Heeeeeeere's Obamacare!

[Kestrel]

I read an article the other day about a couple that wanted to start up their own business, but were reluctant to give up their employer based coverage. The were looking at the ACA as a possible alternative.

A few year ago, I attended a week long training session on setting up your own business. A full half day was devoted to the insurance problem. The instructor told is that a high deductible plan was probably the best option. At the end of the class, someone asked the instructor what kind of insurance he had. The instructor admitted that he had a pre existing condition and had no coverage for several years. He was covered now only because he got married and was able to get coverage from his wife's employer.

The ACA makes this much simpler. If you want to start your own company, buy a policy to protect your family on the exchange.

 

[Unabogie]

It's only 3:00 here on the West Coast, but I can already feel my life slipping away.

Damn you, Obama. DAMN. YOU. TO. HELL!

 

[MattusMaximus]

Explaining the joke and therefore killing all humor in 3..2..1..

The password policies on that site are terrible. Absolutely terrible because:

1) passwords with maximum lengths are always unacceptable.

This restriction exists because the developer is probably encrypting passwords rather than hashing them. Encrypted text is proportional to the size of the plaintext input, hashed text has a fixed length regardless of the size of the input.

Encypting is less optimal than hashing, but perhaps encryption was chosen to allow users to recover their plaintext passwords for some reason?

Still, let's assume password length restriction was unavoidable: couldn't the developer have made the password field in the database larger to accommodate longer passwords, up to 255 chars for example? The 20 char limit is tiny, encourages short passwords and makes more secure passphrases all but impossible.

2) there's no rational basis for restricting password entry to specific characters. None. Users should be able to use whatever chars they want.

Encrypted or hashed passwords result in an array of random bytes. Developers usually hex-encode or base64-encode the resulting bytes, which in turn maps the bytes back to the ASCII character space, so the encoded password can be stored in a database without any fancy Unicode collation.

If the web server or programming language used to run the site has poor support for unicode characters, the developer can hex/base64-encode the password on the client before sending the data to the server.

To you, as a user, that means your passwords have reduced entropy, makes it hard to substitute letters with special characters, encourages weaker passwords.

tl;dr version: crappy password policies encourage users to create crappy passwords. Weak passwords that are hard for humans to remember, yet easy for computers to crack. FAIL.

So tell that to the people running the healthcare.gov website. Venting your spleen here is doing... how much good?

 

[MattusMaximus]

Still crappy security policy

That wasn't her original complaint. Her original complaint was that she was using a random password generator which used characters she was told not to use and then the website kept rejecting the passwords with those characters.

Damn you, Obama!!!11!1

 

[thaiboxerken]

And the rest is paid for by increased costs to other subscribers. With more people being allowed to signing up, wouldn't that actually increase cost (to most)?

How does this reform heathcare costs again?

How did it work in Massachusetts?

 

[MattusMaximus]

Btw, has anyone seen any news stories on the healthcare.gov servers being overloaded? I honestly did not expect this many people to be signing up, or attempting to sign up, on day 1.

ETA: Ah, here's a story...

http://nation.time.com/2013/10/01/obamacare-exchanges-riddled-with-glitches/

... Exchange homepages in the 34 states where the federally government is fully or partially running insurance marketplaces included one of two messages this morning: “The System is down at the moment” or “Please wait.” In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services said that healthcare.gov had logged more than 1 million visits in just a few hours.

Many web sites run independently by states were also unusable this morning. New York’s exchange web site, nystateofhealth.ny.gov, at some points displayed an “internal server error” message. Exchange administrators blamed heavy traffic for the glitch, posting a message saying, “Due to overwhelming interest in the NY State of Health – including 2 million visits in the first 2 hours of the site launch – the health exchange is currently having log in issues. We encourage users who are unable to log in to come back to the site later when these issues will be resolved. traffic may have been responsible.” ...

Yup. The servers are jammed with all those people who don't want health care coverage

This is a good problem to have, in my opinion.

 

[Checkmite]

I just got in what turned out to be a yelling match with a family member about Obamacare.

