Lloyd Lofthouse

We know that the Affordable Care Act run through the HealthCare.gov site has problems. After all, the critics of ObamaCare keep reminding us of every glitch, every problem—hammering us every day with cherry-picked facts, but I suspected they weren’t telling the whole story. 

So I asked: What about the State-based sites? Quote: “States can create and operate their own marketplace or a hybrid called a State Partnership Marketplace in which the state runs certain functions.”

Through Google I found a piece at TalkingPointsMemo.com that said, “How Kentucky Built the Country’s Best Obamacare Website.”

“Kentucky did it right,” Talking Points reported. “The state’s online health insurance marketplace has become Obamacare’s city on a hill while HealthCare.gov has been flummoxed by a month of glitches and bad press. Whatever the federal website seems to have failed to do to ensure its success on the Oct. 1 launch, Kentucky did.”

In Kentucky, Talking Points said more than 26,000 people enrolled in coverage and 50,000 more have started the application process. The Talking Points piece was dated October 28, 2013.

Kentucky’s success led me to ask myself this question: How many people have signed up through other state-run sites so far?

And of course—as you may have already guessed—it took a few seconds using Google to discover an answer to that question and I found it through the Christian Science Monitor that reported: “The 11 states that run their own websites and have given progress reports account for about 30 percent of America’s population, but 75 percent of total enrollments during the first month of Obamacare exchanges. … All 11 state-run exchanges had at least 1,000 enrollees, led by California at 35,364. By contrast, of the 36 states using HealthCare.gov, 27 had fewer than 1,000 enrollees.”

And Health Care.gov—the federal site—has a page that links to the state sites. So why bother with the federal run site when you can sign up through a state site—that is if you live in one of the few states that supports healthcare for all—that probably works better? Too bad if you live in a state run by conservatives who may not care if you rot or not.

Maybe the feds should ask Kentucky for help to fix the federal healthcare site. Even though I don’t need to get health insurance through an exchange because my health care provider is the Veterans Administration, I visited to make sure I could read California’s site; it worked, and my wife has been signing up there. She has complained it’s going to cost her about $100 more than her old plan but conceded the health care offered will be much better. The last time she had a physical under her current $400 a month plan, she says it cost her $4,000—an annual physical through the new plan will cost nothing.

However, for every success story, we may also find a failure and Oregon provides another example of that. So far, Oregon’s insurance exchange site failed to enroll a single subscriber and had to ask thousands to apply on paper while—next door—California’s insurance exchange signed up 31,000 people in an Affordable Care Act plan in October and added 29,000 more the first 12 days of November. Source: Yahoo.com

One thing for sure, we will never hear the success stories from the critics of ObamaCare because they cherry pick the facts. They want ObamaCare to fail—without giving the program a chance—just like Rush Limbaugh said on his conservative radio talk show back in 2009 when he wanted Obama to fail after Obama was elected President and before he even took the oath of office and had a chance to do anything as president.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine, Vietnam Veteran and English-journalism teacher.

His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy that started life as a memoir and then became a fictional suspense thriller. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

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