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Politico reports:

People who can’t finish the online signup for health insurance by midnight today because of website problems may get extra time to finalize their application and still get covered by Jan. 1, according to a message posted on HealthCare.gov early this afternoon.

“We don’t want you to miss out if you’ve been trying to enroll,” the HHS message says. People who ran into “delays caused by heavy traffic to HealthCare.gov, maintenance periods, or other issues with our systems” should not worry. “We may be able to help you get covered as soon as January 1,” it says.

An insurance source said federal exchange officials have informed the industry that exceptions and assistance will be given to people who “legitimately tried to apply” and couldn’t finish. The source said that help isn’t meant to be a blanket extension of a deadline that’s already been pushed back twice. The insurers expect to get fuller details about the precise breadth of the po

People who can’t finish the online signup for Obamacare health insurance by midnight today because of website problems can seek extra time to finalize their application and still get covered by Jan. 1, according to a message posted on HealthCare.gov early this afternoon.

“We don’t want you to miss out if you’ve been trying to enroll,” the HHS message says. People who ran into “delays caused by heavy traffic to HealthCare.gov, maintenance periods, or other issues with our systems” should not worry. “We may be able to help you get covered as soon as January 1,” it says.

Pretty soon they’ll say even if you signed up after January 1, you will be covered retroactively for things that happened before. Why not? Get covered!

 

Reuters has a detailed report on the final deadline to sign up for Obamacare, and how we got here:

Tuesday is a moment of truth for Obamacare.

It marks the final deadline for most Americans to sign up for health insurance under President Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, if they want coverage starting on January 1.

If enough people – and the right mix of young and old – do not enroll, the ambitious program designed to provide health benefits to millions of uninsured and under-insured Americans risks eventually unraveling.

Unraveled. There’s that word again. What a great title for a book.

The article has some discussions of the role Marilyn Tavenner played:

Tavenner’s anxiety – more than a year ahead of the planned launch of the exchanges – spurred concerns among industry and advocacy groups, which publicly questioned whether the multiple government agencies involved in the effort would be able to pull it off.

The White House was closely briefed on the issues. Tavenner was cleared to visit White House officials involved in the project 425 times from December 2009 to June 2013, including several meetings with Obama, visitor logs show. The White House said later that Obama knew only the broad picture, not details of the effort.

The administration also sought industry feedback, but some groups complained their warnings fell on deaf ears.

And detailed records of when people in the Administration, including POTUS, knew about possible problems:

Tavenner assured the panel that software development and testing for HealthCare.gov would be done by September 2013.

A week later, on April 18, Tavenner’s boss, Katherine Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, delivered a similar message to a House budget panel. She said work on the insurance exchanges was “up and running, and we are on track.”

These confident public displays masked a different reality.

Earlier that month, Tavenner and Sebelius had been briefed by an outside consultant about a broad array of risks threatening the October 1 launch of HealthCare.gov.

The report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co depicted a tangled, leaderless bureaucracy managing the effort and warned of possible system failures that materialized barely six months later. It blamed tight deadlines, insufficient testing and the absence of a “single, empowered decision-making authority.”

The report sounded the alarm. Attendees at high-level briefings that followed included Todd Park, the White House chief technology officer, and Brian Sivak, the HHS technology whiz brought in to jumpstart health technology systems.

The consultants met with Tavenner and Jeanne Lambrew, Obama’s healthcare adviser who, two decades earlier, had worked on a failed healthcare overhaul spearheaded by then-first lady Hillary Clinton.

Obama also was briefed on McKinsey’s findings, White House press secretary Jay Carney later acknowledged. White House logs show two McKinsey consultants arriving for a meeting on April 8, but the company would not comment on the visit.

The first public hints of official concern about possible problem’s with Obamacare’s technology actually came on March 22 – before Tavenner and Sebelius had expressed their confidence to Congress and just as McKinsey’s findings began to make their way through the administration.

And then things fell apart:

Chao wrote to colleagues on July 16 to say that he feared CGI could “crash the plane at takeoff,” according to e-mails released by Republican congressional investigators. CGI has declined to comment.

Alarming assessments streamed in from CMS technical advisers.

“We believe that our entire build is in jeopardy,” wrote one, referring to the elaborate website construction.

E-mails flew back and forth between Chao and the contractors until a CGI vice president assured Chao, “I am on top of this.”

