WASHINGTON – Appearing before a House committee, Medicare Chief Marilyn Tavenner apologized for the problems Americans are experiencing with healthcare.gov.
Thirty-six states are using the federal health insurance exchange, which relies on healthcare.gov as the main avenue for shopping and enrolling in the health insurance made available under the Affordable Care Act. The website has been plagued by glitches since it went live on Oct. 1. Ms. Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is the first administration official to appear before Congress to discuss the rollout of the exchanges.
Alicia Ault/IMNG Medical Media
CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner apologized for technical glitches on the healthcare.gov website at the Ways and Means Committee.
"To the millions of Americans who’ve attempted to use healthcare.gov to shop and enroll in health care coverage, I want to apologize to you that the website has not worked as well as it should," Ms. Tavenner said at an Oct. 29 hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee. "I want to assure you that healthcare.gov can and will be fixed."
Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said that "three years should have been enough" time to make sure the website functioned properly, and that the website problems were small compared to overall issues with the ACA [Affordable Care Act]. He said that it appeared that many thousands of Americans were being dropped by their current plans – more, apparently, than were getting signed up for new coverage.
"The numbers I’m hearing from insurers in my home state of Michigan are not good," said Rep. Camp, referring to how many had enrolled in coverage through the exchange there, which is being run in partnership with the state. "In fact, I think I could have a meeting in my office and have all of them fit in it."
When asked by Rep. Camp and other Republicans for details on the numbers of people who have actually enrolled in health insurance via the federal exchange, Ms. Tavenner repeatedly said that those figures would be available in mid-November.
Rep. Camp expressed concerns that given the website problems, it seemed unlikely that the administration would be able to enroll 7 million Americans by late March, and more importantly, to attract large numbers of young and healthy enrollees. Without them, the exchange plans might end up being overly populated with higher-risk, sicker enrollees, he said.
Ms. Tavenner said that premiums were "locked in" for 2014, but that "obviously, the next 6 months of enrollment are critical."
Ways and Means Committee Democrats largely defended the law and said the website would be fixed soon enough. But some were not as quick to apologize for the failures. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) said that while Republican delaying tactics might be harmful, "I recognize that the promise of affordable health care could also be denied through management failure."
He asked Ms. Tavenner whether both the small business exchanges and a Spanish-language version of healthcare.gov would be up and running by November. She said they would.
Ms. Tavenner emphasized that the system is working. "It’s just not working at the speed that we want and at the success rate that we wanted."
At a press briefing the same day, Julie Bataille, a CMS spokeswoman, said the agency had stabilized the problems that consumers were previously having creating accounts on healthcare.gov. After doubling the number of servers and making software enhancements, the agency is now able to process nearly 17,000 registrants per hour through the account creation step with few errors, she said.
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