Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), will testify Tuesday morning before the House Ways and Means Committee about the administration's implementation of the Affordable Care Act. A livestream of the hearing will be available at C-SPAN when the hearing...
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”
Republicans said Sunday they intend to press Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the Obama administration's troubled launch of healthcare.gov, the online portal to buy insurance, and concerns about the privacy of information that applicants submit under the new system. The Obama administration will face intense pressure next week to be more forthcoming about how many people have actually succeeded in enrolling for coverage in the new insurance markets. Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner is to testify during a House hearing on Tuesday, followed Wednesday by Sebelius before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The officials will also be grilled on how such crippling technical problems could have gone undetected prior to the website's Oct. 1 launch. "The incompetence in building this website is staggering," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the second ranking Republican on the panel and an opponent of the law.Democratic Senator Jeanee Shaheen of New Hampshire, a supporter of the Affordable Care Act, told Face the Nation on Sunday that “The rollout has been a disaster,” and proposed that the enrollment period be extended beyond the March 31st deadline. (h/t Washington Free Beacon) Indeed, other Senate Democrats have joined Shaheen in support of such a proposal. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has also joined with Republicans in calling for a one-year delay of the individual mandate.
The troubled HealthCare.gov website will be running properly by late November, said Jeffrey Zients, President Obama's appointee to fix the problems that have plagued the site since its Oct. 1 opening. "By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users," Zients said Friday. "The HealthCare.gov site is fixable. It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed." Zients, former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, was called in Monday to help with the site until it is fixed. He helped with other website glitches during Obama's first term. QSSI, a division of UnitedHealth Group, will serve as a general contractor to oversee the effort, he said. Their existing contract for the site has been renegotiated.Philip Klein over at Washington Examiner was on a conference call this afternoon with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Jeff Zients, and offers a few additional pieces of information. (This is only an excerpt of several he mentions):
Earlier today, the House Republican Conference released a video highlighting actual excerpts from an online chat between a potential customer and a customer service representative for Healthcare.gov. The individual who experienced the chat session was Adrian Smith, 34, of New Jersey. Smith released the following statement to confirm his story with Healthcare.gov: “Thank you for your inquiry about my experience on October 11, 2013 using the healthcare.gov support chat. I can confirm that the excerpts used in the YouTube video and the full transcript posted at www.gop.gov/yourstory is authentic and exactly as I experienced on October 11. I am a resident of New Jersey and work for a higher education institution. I am not employed by the Republican Party. “After a recent job transition, my family needed to make an informed decision about healthcare options for the approaching year. After repeated registration problems, I was able to create a healthcare.gov account on October 11 and began the tedious process of entering specific personal information about our family. Each page resulted in a long wait before being able to proceed. At some point in the process it appeared that our family information became corrupted and I was unable to proceed with the family profile.
Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously. Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead. When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project.Later in the report, it indicates that "U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has said that the government expected HealthCare.gov to draw 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users but that the site was overwhelmed by up to five times as many users in the first week." CGI, which worked on the shopping and enrollment applications, reportedly built it to accommodate 60,000 concurrent users, according to the Post.
The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election.
Two weeks into the launch of the Obamacare website, issues continue to be unearthed and the administration remains short on answers. A few interesting paragraphs from this piece in Politico last night: At a summit of health care advocacy groups at the Newseum on Tuesday, the audience...
As the Obamacare website continues to struggle with issues since its rollout, more and more information is emerging that tells us the problems extend beyond “glitches.” The NY Times published a lengthy article over the weekend, detailing more of the issues as viewed by various sources....
More technology experts are warning that glitches in the Obamacare system could take longer to iron out, as many remain unable to get beyond the earliest steps in the signup process. From Politico: The glitch-plagued Obamacare rollout might be just the beginning: A series of potential technology...
Remember, we had to pass the law to find out what was in it....
Obamacare website problems part lack of planning, part Obamacare itself....
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw development of the [Obamacare] site, declined to make any of its IT experts available for interviews. CGI Group Inc, the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov, is "declining to comment at this time," said spokeswoman Linda Odorisio. Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems. For instance, when a user tries to create an account on HealthCare.gov, which serves insurance exchanges in 36 states, it prompts the computer to load an unusually large amount of files and software, overwhelming the browser, experts said. If they are right, then just bringing more servers online, as officials say they are doing, will not fix the site.
Since its initial rollout on Tuesday, the Healthcare.gov system has been plagued by technical glitches and long wait times. Some have tried to offer potential reasons, explaining that the system must communicate with many other systems and that's further complicated by the fact that the...
First the Teamsters, UFCW, and UNITE-HERE expressed their belated disapproval of the ObamaCare Tax monstrosity, and now the IRS employee union wants to be exempted from Obamacare. The Teamsters, et al., made points that we've been making since 2009, points they willfully ignored and openly...
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