COVID-19 & Healthcare

White House says HealthCare.gov now working for ‘vast majority of users’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post reports HealthCare.gov meets deadline for fixes, White House says:

Administration officials announced Sunday that they had met their Saturday deadline for improving HealthCare.gov after completing a series of hardware upgrades and software fixes to the troubled Web site.

A progress report released Sunday morning by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said: “While we strive to innovate and improve our outreach and systems for reaching consumers, we believe we have met the goal of having a system that will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.” Read the administration report.

Government and outside technical employees have worked round-the-clock for weeks on the fixes so the administration could keep its promise to have the site working smoothly for most people by Nov. 30.

The report served as the basis for a press briefing Sunday morning by Jeffrey Zients, the man President Obama tasked to oversee the fixes.

“The bottom line, HealthCare.gov on Dec. 1 is night and day from where it was on Oct. 1,” when the site was launched, he told reporters.

As a result of the improvements: the average system response time is under 1 second; the error rate is “consistently well below 1 percent”; the online system is stable — not crashing — more than 90 percent of the time; as many as 50,000 shoppers can use the site at the same time, or up to 800,000 visits a day.

Two critical lawsuits to get a hearing in December

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Two critical lawsuits will get a hearing in December.

The lawsuit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court on behalf of 36 Republican legislators and a pair of citizens by lawyers for the Goldwater Institute contends the hospital assessment in the law is a tax that required a 2/3 vote of the Legislature under the state Constitution. It also alleges that allowing the director of the state's Medicaid program to set the assessment and exempt some providers gives him taxing authority that properly belongs to the state Legislature. Judge sets date to hear Medicaid expansion lawsuit:

Maricopa County Superior Court judge Katherine Cooper set a Dec. 9 date to hear the suit filed in September on behalf of 36 Republican state lawmakers and a pair of citizens.

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Brewer's lawyers want Cooper to throw out the suit. They say the plaintiffs don't have standing to sue and lawmakers could sue to stop any law it moves forward.

The Arizona Republic reported, Brewer’s lawyers: Suit challenging Medicaid expansion has no merit:

Arizona lawmakers on the losing side of the Medicaid expansion vote have no legal authority to stop the new law that broadens eligibility for low-income residents, attorneys for Gov. Jan Brewer argued in a court filing Wednesday.

Brewer’s attorneys asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper to dismiss the lawsuit, filed last month by the conservative Goldwater Institute, saying the court should not get involved in a legislative dispute.

The Republican lawmakers “are a disgruntled faction within the Legislature that was outvoted by a bipartisan coalition,” wrote Douglas Northrup, an attorney with Fennemore Craig. “Legislators’ alleged injury is a loss of legislative and political power.”

Three other plaintiffs — two constituents and the state director of Americans for Prosperity — also lack authority to sue, he argued, largely because they can’t show they’ve suffered any harm from the portion of the law that’s being challenged, which is an assessment on hospitals to help pay for expansion.

“If the court found that standing to challenge a law’s constitutionality is found with such tenuous allegations of injury, every constituent whose legislator voted against an allegedly unconstitutional bill would have standing,” Northrup wrote.

He argued that the Arizona Supreme Court recognized the limits of legislative standing in a 2003 case, ruling that individual legislators did not have authority to challenge then-Gov. Janet Napolitano’s line-item veto authority.

U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the legal fiction of ‘corporate personhood’ gives corporations religious liberty rights

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear religious challenges to the requirement that employers provide health insurance for their workers that includes birth control and related medical services.  The Court said it would decide constitutional issues, as well as claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog.com reports, Court to rule on birth-control mandate (UPDATED):

The Court granted review of a government case (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores) and a private business case (Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius).  Taking the Conestoga plea brought before the Court the claim that both religious owners of a business and the business itself have religious freedom rights, based on both the First Amendment and RFRA.  The Hobby Lobby case was keyed to rights under RFRA.

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The Court did not expedite the briefing schedules for the new cases, so presumably they will be heard in March.  Moreover, the Court has already released its argument schedule for all sittings through the February session.

Under the orders the Court issued in the health care cases, the Justices are not being asked to strike down the requirement that employers provide a full range of pregnancy-related health care under their employees’ health insurance plans. In that sense, these cases are different from the Court’s first rulings on the ACA two years ago, when it upheld a penalty for an individual who refused to obtain health insurance at all and nullified a requirement that states must broadly expand their Medicare program of health care coverage for the poor.

This time, the Court will be focusing only on whether the pregnancy-related care coverage can be enforced against profit-making companies — or their individual owners, when that is a very small group — when the coverage contradicts privately held religious beliefs.

Ezra Klein: Healthcare.gov website is improving quickly

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

One of the harshest critics of the federal government's healthcare.gov web site has been Ezra Klein of the Washington Post (whom I suspect has an unhealthy faith in modern technology). Recent modifications to the web site now have "techie" Ezra Klein suggesting that the healthcare.gov may finally be working as it was intended to work. Wonkbook: Is Obamacare turning the corner?:

A spin through HealthCare.Gov this morning went smoothly. The site loaded quickly. The process progressed easily. There were no error messages or endless hangs. I didn't complete the final step of purchasing insurance but, until then, the site worked — or at least appeared to work — exactly as intended.

My experience isn't rare. There are increasing reports that HealthCare.Gov is working better — perhaps much better — for consumers than it was a few short weeks ago. "Consumer advocates say it is becoming easier for people to sign up for coverage," report Sandhya Somashekhar and Amy Goldstein in the Washington Post. "The truth is, the system is getting stronger as it recovers from its disastrous launch," writes Sam Baker in the National Journal. Applying "was no problem at all, with no delays," says Paul Krugman.

Reports from inside the health care bureaucracy are also turning towards optimism. People who knew the Web site was going to be a mess on Oct. 1st are, for the first time, beginning to think HealthCare.Gov might work. Data backs them up: By mid-November, the pace of enrollment in the federal exchanges had doubled from what it was in October.