The federal official who oversees new health-insurance exchanges apologized publicly Tuesday for the troubled launch of a Web site that is supposed to allow millions of uninsured Americans to buy coverage, but she said the problems are “fixable” and pledged that the site would soon work as promised.
Testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said: “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 Web site has not worked as well as it should. We know how desperately you need affordable coverage.”
Since the site was launched Oct. 1, “we know that the consumer experience has been frustrating for many Americans,” Tavenner said in an opening statement. “This initial experience has not lived up to our expectations . . . and it is not acceptable,” she said. “While these problems will require a lot of hard work, the bottom-line conclusion is this HealthCare.gov site is fixable,” Tavenner added.
She said that 700,000 applications for health insurance have been submitted so far, more than half of them in the federal marketplace. But under questioning, she declined to say how many people have actually been able to enroll. She said those numbers would not be available until mid-November, adding that “we expect the initial number to be small.”
As head of CMS, Tavenner runs a $1 trillion-a-year agency that provides Medicare and Medicaid coverage to 90 million Americans and is overseeing the implementation of President Obama’s signature domestic initiative: the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare.
She is the first Obama administration official to testify before Congress about the launch of the Web site intended to allow millions of Americans to shop for the health insurance that they are required to have starting in 2014.
Tavenner faced a barrage of questions about the site’s botched debut.
In an opening statement, Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the Ways and Means Committee chairman, charged that “while the [Web site] can eventually be fixed, the widespread problems with Obamacare cannot.”
Rep. Sander Levin (Mich.), the top Democrat on the panel, responded, “Democrats want to make the Affordable Care Act work; congressional Republicans don’t.” He said that having failed to defund or derail the act, Republicans have shifted their focus to the Web site’s problems. But, he predicted, “once they get the bugs worked out, it will work well.”
Faced with the site’s disappointing rollout, Tavenner’s agency this month hired contractor Quality Software Services Inc. to be the general manager for the effort to fix HealthCare.gov.
As recently as late September, Tavenner predicted that the Affordable Care Act would have a smooth launch on Oct. 1.
In written testimony submitted to the committee in advance, Tavenner pushed back against allegations that her agency mismanaged the project, suggesting that the difficulties with HealthCare.gov originated with some of the private contractors enlisted to work on the project.
