Well, it's around 7pm EST on Sunday, 1/31/16. As of this writing, HealthCare.Gov is loading quickly, as are all 13 of the state-based exchange websites. Aside from a "high call volume" message at Covered California and "extended call center hour" messages from CoveredCA and various other SBMs, I'm not seeing any evidence of website server load strain, etc.
In fact, the only "overtime/extension period" announcements so far are from the Maryland Health Connection and Covered California, which each announced official "In Line By Midnight" extensions for those who start their enrollment process by midnight tonight.
This is only appearing on the home page of the Massachusetts exchange website, but the wording of it suggests that it applies to all of the state-based exchanges.
Yeeks. Don't be surprised if there's a few more #ACAOvertime announcements after all....
UPDATE 10:50pm: Hmmm...it's been over an hour and no other state exchange websites are reporting any problems, nor have I seen any Tweets or Facebook posts which indicate any outages.
All websites including HC.gov are still loading smoothly.
UPDATE MIDNIGHT: Welp, that's that, at least for the Atlantic and Eastern Time Zones. *Central, Mountain West and Pacific still have a bit to go, and of course Alaska and Hawaii are 5 hours behind, but I've gotta get some sleep myself...
I assume there'll be some sort of rough tally announcement tomorrow, but all eyes will be on the Iowa Caucuses anyway, so there you go.
Fox News host Chris Wallace cornered Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz on Sunday about his claim that President Barack Obama’s health care reform law had cost jobs.
“The fact checkers say you’re wrong,” Wallace told Cruz. “Since that law went into effect, the unemployment rate fell from 9.9% to 5% as 13 million new jobs were created, and 16.3 million people who were previously uninsured now have coverage.”
“There are plenty of problems with Obamacare, but more people have jobs and health insurance,” the Fox News host added.
...“Wait,” Wallace interrupted. “There’s certainly no question that more people have jobs and more people health insurance.”
...The Texas senator became irritated as the Fox News host pressed for an answer to his original question.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You say that Ted Cruz is a liar, but you have said that you want everyone to be covered on health care and the government is going to pay for it. How is that not ObamaCare?
TRUMP: I want people takes -- that's true. I want people taken care of. I have a heart. I want people taken care of. If people have no money, we have to help people. But that doesn't mean single payer. It means we have to help people.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How do you do it?
TRUMP: We'll work something out.
And...scene.
(OK, I admit I left out some of Trump's blather before/after; feel free to click the link for his "fully detailed" response).
Senator Ted Cruz is often asked about doing away with President Obama’s health care law. He is less rarely pressed by voters on what will replace it.
But at a middle school cafeteria here, a man, Mike Valde, presented him with a tragic tale. His brother-in-law Mark was a barber — “a small-business man,” he said. He had never had a paid vacation day. He received health insurance at last because of the Affordable Care Act. He began to feel sick and went to a doctor.
“He had never been to a doctor for years,” Mr. Valde, 63, of Coralville, Iowa, said. “Multiple tumors behind his heart, his liver, his pancreas. And they said, ‘We’re sorry, sir, there’s nothing we can do for you.’ ”
The room was silent.
“Mark never had health care until Obamacare,” Mr. Valde continued. “What are you going to replace it with?”
Mr. Cruz expressed condolences and pivoted quickly to a well-worn answer assailing the health care law.
UPDATE: I've expanded the second half of this entry.
A week or so ago, I took a good look at Bernie Sanders's Single Payer healthcare proposal and was, as I put it, "beyond disappointed" due to it's lack of detail, and naiveté about not only the political realities of trying to get such a plan through (which is the biggest issue that Sanders supporters insist can be overcome through a "political revolution" etc etc), but also due to the sheer mountain of legal, economic, infrastructure and logistical headaches that would have to be navigated.
The irony is that, for me, the math behind such a plan (ie, how much it would end up saving people overall in terms of actual dollar savings as well as reduced administrative overhead, greater efficiency, etc) was something which I didn't even get into. I was operating on the assumption that, while the specifics would obviously jump up and down here and there, the numbers were generally in the right ballpark. HOWEVER, according to Emory University expert Kenneth Thorpe (who's actually a strong single-payer advocate who has authored several SP plans himself), that may not be the case whatsoever. Dylan Matthews of Vox writes:
UPDATE: I thought this was obvious, but apparently not: I'm not saying that a complete relocation of the entire population of Flint will be necessary, I'm just trying to get some sort of feel for how much it would theoretically cost if they had to be relocated.
"A September estimate, only recently released by Michigan governor Rick Snyder, puts the cost of replacing all the lead pipes in Flint at $60 million. And the project will take 15 years.
I'm surprised by this for several reasons. The snowstorm was nearly a week ago, and there's still 3 days left for people to enroll as it is; are there still a lot of areas of Maryland coping with power outages/other disruptions which are making it unreasonable to expect people to get in under the wire?
Second, because CMS just stated pretty unequivocally that HealthCare.Gov will not be offering any official deadline extension (although, like the MD exchange, they did say that they'll have an "in line by midnight" exception). I assumed that if HC.gov was taking a "hard line stance" that the state exchanges would as well.
