by J. D. Heyes

In mid-October, Forbes’ Avik Roy, who has been writing regularly about the pitfalls and expected pitfalls of Obamacare, made a rather startling claim.

“A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing,” he wrote. “Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.”

In other words, he was saying that the Healthcare.gov website was designed to hide the true cost of insurance plans.

Roy’s story got some traction, but it largely went unnoticed. Now, however, thanks to information surprisingly uncovered by CBS News, it appears that Roy’s story was prophetic:

CBS News has uncovered a serious pricing problem with HealthCare.gov. It stems from the Obama administration’s efforts to improve its health care website. A new online feature can dramatically underestimate the cost of insurance.

So much for ‘shop and browse’

Now, the latter report is being much more generous to the administration than it probably deserves – that this so-called pricing error is merely the result of harmless glitches stemming from good-faith efforts by this hapless government to fix the glitch-prone and virtually unusable federal exchange site.

But what is clear is this: There is a concerted effort to keep Americans from learning what the actual costs of plans are going to be under Obamacare.

Furthermore, as reported by CBS News:

The administration announced it would provide a new “shop and browse” feature… but it’s not giving consumers the real picture. In some cases, people could end up paying double of what they see on the website, CBS News’ Jan Crawford reported Wednesday on “CBS This Morning.”

President Obama, who has feigned shock and anger over a website that he and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius knew for months was broken but which he demanded be launched anyway, has “vowed” to fix the struggling online exchange. In particular, administration officials are already crowing about what they are calling “improvements” in the site’s design, in particular, a feature that supposedly allows you to “See Plans Now.”

White House mouthpiece Jay Carney has even said that “Americans across the country can type in their zip code and shop and browse.”

“But,” CBS News reported, “the new ‘shop and browse’ feature often comes with the wrong price tags.”

In addition, health insurance industry analysts note there are only two broad age categories: 49 or younger and 50 and older.

And consider that the exchange’s success depends on enrolling a large number of young, healthy people, to pay for those who are older, sicker and with chronic, pre-existing conditions.

Get ready for sticker shock

That means that the younger crowd – many of whom don’t have health insurance, because they figure they’re so young and healthy that they don’t need it – are going to be shocked when they find out what they’re actually going to have to pay.

More reporting on the concealment of plan prices from CBS News:

Jonathan Wu is co-founder of Valuepenguin.com, a consumer finance website focusing on the impact of health care reform. His company has built a tool that provides quotes for plans on the federal exchange. He said it’s “incredibly misleading for people that are trying to get a sense of what they’re paying.”

During its investigation, CBS News reporters and analysts ran cost figures for a 48-year-old female in Charlotte, N.C., who is ineligible for subsidies. According to the Healthcare.gov site, she would pay $231 a month, though the actual plan on Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina’s website costs $360, or more than 50 percent higher. “The difference,” CBS News said, is that “Blue Cross and Blue Shield requests your bierthday before providing more accurat estimates.

“The numbers for older Americans are even more striking. A 62-year-old in Charlotte looking for the same basic plan would get a price estimate on the government website of $394. The actual price is $634,” said the report.

Much of America should get ready for health insurance sticker shock.

by Walter Ewing
Analysis

Unauthorized immigrants come to this country primarily for two reasons: to work, and to be reunited with family members who are already here. They would obviously prefer to come to this country legally, but our legal limits on immigration have for decades not matched either the realtties of U.S. labor demand or the natural human desire for family unity. And so they opt to make the expensive, difficult, and dangerous decision to come without authorization because that is what they judge to be the best chance they and their families have for a better future. In other words, the overwhelming majority of unauthorized immigrants are as far from being hardened criminals as you could possibly get. They are gardeners and housekeepers; husbands and wives; parents with children. They are members of U.S. society and integral to the U.S. economy. How much damage are we willing to inflict upon U.S. society and the U.S. economy in the process of expelling unauthorized landscapers and nannies from the country?