Basically what my understanding of Obamacare is - you have to have insurance. You can buy insurance through whichever company you want, or use the company your employer uses. You must use the health care facilities and providers that your chosen insurance company approves. All of which, coincidentally, is the way things have always been as long as I've been alive. The only major difference is that if you don't buy some kind of insurance from somebody, you now have to pay a penalty. The government has also put certain caps on how much companies can charge you, and have eliminated disqualification for pre-existing conditions.

This is not my family member's understanding of Obamacare at all. According to her, you have no choice of private insurance companies at all. People have to sign up not for insurance, but for "Obamacare", which is basically the government as insurer, and that people will not be allowed to have their own private insurance, neither are they allowed to use whichever doctor they want (which evidently private insurance companies let you do before now). According to her, doctors and even whole hospitals have also basically been quitting en masse, refusing to "accept Obamacare", leading to what is now a shortage of doctors. She also says that from now on, no hospitals in the US are allowed to operate as "charity hospitals". She further says that "Obamacare exchanges" are federal government agencies, not private agencies or companies, and that the purpose of the Republican-led government shutdown was to defund them and stop them from opening (she said this immediately after reporting having watched the NBC nightly news, which I know for a fact had a big story about how the exchanges opened today). She also said that the Obamacare signup websites which crashed today under heavy user load, were crashed due to an effort which she says she witnessed being organized over Twitter and Facebook of American citizens who wanted to deliberately crash the site as a protest of Obamacare, and not due to 8 million people using the site to buy insurance as the news reports claim. Also, only 2% of Americans support Obamacare, according to "real" non-skewed polls.

She says she knows all this because she actually reads all the non-mainstream media and all the actual government legislation and bills, while I obviously haven't.

Is she closer to the truth than I am? If not, do her views represent the majority of conservative constituents' idea of what Obamacare is? No wonder they're against it, quite frankly. I would be too.

 

[thaiboxerken]

Explaining the joke and therefore killing all humor in 3..2..1..

The password policies on that site are terrible. Absolutely terrible because:

1) passwords with maximum lengths are always unacceptable.

This restriction exists because the developer is probably encrypting passwords rather than hashing them. Encrypted text is proportional to the size of the plaintext input, hashed text has a fixed length regardless of the size of the input.

Encypting is less optimal than hashing, but perhaps encryption was chosen to allow users to recover their plaintext passwords for some reason?

Still, let's assume password length restriction was unavoidable: couldn't the developer have made the password field in the database larger to accommodate longer passwords, up to 255 chars for example? The 20 char limit is tiny, encourages short passwords and makes more secure passphrases all but impossible.

2) there's no rational basis for restricting password entry to specific characters. None. Users should be able to use whatever chars they want.

Encrypted or hashed passwords result in an array of random bytes. Developers usually hex-encode or base64-encode the resulting bytes, which in turn maps the bytes back to the ASCII character space, so the encoded password can be stored in a database without any fancy Unicode collation.

If the web server or programming language used to run the site has poor support for unicode characters, the developer can hex/base64-encode the password on the client before sending the data to the server.

To you, as a user, that means your passwords have reduced entropy, makes it hard to substitute letters with special characters, encourages weaker passwords.

tl;dr version: crappy password policies encourage users to create crappy passwords. Weak passwords that are hard for humans to remember, yet easy for computers to crack. FAIL.

Eat a hamburger, it'll help.

 

[Biscuit]

I just got in what turned out to be a yelling match with a family member about Obamacare.

Basically what my understanding of Obamacare is - you have to have insurance. You can buy insurance through whichever company you want, or use the company your employer uses. You must use the health care facilities and providers that your chosen insurance company approves. All of which, coincidentally, is the way things have always been as long as I've been alive. The only major difference is that if you don't buy some kind of insurance from somebody, you now have to pay a penalty. The government has also put certain caps on how much companies can charge you, and have eliminated disqualification for pre-existing conditions.

