Health Care

On Friday morning, Richard Pollock at the Washington Examiner (HT Ed Driscoll at PJ Media) broke an important story about the the large number of doctors choosing not to participate in Covered California, the state's Obamacare exchange. The odds that the agenda-driven press in the formerly Golden State of California was already aware of this problem and chose not to report on it would seem to…

So it's come to this. During the past week, the Associated Press reported today, "Federal health officials," meaning "the Obama administration," began "urging" (i.e., "telling") counselors and navigators around the country to stop using paper applications for Obamacare coverage, "because of concerns those applications would not be processed in time." It seems that either Team Obama or AP (my…

The ongoing effort to insulate President Barack Obama from the negative consequences of his "signature achievement," not only with the HealthCare.gov web site but also his false "If you like your plan-doctor-provider, you can keep your plan-doctor-provider" guarantees, is a sickening sight to behold. Reid Epstein at the Politico contributed one small chapter in that exercise. He decided to "…

Most people don’t know this, but beyond being a professional gasbag, MSNBC host Ed Schultz is also a prophet in direct communication with God. He let the world know this on his program last night when he pronounced that President Obama’s very unpopular health care law is something that all Christians should support because, in actual truth, God approves of Obamacare. “I’ll tell you what I…

Seung Min Kim and Jennifer Haberkorn at the Politico have apparently been living in hermetically sealed Beltway caves since early October. In an item which appeared Tuesday evening, the pair acted as if the idea that Americans stand a great chance of losing access to their current doctors and other medical providers as a result of signing up for a health care plan through the Obamacare…

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. However, PBS’s Judy Woodruff wishes the Obama administration could get another crack at the rollout of ObamaCare. While moderating an ObamaCare discussion on Tuesday’s PBS NewsHour, Woodruff posed this question to Ron Bonjean, a former Republican spokesman: [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

On Tuesday's MSNBC Daily Rundown, host Chuck Todd was eager to declare the ObamaCare disaster to be over and claim Republicans were now of the defensive: "With 750,000 visitors to the site yesterday without a crash and the Obama administration now confident that the website is functioning...the Republican repeal movement may actually now fizzle out completely." [Listen to the audio or watch the…

On November 19, Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a congressional committee that "[W]e still have to build the payment systems to make payments to issuers in January" for those who have enrolled in plans through HealthCare.gov. On Black Friday, while almost no one was paying attention, Alex Nussbaum at Bloomberg News reported…

Call it a case of interview envy--in the context of an ongoing feud between two MSNBC hosts. There has been bad blood between Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews for years, as here, here and here.  On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough took the occasion of Chris Matthews' impending interview of President Obama to mock the way Matthews' on-air schedule has shrunk. In a particularly low blow,…

How does one do a report on an important commerce-related web site without mentioning serious known security problems which are so bad that respected IT experts warn that it shouldn't be used? Ask Kate Pickert at Time's Swampland blog and Kelli Kennedy at the Associated Press, because that's exactly what they did. Pickert and Kennedy reviewed the new and not much improved HealthCare.gov on…

As my colleague Jeff Meyer noted earlier this afternoon, msnbc.com has been busy today boosting HealthCare.gov, insisting that the "bug" which made the website nearly inoperable in October and November was now fixed and everything was working just fine. Well now the landing page for the Lean Forward network is hailing HealthCare.gov as the "website [which] might just save your life." The…

Anyone doubting Roger Ailes' eye for talent needs to go somewhere else besides his shuffling of Fox News's weekday evening lineup, especially but not exclusively his decision to move Megyn Kelly into the 9 p.m. time slot. Variety's Brian Steinberg reports that Kelly has put even more distance between Fox and its so-called competitors at CNN, MSNBC, and HLN, while Greta Van Susteren and Sean…

Talk about burying the lede. Deep within a 5,000-word story published today in the New York Times about the Obamacare website launch is the very damaging disclosure that the much-vaunted “tech surge” promised by the president in late October was mostly just a publicity stunt. In truth, the number of people brought in to work on the project was no more than “about a half-dozen.” Not only that…

Monday's CBS Evening News and Tuesday's CBS This Morning both underlined the continuing problems with HealthCare.gov, even after the Obama administration claimed "it met its deadline to make HealthCare.gov work smoothly for the vast majority of shoppers". Meanwhile, the network's competitors at NBC hyped the supposed positive news about the ObamaCare website. Wyatt Andrews noted how the…