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The head of the US agency responsible for the troubled new government-run healthcare website apologised yesterday for the difficulty people are having in obtaining insurance, but blamed the portal’s woes on contractors and high traffic.
Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said the website faces “complex technical issues” four weeks after it opened for enrollment.
“We know that consumers are eager to purchase this coverage. And to the millions of Americans who have attempted to use Healthcare.gov to shop and enroll in healthcare coverage, I want to apologise to you that the website has not worked as well as it should,” Tavenner told a congressional hearing.
Tavenner’s testimony to the US House of Representatives Ways & Means Committee is the Obama administration’s first formal statement to Congress about the challenges facing Healthcare.gov. Tavenner’s boss, US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, is scheduled to testify before another House oversight panel on Wednesday.
The website is a lynchpin of President Barack Obama’s programme to provide healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured Americans under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare. Republicans have seized on the website’s technical glitches as evidence of broader problems with the law and renewed their call for a delay in the federal mandate that most Americans obtain insurance for 2014 or pay a penalty.
At yesterday’s hearing, written testimony submitted by Tavenner, a nurse and former hospital company executive, was at odds with sworn testimony from two contractors who told the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week that CMS bears ultimate responsibility for the website’s performance.
“CMS has a track record of successfully overseeing the many contractors our programmes depend on to function. Unfortunately, a subset of those contracts for Healthcare.gov have not met expectations,” Tavenner told the Ways and Means Committee, one of at least three Republican-controlled House panels investigating the problem-plagued debut of Obama’s signature domestic policy.
Republicans have long opposed the policy because they consider it an unwarranted expansion of the federal government.
Sebelius, who has faced Republican calls for her resignation, will appear before the Energy and Commerce Committee today. That panel yesterday posted her testimony, which was nearly identical to Tavenner’s.
