A repost mind you but I found it a little unsettling . . . .

[1775usmarine]

According to what I've heard and 1st result of google search the penalty for not buying health insurance under the first year of Obamacare is $95. I believe it goes up after the first year, but I don't know the penalty schedule. This is one reason why Obamacare won't work and they'll push single payer. Why would a healthy 23 year old buy expensive insurance if the penalty is only $95 and they can just wait until they get sick anyway? The whole concept of Obamacare relies on the young and healthy buying insurance to spread the risk and allow the insurance companies to afford covering pre-existing conditions.

What if I don’t want to buy insurance?
First off: Nobody will come knocking down your door, demanding that you purchase a health plan. But if you decide not to purchase coverage, you will have to pay a $95 tax penalty. This would be deducted from your 2015 tax return.

Why would a 23 yr old buy his/her own insurance anyways if he/she can still get a free ride off his parents till their 26? That is unless the parents are smarter than the rest who let junior stay at home till 30 and take him or her off at 18. Seems like 26 is the new 18 especially with most of my generation still living at home and think its a giant booze and screw fest.

 

[BGDave]

You can release the deep breath that must have accompanied the thought of a government bureaucrat coming up with something like this. It was actually a Macy executive who was one of FDR's unofficial advisors who had made the observation that people generally become disinterested in the actual cost of an item if you break it down into relatively small payments that they can manage to pay.

Without a doubt I could be wrong. Seem to remember some resistance to Federal withholding being seen as paying taxes before they were due. Look how far we have come.

 

[jamil]

Huh. I didn't know that. It's not how it appeared in the article I read.
Worded in a way like they were resorting to "tapping a private company" to try fixing it.
I'll see if the paper is still in the recycling and quote it verbatim.

CGI Federal is the company most in the hotseat right now. Several companies did various parts and I think CGI did the front end and some middleware components.

While technically correct, a crony company built it using stale technology. This was further complicated by the government micromanaging the project and demanded sweeping changes within a month of the start date to eliminate the feature allowing you to compare rates without creating an account and then the rates you are quoted may well be much lower than what you will actually pay. My guess is that the difference is that they will be forced to get some people who actually know what they are doing to fix it/replace it.

I think you may be right about "crony company". How's this for crony? I read that one of Micheal's classmates at Princeton is a top exec at CGI and that CGI won a no-bid contract. If that's true, I don't see this as much different from Halliburton's supposed no bid contract in Iraq except the people that *****ed about that don't seem to be *****ing when it's their own doing it.

As for stale technology, I'm not sure what technologies were involved or the architecture, but I most suspect changing goal posts as the main culprit.

CGI has completed both successful and unsuccessful projects for the US government. So they are capable of doing it right. I don't really fault them as much as I fault an incompetent administration that could not finalize the requirements until April of this year! They've had 3 ****ing years since AFA passed! And they were still changing complex stuff at the last minute! Changing requirements are a major cause of the same kinds of problems we're seeing. The deadline was the deadline, not because it was ready, but because it was the deadline. So they released an incomplete product. The fault for the broken system falls squarely on the HBIC's shoulders.