The Secretary for Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is appearing before the House Committee for Energy and Commerce this morning to talk about the federal health insurance exchange website HealthCare.gov. Representatives have all but guaranteed that it won’t be a pleasant chat as politicians try to identify who is at fault and assign blame for the errors that have stymied most users who want to sign up for insurance.
In the run-up to the hearing this morning, it might be helpful to review some of the news that’s transpired in the past whirlwind of a week. Here are three areas where there have been new developments.
In case you’re keeping score: Executives representing government contractors, CGI Federal and QSSI/Optum — part of UnitedHealthcare — lay blame for HealthCare.gov’s errors at the feet of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. They said it failed to allocate enough time to test all the components of the website together. CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner returned the compliment by blaming CGI Federal in her testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee. She said the lead contractor on the project “failed to meet expectations.” But she did apologize to Americans for the problems, so that might be well received by Sebelius’ questioners tomorrow.
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The tech surge: Jeffrey Zients is leading a group of health IT companies to tackle the varied problems on the federal insurance exchange that have prevented people from signing up for health insurance. It has set a deadline of the end of November to fix most of the errors. QSSI is the lead contractor in this project. Zients has assured we’ll get regular updates on the site’s progress. It’s come under fire for trying to fix problems while the site remains open. Verizon’s data center to verify eligibility for participating in the federal exchange went down over the weekend, which seemed to prove that point.
Number crunching: The House committee has been seeking to quantify how many have signed up for health insurance through the federal exchange. They are likely to seek answers from Sebelius. The hearing is likely to move beyond HealthCare.gov and shift to other aspects of the Affordable Care Act that have caused news in the past week. The biggest source of consternation in recent days has been news that health insurers are dropping members from plans that don’t comply with the Affordable Care Act. That seems to contradict the administration’s message that people could retain the plan they liked.