This is not my family member's understanding of Obamacare at all. According to her, you have no choice of private insurance companies at all. People have to sign up not for insurance, but for "Obamacare", which is basically the government as insurer, and that people will not be allowed to have their own private insurance, neither are they allowed to use whichever doctor they want (which evidently private insurance companies let you do before now). According to her, doctors and even whole hospitals have also basically been quitting en masse, refusing to "accept Obamacare", leading to what is now a shortage of doctors. She also says that from now on, no hospitals in the US are allowed to operate as "charity hospitals". She further says that "Obamacare exchanges" are federal government agencies, not private agencies or companies, and that the purpose of the Republican-led government shutdown was to defund them and stop them from opening (she said this immediately after reporting having watched the NBC nightly news, which I know for a fact had a big story about how the exchanges opened today). She also said that the Obamacare signup websites which crashed today under heavy user load, were crashed due to an effort which she says she witnessed being organized over Twitter and Facebook of American citizens who wanted to deliberately crash the site as a protest of Obamacare, and not due to 8 million people using the site to buy insurance as the news reports claim. Also, only 2% of Americans support Obamacare, according to "real" non-skewed polls.

She says she knows all this because she actually reads all the non-mainstream media and all the actual government legislation and bills, while I obviously haven't.

Is she closer to the truth than I am? If not, do her views represent the majority of conservative constituents' idea of what Obamacare is? No wonder they're against it, quite frankly. I would be too.

You and I have a very similar understanding. Your family member is in lala land. The exchanges are where you can view side by side and purchase health insurance through private companies. You are free to buy your insurance where ever you want but the exchanges make things easier to compare and find out about subsidies and what not. You can use your existing insurance be it personal or work provided or you can go with a new policy from any source you like. You must have insurance or pay a penalty.

The claims about doctors, nurses and hospitals are new to me but sound insane. The claims about people deliberately trying to crash healthcare.gov I doubt but if they are then those people are a bunch of major league ********.

 

[temporalillusion]

It could be worse. I have run into systems that allowed you to choose a password with a special character, but didn't allow it to be entered when logging in.

Or ones that let you enter a 30 character password but then truncate it to some length less than 30 and don't tell you, I had that one recently.

 

[eeyore1954]

Btw, has anyone seen any news stories on the healthcare.gov servers being overloaded? I honestly did not expect this many people to be signing up, or attempting to sign up, on day 1.

ETA: Ah, here's a story...

http://nation.time.com/2013/10/01/obamacare-exchanges-riddled-with-glitches/


Yup. The servers are jammed with all those people who don't want health care coverage

This is a good problem to have, in my opinion.

Or people who now are required to get insurance and those who are wondering if they can get a better deal.
I was looking for a relative and this is what I got.
Error 500: org.springframework.core.task.TaskRejectedException: Executor [java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor@20495dc9] did not accept task: org.springframework.context.event.SimpleApplicationEventMulticaster$1@901a3b51

It is not surprising to me they would be overloaded people have been waiting a few years to find out.

 

[Kestrel]

How did it work in Massachusetts?

Massachusetts results would only be relevant if the people of Massachusetts were the same species as the people in other states.

 

[yodaluver28]

You and I have a very similar understanding. Your family member is in lala land. The exchanges are where you can view side by side and purchase health insurance through private companies. You are free to buy your insurance where ever you want but the exchanges make things easier to compare and find out about subsidies and what not. You can use your existing insurance be it personal or work provided or you can go with a new policy from any source you like. You must have insurance or pay a penalty.

It's a little more complicated than that. You must pay a penalty if you don't buy insurance but can afford it, don't have a conscientious objection, aren't a member of a native tribe, or haven't received one of the other exemptions available. Both the number and % of people who will be penalized will be very small IMO.

Most people already have coverage through their employers, Medicaid, or Medicare. Many people who don't have employer insurance will jump at the chance to get some if they can afford the new lower pricing. People who earn a certain percentage of the poverty level will qualify for subsidies to help buy insurance and those who earn too little to file a federal tax return but don't qualify for Medicaid are automatically exempt from any requirements or penalties.

