with very high deductibles. He can now get a Bronze Plan, with real, every-day coverage, for $2100 per year.
Ted Cruz is right….it’s a complete disaster!
Suck on that, GOP!
More people are going to see that by November of 2014.
The national average for a mid-fifties, non-smoking adult is $5,673 – according to the KFF calculator. Not much different from the quotes your bil received. The insurance companies will now get $2,100 from your bil and the balance paid by the government.
That’s presumes the silver plan – the calculator default. Bronze is about $4,686. And for some states, it is much cheaper. Illinois
Oops. Illinois bronze is $3,188
A friend is considering retiring soon and was concerned about health care. All he knew about Obamacare was the political back and forth. I sent him the link for Cover Oregon, and he discovered he may be eligible for Medicaid and will pay $0. A lot of folks, once the rubber hits the road, are gonna be surprised.
Does he know yet about the preventive care that is no additional cost to him?
https:/www.healthcare.gov/what-are-my-preventive-care-benefits
How did you do that preliminary run through? I went to the site this morning and I could get nowhere without clicking the “Apply” button. That brought me to an application form. It seems you can’t see the plan or find out the rules without committing yourself to buy. No way Jose. Even if I had filled out the application, at some point it would have asked if I had employer based health insurance. I’m sure it would have kicked me out as ineligible when I would answer truthfully “Yes”.
One of the Tea Baggers at work told me that his severely (from birth) handicapped daughter is required to pay $9,000 out of her under $12,000 income so she is better off paying the fine. I know his daughter is terribly handicapped, physically and mentally, and he was forced into bankruptcy by the bills when she was born around thirty years ago. I told him that she should qualify for extended Medicaid and should have already been qualified as a handicapped person. BUT I CAN’T PROVE IT BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS TO KEEP ON HIDING THE DAMN INFORMATION. I would LOVE to be able to print out pages from the site to refute him but I have to sign up for a plan before I find out what is in any plan or what the prices are. Who designed this crappy site? If it was a commercial site I would just ignore it as a scam. And why the Hell is Illinois, a Democratic state government from head to toe, using the Federal site? Why don’t they have their own like California? From the beginning it was like this. “Vote for the bill before reading it.” Now, “Sign up and we will tell you what you signed up for, maybe.” And now, on Der Tag, they still won’t give us the information without commitment. I thought of applying with a bogus name and address to find out the choices but I’m afraid of being prosecuted for fraud.
BTW, is commercial individual insurance gone or not? Just this morning on WGN I saw an ad from BCBSIL (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois) for individual policies.
Apparently, brendan is calling one Republican congressman after another and yelling that they ruined his family vacation to Yosemite.
Brilliant!
I hope his list includes Tom McClintock, the asshole repub who represents Yosemite.
the San Jose Mercury News talked to business owners near Yosemite who complain about the lack of tourists, without mentioning that their own congressman voted for the shutdown.
We’re doomed. Al Franken’s and Amy Klobuchar’s homestate industry is more important than hardnosed negotiating.
What’s next to offer up?
Relax. The device tax isn’t going away unless it’s replaced by some offsetting revenue stream. Amy and Al are two Democrats. The president is also there with his veto pen.
It’s the timing of the offer that is disturbing. The Dems should keep their traps shut until the public realizes what this shutdown means and start hammering the Republicans.
Then the deal is:
Eliminate the debt ceiling.
Replace the device tax with a financial transaction tax (Robin Hood tax)
Pass a CR that is good until the end of Fiscal Year 2014
Statutorily mandate an automatic CR if the appropriations are not in place by the end of the fiscal year.
Time to stop kicking the can down the road 90 days. That 90-day offer should have been to avoid a shutdown. Now, the Dems should ask for more and specifically for stuff to prevent a future shutdown or debt crisis.
Precisely. And Durbin is one of the Dem “leaders” for Christ’s sake!
What kind of competent strategist comes out with this shit at 9am of Day 1? Somehow I don’t think DD’s gonna see the wisdom of your plan, ha-ha. Or he is terrified of Repubs and their Noise Machine(s).
Hopeless, absolutely hopeless….
Why anyone on the Democratic side would open their trap at this point is ludicrous.
Harry Reid needs to crawl up Durbins butt and tell him to shut the hell up.