Tag Archives: UnitedHealth Group

The Realities Of ObamaCare

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ObamaCare is more than a political issue. ObamaCare is an issue of life and death for people with serious diseases who have health insurance. It would have been very easy to pass a law that provided people who did not have health insurance with insurance without impacting those people who had health insurance they depended on. Unfortunately the Obama Administration chose to disrupt the health insurance of Americans with insurance in order to provide coverage for those Americans without health insurance.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal posted an article by Edie Littlefield Sundby about how ObamaCare is impacting her healthcare.

Ms. Sundby writes:

For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

…Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University’s Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The second element essential to my fight is a United Healthcare PPO (preferred provider organization) health-insurance policy.

Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.

But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.

…Before the Affordable Care Act, health-insurance policies could not be sold across state lines; now policies sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges may not be offered across county lines.

This lady has beat the odds of survival because of very good healthcare. She will now be denied that quality of healthcare under ObamaCare. This is no longer an abstract issue–it is now personal. Not only can she not keep the health insurance she liked, she cannot keep the doctors and the hospital she depended on. ObamaCare needs to be fixed quickly or done away with and replaced with a plan that actually works.

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Slime Comes To Healthcare

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There are a lot of problems with the ObamaCare website right now. That’s not news–you knew that already. But did you know about the connection between the AARP, United Healthcare, and this miserable healthcare website?

Yesterday the Washington Post reported:

The company chosen by the Obama administration to oversee the repair of the new federal health insurance Web site faced questions from lawmakers a year ago about whether it was an appropriate choice for earlier work on the site, given that it is owned by the country’s largest health insurance company.

Columbia-based Quality Software Services Inc. — known as QSSI — was purchased by ­United­Health Group in September 2012, months after it was picked by the Department of Health and Human Services to help set up the Affordable Care Act Web site. That called for work on three areas: build a data hub for the site so that information could be transferred between different groups, deliver a tool to help users register, and do some testing of the technology.

Keep in mind that QSSI was chosen without the normal bidding process. Remember that the AARP was one of the early supporters of ObamaCare because they will make millions on supplemental medicare programs through United Health Group, the parent company of United Healthcare. There are other interesting connections between OSSI and various White House types.

Yesterday the Daily Caller reported a connection between the Obamas and the website developer.

The article reports:

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

…George Schindler, the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract.

Meanwhile, Da Tech Guy On DaRadio makes another interesting observation:

Now there is nothing wrong with pointing out the issues with the site, it speaks to the competence of this administration or lack thereof but any conservative writer or pundit who does had better damn well make sure they stress the real problems with Obamacare which have nothing to do with coding.

Because if they don’t, when the coding interface is repaired the media will declare Obamacare “fixed” and it won’t matter how many people lose their insurance. How many people’s deductibles double or how much more individuals pay for worse coverage. The conversation will be over and they will move to the next topic that serves the administration’s purpose.

That is the crux of what DaTechGuy is saying, but please follow the link above to his article–he includes a few very good video clips to make his point.

Generally speaking, ObamaCare is an example of crony capitalism at its worst. The Republicans were right to shut down the government in an effort to stop this runaway train.

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Some Details On Congressional Insider Trading

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U.S. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts

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Big Government posted an article today showing documents it has obtained detailing some of John Kerry’s stock trades during the debates before the passage of Obamacare. Oddly enough, the trades took place in pharmaceutical stocks and were executed in such a manner to insure significant profits. Was he just a really good investor?

The article reports:

Sen. John Kerry’s position on the powerful Senate Finance Committee’s Health Subcommittee gives him direct access to critical information regarding health care policy. In July 2009, pharmaceutical industry representatives met with key members of Congress to flesh out the Obamacare bill. Then, in November 2009, with the bill’s passage was looking more likely, the Kerrys’ portfolios reflect a drug stock buying spree.

The article also cites some of the Kerry family’s trading during the negotiations on the prescription drug plan:

The Kerrys’ investment funds bulked up on:

  1. More than $500,000 of Johnson & Johnson
  2. As much as $1 million of Pfizer
  3. At least $200,000 in Oxford Health Plans
  4. Between $500,000 and $1 million in United Health Group
  5. At least $100,000 of Cardinal Health
  6. At least $240,000 of Merck

The result: after the bill was signed into law in 2004, some of the Kerrys’ investments were sold, which netted between $100,000 and $1 million from Oxford Health Plans, plus tens of thousands from Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Cardinal Health.

Please follow the link to the article in Big Government to read the entire article and see the documentation of the trades.

This sort of behavior on the part of our elected officials is simply unacceptable.

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