For Chao, meeting the October 1 deadline to have the website functioning well had become a matter of personal honor. Along with Tavenner, he had given sworn testimony to a congressional committee and assured skeptical members that the agency was on track.

On July 20, Chao urged his staff to redouble its effort and sent a link to his testimony.

“I wanted to share this with you so you can see and hear that both Marilyn and I, under oath, stated we are going to make October 1,” Chao wrote. He urged them to “put yourself in my shoes” and help him make those words the truth.

And five days before the deadline, the site crashed with 500 simultaneous users:

At CMS, system tests during the third week of September were “not good and not consistent at all,” one employee told Chao in an e-mail. At a time when the website should have been able to accommodate 10,000 simultaneous users, it was crashing with 500 simulated users on it – about a week before the site’s scheduled launch. Contractor CGI called the glitches “part of the tuning exercise.”

Chao shot off an all-caps message to his staff, ordering that tests continue, just five days before the deadline.

At the White House, technology officer Park questioned Chao about the website’s progress. If Park sensed disaster, he gave no hint.

“Massive kudos again for the incredible progress the team is making!” Park wrote in an e-mail.

 

Now it’s the March deadline that *really* matters.

Today keeps being referred to as Obamacare’s “deadline.” But it’s worth being clear about what kind of deadline it actually is.

Today’s the deadline to sign up for health insurance on HealthCare.gov if you want that insurance to start by January 1st. But that’s it. If you don’t sign up today and instead sign up on Friday, or next Tuesday, your insurance will kick in a bit after January 1st. There’s no difference in premiums. There’s no difference in plans. There are no penalties.

Indeed, today very much isn’t the deadline to sign up for insurance that protects you from the individual mandate. The mandate only kicks in when people have a coverage gap of longer than three consecutive months during the year. That means that buying insurance any time before the end of March is good enough to avoid the penalty.

Tonight’s cutoff mostly matters for people who saw their plans cancelled and want to make sure their replacement coverage begins on Jan. 1 so they don’t have a coverage gap in 2014. For everyone else — and for the law itself — it’s not a very significant deadline.

Of course, if you are not insured in March, you have to pay the penalty/tax/mandate/whatever.

 

From his interview in WaPo, Snowden made a direct reference to one of the causes of the American Revolution–pernicious general warrants that allowed British custom agents to search wherever they damn pleased:

In the Moscow interview, Snowden said, “What the government wants is something they never had before,” adding: “They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?”

Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”

“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.

The Declaration (curiously) does not contain any direct references to prohibition on the general warrants, also known as writs of assistance, but this grievance indirectly refers to them:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

(Maybe the Fourth of July was the first Festivus, with the airing of grievances!?)

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason shortly before July 4, 1776 directly discusses the general warrants:

SEC. 10. That general warrants, whereby an officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive and ought not to be granted.

In a fascinating interview with WaPo, Edward Snowden walks through his thought process to leak the documents. His discussion about his oath to the Constitution is relevant:

In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.

“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”

In other words, Snowden suggests that his oath to the Constitution–and for the NSA to act constitutionally–trumps any contractual promise he made of secrecy.

During my orientation (onboarding in govspeak) when I started working for the DoD in 2005, I signed Standard Form 312, the “Classified Information Nondisclosure Act.” The relevant provision states:

. I hereby agree that I will never divulge classified information to anyone unless: (a) I have officially verified that the recipient has been properly authorized by the United States Government to receive it; or (b) I have been given prior written notice of authorization from the United States Government Department or Agency (hereinafter Department or Agency) responsible for the classification of information or last granting me a security clearance that such disclosure is permitted.

The form says nothing about the Constitution.

But, during the same session that I signed Form 312, I also gave an oath to the Constitution, codified at 5 U.S.C. s. 3331:

An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” This section does not affect other oaths required by law.

I suppose Snowden could see the oath to the Constitution to trump any contractual promises he made to maintain confidentiality. Though, the last sentence says, clearly “This section does not affect other oaths required by law.” (I don’t recall that part being in the oath card I read).

But the last bit is interesting. It says that if your oath to the Constitution conflicts with some other promise you made, the Constitution must fall  to the side. Imagine that. The Code of Federal Regulations has supremacy over the Constitution!

So, in this sense, Snowden is wrong. His fealty to the NSA must be subordinate to the United States Constitution.

I could not find any other commentary on the meaning of the last line, so I’ll take it at its face.

What a sad provision for all civil servants with clearances to have to swear to.