The claims about doctors, nurses and hospitals are new to me but sound insane. The claims about people deliberately trying to crash healthcare.gov I doubt but if they are then those people are a bunch of major league ********.

I have been hearing that lie from TeaBagger relatives for two years. When my mom was in the hospital last month, it was open and there were doctors, nurses, and custodians everywhere and none of them mentioned anything about a massive walkout in the works. The only peep I heard about Obamacare was from a billing department worker there who was telling me that she has to answer all kinds of crazy questions about it all day every day. She said she's actually had people ask her if she'll be sitting on one of the death panels.

 

[SkepticalDrew]

She said she's actually had people ask her if she'll be sitting on one of the death panels.

I would have said yes and then preceded to do my best death panel stare until they were forced to walk away and stop asking silly questions.

 

[12AX7]

You know I thought if I was really over the top my sarcasm would be obvious. Problem is there are so many actual crazies out there you can never tell anymore.

DISCLAIMER: I do not actually believe President Obama is a muslim, that he was born in Kenya, and I fully support the ACA. Because I'm not crazy.

Sorry. It's hard to tell sometimes.



Well played, sir.

 

[Kestrel]

Is she closer to the truth than I am? If not, do her views represent the majority of conservative constituents' idea of what Obamacare is? No wonder they're against it, quite frankly. I would be too.

Her views are somewhat typical. I have heard all of those claims about the ACA except for the one about liberals crashing the websites to make them look busy.

She missed a few of the really good ones. The microchip we will all have imbedded. The massive government run database that will store all of our health records. That all doctors will be paid the same regardless of skill or experience.

Many of these seem to be derived from a widely circulated email warning people of the horrors in the Affordable Care Act, complete with references to the page and line in the law. Snopes debunks it here.

Add to this creepy ads intended to persuade young people to not buy the Obamacare health insurance:

 

[MattusMaximus]

Or people who now are required to get insurance and those who are wondering if they can get a better deal.
I was looking for a relative and this is what I got.
Error 500: org.springframework.core.task.TaskRejectedException: Executor [java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor@20495dc9] did not accept task: org.springframework.context.event.SimpleApplicationEventMulticaster$1@901a3b51

It is not surprising to me they would be overloaded people have been waiting a few years to find out.

Exactly. Give it some time, and the kinks will get worked out. Something this big is bound to have some kinks - hell, it took *years* to get Social Security worked out after FDR got that ball rolling. Same thing here.

 

[Unabogie]

Her views are somewhat typical. I have heard all of those claims about the ACA except for the one about liberals crashing the websites to make them look busy.

She missed a few of the really good ones. The microchip we will all have imbedded. The massive government run database that will store all of our health records. That all doctors will be paid the same regardless of skill or experience.

Many of these seem to be derived from a widely circulated email warning people of the horrors in the Affordable Care Act, complete with references to the page and line in the law. Snopes debunks it here.

Add to this creepy ads intended to persuade young people to not buy the Obamacare health insurance:

Back in 2009, a neighbor sent me that same list with a giant "AHA!!!". I'd wager he's not even aware that none it is true, even 4 years later.

 

[MattusMaximus]

Sorry. It's hard to tell sometimes.



Well played, sir.

I second this, PGH. You certainly had me going

 

[12AX7]

So, has the world ended yet? Has the Bible been banned? Have the evil Muslim socialists come to take our American flags to burn them? Are women being forced to abort their babies and then eat the remains? Are old people being turned into Soylent Green?

Wait, none of that's happened yet? Well, color me surprised... I mean, that's what the right-wing would said would happen once Obamacare started...

Don't forget Obama's private army that was to be funded through Obamacare.

On a serious note, I wonder how long until some extremist nutcase tries to hack the Healthcare.gov website in an attempt to take it down? I honestly wouldn't put it past some loonies.

Nah. They can't get off of Fox "News", Glenn Beck and PrisonPlanet's sites long enough.

Why call it heathcare reform instead of cost redistribution? Let me guess, no one would vote for it.

I'm curious.

What did you call it when it was a Republican idea Romneycare?