Medicare site chief blames outside contractors for glitches

The official most responsible for the rollout of the Obamacare health-insurance exchange website told a House committed that outside contractors were responsible for the website woes, not her staff.

Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in her testimony during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on 29 October blamed outside contractors for the mess.

The consumer website has been hit by delays, error messages and hang-ups preventing many people from completing applications.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, led by Tavenner, had been tasked with building and running the exchange website that was supposed to let people compare and buy health plans, aided by tax credits.

Apologising to  Americans, yesterday Tavenner said the exchange's flaws were ''not acceptable'' and vowed the healthcare.gov site ''can and would'' be fixed.

She told the committee that improvements were being seen every week.

She added, the agency relied on ''private sector contractors, just as it did to administer aspects of Medicare. Unfortunately, a subset of those contracts for healthcare.gov had failed to meet expectations, she said.

She added, an ''initial wave of interest stressed'' the system, built under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, but she would not say how many people might have been left out due to flaws with the exchange.

Tavenner said that ''nearly 700,000 applications have been submitted to the federal and state marketplaces'' in the last four weeks.

According to her, the number who had actually enrolled in health insurance plans would not be available until mid-November. She said the initial number was expected to be small.

Ways and Means Committee, chairman, representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan, said that at least 146,000 Michigan residents had recently received notices that their current insurance policies would be cancelled due to the coverage not meeting requirements of the new health care law.

In fact, according to Camp on the basis of  what little information the administration had disclosed, it turned out that more people had received cancellation notices for their health care plans this month than had enrolled in the exchanges.

Tavenner said that existing insurance policies were, in many cases, inferior to the new policies they could get and in compliance with the law, new policies would provide more benefits and pay a larger share of medical costs than many existing policies.