Fall in west central Missouri.

Yesterday when I was researching a post on what Missouri’s Washington D.C. delegation had to say about the latest overblown Obamacare roll-out “crisis,” I came across this claim in an official news release issued by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-3):

Consider this: the Administration spent a total of $500 million on the Obamacare website and its back end systems. To put this into perspective, Facebook operated for six years before surpassing the $500 million mark.

Unfortunately for Rep. Luetkemeyer’s credibility, his statement is totally untrue and, hence, the comparison between the costs of Obamacare.com and Facebook is so much gibberish.

The $500 million number is probably a riff on an erroneous report in Digital Trends that was subsequently corrected. Republicans, eager to slander Obamacare in any way possible, seized on the initial report, omitting in the process to note that it referred to a decade of work by the company in question and covered many projects other than Obamacare.com. However, Republicans eager to do their special brand of mischief went to town with the false number. As Media Matters reported:

The life of the $600 million figure appears to be the latest example of how misinformation is fermented within the right-wing media and then adopted as quasi-policy by the Republican Party. After all, Rep. Camp is holding a hearing specifically to determine why the government’s $600 million health care website doesn’t work, even though the site didn’t cost $600 million.

Secretary Sebilius, in answer to questions during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last Wednesday, set the total costs at $174 million, which coincides with an earlier estimate based on analysis of government documents by the Washington Post Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, that put total direct costs somewhere in the vicinity of $170 million. Obviously, the government won’t get Obamacare.com set up and running for nothing, but the actual cost so far is nowhere near the $500 million figure Rep. Luetkemeyer and his ilk are presenting as the current cost of Obamacare.com in order, presumably, to gin up outrage over the roll-out of the Website.

Which brings me to the real issue here. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer has sufficient staff and resources to come up with numbers similar to those of the WaPo‘s Kessler if he had cared about accuracy rather than trying to make a partisan point. Actually, since the Luetkemeyer release I referenced above was issued on Oct. 25, he or his staff could have easily found lower estimates if they had performed a simple a Web search. No one is forcing him to promulgate erroneous talking points. The conclusion we are left with is either that Luetkemeyer is so intellectually lazy that he doesn’t care whether or not he gives his constituents the right numbers, or he deliberately used an incorrect number to bolster an anti-Obamacare stance that is so weak that it won’t withstand the truth.

And, given that this is not Rep. Luetkemeyer’s first blatantly overt ofense against the truth, I’d end to go with the latter explanation. In his 2011 skirmish against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he cited a totally spurious report that purported to represent the work of 700 scientists whom Luetkemeyer claimed challenged the work of the IPCC on climate change.

Taken individually, these may not be life-and-death issues – although a good case could be made that health care and climate change, in general, are just that. But whatever the case, questions that give rise to worries about either the competence or the honesty of our elected representatives are important. We all know that we’re worse off as a nation because of the misinformation that pervades Fox Nation. What may yet doom us is when trusted officials like Luetkemeyer are willing to abuse their integrity in the name of partisan advantage to the extent that they will play a role in helping to maintain that miasma.  

Today, via Twitter, from Representative Vicky Hartzler (r):

Rep. Vicky Hartzler ‏@RepHartzler

New report shows 4.7 million people visited Obamacare website on the first day but only SIX (6) people were able to enroll!!! Unbelievable! 7:24 AM – 1 Nov 13

Think about that for a second. Four point seven million people visited the web site on the first day. A need and pent up demand? Just asking.

So, has the thought crossed anyone’s mind that the first number impacted the second number? Just asking.

Because the site was designed to sign up everyone on the first day. Right.

A Twitter reply:

KCLiveMusicBlog ‏@KCLiveMusicBlog

@RepHartzler here’s a novel idea, why not try helping to fix it instead of grandstanding? You did everything you could to make it fail. 7:26 AM – 1 Nov 13

Usually when there’s a problem the response from rational people is to try and fix it. Usually.

Meanwhile, today:

Journalism

….Is the site still a disaster? I suppose that a crazy person could subject himself to the eight hundredth hour of Darrell Issa searching for a nut, or you could log on to the website today and see how it works. I chose option two. Here is what I found: everything seems pretty snappy. I registered an account, answered a bunch of questions and shopped for plans without any delays or major bugs getting in my way. Having always lived with employer coverage I cannot say whether the plans are an especially good deal for my exact category of consumer, but I could definitely live with the options I found.

The site does have annoying bug where your only way to go forward is to click on a non-functioning big green button. That would potentially be a game-ender, but each time that happened I fixed it by reloading the page. Basically, setting aside one non-fatal bug and the final application submission, which I skipped because I like my work plan, healthcare.gov works fine….

[emphasis added]

Yeah, you’d think someone would actually check.

From comments at Balloon Juice:

….I completed our family’s enrollment last night and even paid the initial premium online. Happy days! Now after 10 years of “patchwork” healthcare and little to no insurance coverage, I can breath a little easier….

….I registered and started poking around the site. It loaded quickly, the pages worked as designed and I encountered no problems. I didn’t go too far because I am currently insured and don’t live in a state that uses healthcare.gov, but I believe the bulk of the website troubles are resolved (or will be within a week or two)….

…Ultimately, I gave up on my current application and started a new one, with a new gmail address and a variation on my login ID. Everything else was the same, and it worked perfectly….

And sign up on the site goes on for several more months.

Republicans are mostly breathless with glee at the faux news “exposé” to the effect that the insurance policies of some folks in the individual health care market will be changed by their providers in such a way that they can no longer be offered under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Of course, this is not really news – it was known, debated and covered in the news when the issue first arose in 2010.

Nevertheless, our Republican friends are nearly convulsing with false concern.  What they’re saying:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-4) thinks the news offers “more proof that the President’s health care law is unworkable and hurts Americans. ”

Rep. Billy Long (R-7) thinks that this problem is so serious that he needs to offer legislation to delay the individual mandate because “portions of the president’s health care law are harming consumers nationwide.”

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-3) has made ample use of the generic GOP boilerplate on the topic of roll-out glitches on his Website, adding that his constituents are suffering because of the President’s “empty” promises that are belied by the fact that “currently available plans  are cancelled.” He even offers a vague, unverifiable constituent horror story about the havoc wreaked by the cancelled policies – though he doesn’t answer lots of questions that spring to mind about the actual situation of his annecdotal constituents.

Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) breathlessly tweeted that “White House finally admits, ‘It’s True’ some Americans won’t be able to keep their health care plan under Obamacare. #MoreBrokenPromises.” Finally? Sheesh! Too hard for her to remember what was going on three years ago? About an issue she putatively cares so much about she was willing to shut down the government down over it? She ought to be able to do better.

Senator Roy Blunt, for his part, is “committed to fighting for Missourians who are being crushed by ObamaCare,” which includes those who are having their  policies cancelled among other individuals in situations that have elicited his misplaced concern trolling.

So what’s the story? Here, via TPM, is a chart that puts these dire claims into a slightly different perspective:

To  summarize, 80% of the people who like their  current, employer-provided plan will see no change, just as the President promised; 3% will change policies but see little difference in cost or coverage; another 3% will probably have to pay more for better policies; while 14%  who were previously uninsured will get affordable insurance and access to healthcare. I don’t know about  you, but government can “crush” me like this any time it wants.

Slightly edited for clarity. Inadvertently garbled content restored in last paragraph.