Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website
First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company....

The ACA’s Million Dollar Question: Will Enough People Sign Up?
...There’s another self-inflicted wound that could prove fatal. Since the ACA allows young people to stay on their parents’ health plans until they turn 26, the law dramatically shrinks the pool of healthy young customers whose overpayments on insurance are supposed to subsidize the middle aged beneficiaries of the law....

ACA Health Exchange Contractors Have History of Security Failures
..."Two of the contractors involved in developing online health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, which have been plagued by technical problems since launching this month, have had serious data security issues in the past. Quality Software Services developed the software for the Affordable Care Act's data services hub and oversaw development of tools to connect the hub to the databases of other federal agencies. Last June, an audit report by the Health and Human Services Inspector General found QSS failed to adhere to federal security standards (PDF) in delivering IT testing services for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Additionally, services firm Serco suffered a major security breach in 2012. Serco won a five-year $1.3 billion contract to process and verify paper applications for health insurance via the online exchanges. Serco's breach exposed sensitive data of more than 123,000 members of the Thrift Savings Plan, a $313 billion retirement plan run by the U.S. Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board. The exposed data included full names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, financial account information, and bank routing information."...

If You Like Your Health Plan, You Probably Shouldn't Be Able To Keep It
...But here's the thing: One of the key reasons that America needed health care reform is that a lot of existing health plans were bad. There are a lot of health plans that Americans shouldn't be able to keep....

...If anything, the biggest problem with the ACA is that too many people are getting to keep their existing health plans. Our system of employer-based coverage distorts both the health care and labor markets, which is why health policy wonks left, right and center tend to want to move away from it....

..."If you like your health plan, you can keep it" was never a reasonable promise; health reform that addressed America's combination of high cost, middling outcomes and spotty coverage was necessarily going to have to change a lot of people's health plans. So yes, that statement is proving false — and it's a good thing.

HealthCare.gov pricing feature can be off the mark
...Industry analysts point to how the website lumps people only into two broad categories: "49 or under" and "50 or older."

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."

Prices for everyone in the 49-or-under group are based on what a 27-year-old would pay. In the 50-or-older group, prices are based on what a 50-year-old would pay.

CBS News ran the numbers for a 48-year-old in Charlotte, N.C., ineligible for subsidies. According to HealthCare.gov, she would pay $231 a month, but the actual plan on Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina's website costs $360, more than 50 percent higher. The difference: Blue Cross and Blue Shield requests your birthday before providing more accurate 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. ...

Dropped Coverage: One Cancer-Surviving Doctor’s Story in the Age of Obamacare
...Dr. Shaun Carpenter, 41, is a board certified emergency physician in the New Orleans area. He was part of a rescue team that helped evacuate critical patients during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Dr. Carpenter is a family man, father of three children with another on the way. He also owns his own business, a private medical practice, and has several patents pending for wound-healing products. Carpenter says that hospitals tend to treat ER physicians as independent contractors, so he was not allowed to join his hospital’s group health insurance policy. He and his family elected to obtain coverage through his wife’s employer. Shaun Carpenter is also a patient. A few years ago he was diagnosed with a serious blood disorder called hereditary hemochromatosis....

...Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act, came packaged with lofty promises. President Obama said his law was supposed to make denials of insurance based on pre-existing conditions a thing of the past. President Obama specifically promised that Americans would no longer be denied coverage based on pre-existing conditions, along with promising that if we like our doctors and current health care plans, we can keep them.

So imagine Dr. Carpenter’s shock when he received the news that he and his family were losing their health insurance at the end of this year.

“I was at my mother-in-law’s birthday party last week when she asked me, ‘What are you gonna do about health insurance?’” She told him that his wife’s employer is sending out letters informing its staff that it is dropping their Blue Cross Blue Shield health plans.

Carpenter liked the Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance plan that he and his family were on. It was stable and provided excellent care for many years through several illnesses.

His wife’s employer has dropped these plans due to Obamacare. “Yes, absolutely,” Carpenter says....