Oregon gov. Retread's hired a couple more bureaucrats to help "lead" the national laughingstock known as Coverup Oregon, so you can see he's serious about getting this thing fixed. Why, there was a "legislative hearing" just a couple of days ago, wherein legislatives told Coverup's top banana, "Rocky" (what an abjectly appropriate name, incidentally) that they're none too pleased with what's not going on. The hearing ran five and a half hours, but "Rocky" walked out about halfway through, so the legislatives were left with just jabbering amongst themselves.
And the hits just keep on coming, as a story out of Salem demonstrates:
About a month ago, Henderson mailed in her 19-page Cover Oregon application. A week later, she got a phone call from a worker who said her forms were not complete — namely, the information regarding her projected 2014 income.
On Wednesday, she found in her mail a packet from Cover Oregon. The cover letter asked her to fill in the missing information. But as she flipped through the pages, she was shocked to see that along with her own application were pages from other people’s applications, as well.
On them are names, birth dates, income and Social Security information.
She'd have probably done better to just walk her information over to the Coverup Oregon orifices; after all, she lives in the same town. But her tale serves as a great illustration of the kinds of screwups that are running the operation. Crooks don't have to steal your identity, Coverup will mail the information straight to them. How's that for convenience?
Incidentally, the Sacramento Bee and the Statesman Journal both reported on this little mix-up yesterday; The Oregonian didn't get around to it until late this morning. "If it matters to Oregonians, it's int the Sacramento Bee."
But now that Barry's waved his magic finger, things're looking up:
PacificSource Health Plans and Moda Health Plan Inc. will grant three-month extensions to individuals whose insurance policies were to be cancelled Dec. 31 because they didn't meet federal health reform requirements.
Others, like Providence, Kaiser, and BCBS have announced that they'll extend them for another year, through Dec. 2014. And they can't raise the premiums or other aspects of the plans, because the review date for all that has already passed. That's really got to frost Moda (formerly ODS), because they just spent $40 million to rename the Rose Garden arena.
If you retain your current plan, you get no credits or subsidies. But on the other hand, you're not subject to the IRS "penalty" (currently 1% of your income). You also won't get that "free" breast pump you were looking forward to.