However, in its latest report, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) would have us believe that unauthorized immigrants are Public Enemy #1. The CIS report is basically a laundry list of every federal law which an unauthorized immigrant might break in coming to, living in, and working in the United States without authorization. Although the report is very thorough in its cataloging of statutes, it demonstrates a superficial understanding of criminality and how people—especially immigrants—come to be defined as “criminals.” Moreover, the report offers no practical, realistic guide to dealing with the presence of 11 million unauthorized men, women, and children. The chances are slim that they will all be deported in a modern-day redux of Operation Wetback. Nor are they likely to “self-deport.” Among the more serious flaws of the CIS report is its failure to recognize the degree to which immigrants in general and unauthorized immigrants in particular are actively criminalized by the U.S. justice system. That is, new categories of criminality are created which are applied only to immigrants, but not to the native-born. For instance, both unauthorized immigrants and Legal Permanent Residents are subject to mandatory deportation if they have been convicted of an “aggravated felony.”

However, under the 1996 immigration law, the crimes which qualify as an “aggravated felony” are different for an immigrant than they are for a native-born American. For an immigrant, an “aggravated felony” need not really be “aggravated” or even a “felony.” Instead, it includes many nonviolent and relatively minor offenses such as filing a false tax return or shoplifting—neither of which would be considered an “aggravated felony” for native-born citizens. Similarly, in the case of unauthorized immigrants, Congress has generally defined “illegal entry” into the country as a misdemeanor, but “illegal re-entry” (coming here again without authorization) as a felony. Yet neither of these offenses is violent or threatening. This is why nonviolent immigration offenders comprise the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants who are apprehended and deported each year. In fact, research has shown that those immigrants most likely to be unauthorized—Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men without a high-school diploma—are incarcerated at far lower rates than native-born men. In other words, in the overwhelming majority of cases, these are not “criminals” in any commonly understood sense of the word.

They have not committed violent crimes or property crimes. And they are not threats to public safety or national security. Leaving aside the dubious definitions of “criminal” which are applied to unauthorized immigrants by federal law, some practical questions remain. How far should we go—how many scarce law-enforcement resources and personnel should we devote—to expelling unauthorized landscapers and nannies from the country? How much damage are we willing to inflict upon U.S. society and the U.S. economy in the process? And to what end? If you’re worried that the man who picks your vegetables or mows your lawn may have used a false Social Security number to get his job, the most realistic solution is the creation of a program by which he can earn legal status.

That is far more practical than trying to track him down, and his coworkers, and his family and friends, in a crusade to remove from the country any non-citizen who has ever broken any law.

In other immigration news:

Obama calls for Congress to pass immigration reform by end of year

President Barack Obama on Thursday called on lawmakers to pass a comprehensive immigration reform package before the end of the year after the task of resolving the fiscal crisis kept parts of the U.S. government shut down for 16 days and almost caused the country to default on its debts.

“There’s already a broad coalition across America that’s behind this effort of comprehensive immigration reform, from business leaders to faith leaders to law enforcement,” said the president.

Obama, who talked to reporters about the budget agreement reached Wednesday night in Congress, insisted that immigration reform is a measure that will help jump start the U.S. economy and that must be agreed to as soon as possible.

“In fact, the Senate has already passed a bill with strong bipartisan support that would make the biggest commitment to border security in our history, would modernize our legal immigration system, make sure everyone plays by the same rules,” he added.

Obama said the Senate measure, which would establish a road to citizenship for the country’s 11 million illegal immigrants, would stimulate the economy.

“The majority of Americans think this is the right thing to do, and it’s sitting there waiting for the House to pass it,” the president said. “Now if the House has ideas on how to improve the Senate bill, let’s hear them. Let’s start the negotiations. But let’s not leave this problem to keep festering for another year, or two years, or three years.”

“This can and should get done by the end of this year,” Obama said.

Immigration reform was moved to the political back burner after, first, the Syrian crisis and, next, the fiscal crisis.