The newly game HealthCare.gov signed up 29,000 people on Sunday and
Monday, an official familiar with the program said, more than were
enrolled through the federal Obamacare portal in all of October.
But Wednesday, Republicans kick off their pushback campaign in earnest with two hearings on the Affordable Care Act — the first since the administration crossed its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to get the website running smoothly.
GOP members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are highlighting the site’s disastrous launch in its hearing, “The Roll Out of HealthCare.gov: The Limitations of Big Government.”
“By its very design, the federal government may never be efficient or effective or innovative enough to carry out big initiatives like Obamacare, nor should it be,” Chairman Darrell Issa said to open the hearing. “Government should not be picking winners and losers precisely because it has proven to be so bad at it.”
The House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee hearing on ACA challenges will pick at Obamacare’s non-website related wounds as well.
Serious technical challenges also continue to surface.
Despite the apparent turnaround of the consumer experience on the federal website, enrolling on HealthCare.gov is not the same as people actually being covered by insurance policies. For the latter to happen, HealthCare.gov must tell insurers who has signed up, and the consumers must pay their first premium.
Insurance industry officials on Wednesday warned state legislators in town for their annual legislative conference that persistent issues with the enrollment files could threaten their constituents’ coverage if inaccuracies and duplications aren’t fixed before Jan. 1.
“The back-end issues remain not resolved, and consumers’ coverage will be disrupted,” Mark Pratt, a senior vice president with America’s Health Insurance Plans, told the National Conference of State Legislatures meeting.
Industry officials said they’re working closely with Health and Human Services to fix the issues, but they couldn’t predict when they would be resolved.
“We’re all working hard to do it and get it done, but it’s not a small challenge,” said Kim Holland, head of state affairs for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.
Away from Capitol Hill, President Barack Obama is continuing the administration’s new campaign to refocus the narrative on the law’s benefits. Wednesday afternoon, he will address a group of young leaders at the White House Youth Summit and challenge them to use social media and other means to encourage their peers to sign up.
Convincing young adults to get health coverage is crucial to making the Obamacare exchanges financially viable. A robust demographic mix, especially balancing healthy with sick customers, is at least as important as the total number of people who join the rolls so that insurance plans’ risk pools can withstand the higher medical costs of the infirm and elderly.
The administration’s goal is to have about 38 percent of people enrolled on the exchanges come from the 18- to 35-year-old crowd. Analysts expect most of these enrollees to sign up closer to the end of the 2014 open enrollment period next March because they tend to need insurance less urgently. The administration has not released any specific details on enrollees, but some states have shown early success with young adults. Kentucky reported recently that they are 27 percent of its pool, and California reported them as 22.5 percent of its total as of October.
Also on Wednesday, congressional Democrats are formally joining the new Obamacare messaging push with an afternoon press conference on the White House’s theme of the day. A group of women Democrats will highlight the much touted preventive service benefits under the law, which the administration says have already reached more than 105 million Americans, including 47 million women.
Traffic to HealthCare.gov in the first two days since the administration said it had achieved its immediate repair goals has been robust – 1 million on Monday and 950,000 on Tuesday.
The site has remained stable, according to officials with the agency overseeing it, with some help from a new queuing system that can shut overflow traffic into an online waiting room to prevent it from overwhelming the site.
This marks a dramatic improvement from the first several weeks after the site’s Oct. 1 launch, when it was essentially unusable for millions of Americans. Even for much of last month, despite frantic repairs, the portal crashed or froze frequently for many people.
But the real measure of Obamacare success is how many people are signing up. The administration has said that about 100,000 people enrolled in all of the federal and state exchanges in October, with only about a quarter coming through HealthCare.gov. Bloomberg reported that another 100,000 signed up on the federal exchange in November. The report of 29,000 on Sunday and Monday would represent a 10-fold increase over the November daily average
The
enrollment surge follows a round-the-clock effort by federal tech
officials and contractors to make more than 400 software fixes and
hardware upgrades since the site’s disastrous launch.
The site has held up under pressure from about 1
million visitors for two days straight, giving some early tailwinds to
the Obama administration’s effort to reboot the conversation on its
website and Obamacare as a whole.
(Also on POLITICO: Obamacare fix wins applause, but troubles remain)But Wednesday, Republicans kick off their pushback campaign in earnest with two hearings on the Affordable Care Act — the first since the administration crossed its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to get the website running smoothly.
GOP members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are highlighting the site’s disastrous launch in its hearing, “The Roll Out of HealthCare.gov: The Limitations of Big Government.”
“By its very design, the federal government may never be efficient or effective or innovative enough to carry out big initiatives like Obamacare, nor should it be,” Chairman Darrell Issa said to open the hearing. “Government should not be picking winners and losers precisely because it has proven to be so bad at it.”
The House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee hearing on ACA challenges will pick at Obamacare’s non-website related wounds as well.
Serious technical challenges also continue to surface.
Despite the apparent turnaround of the consumer experience on the federal website, enrolling on HealthCare.gov is not the same as people actually being covered by insurance policies. For the latter to happen, HealthCare.gov must tell insurers who has signed up, and the consumers must pay their first premium.
Insurance industry officials on Wednesday warned state legislators in town for their annual legislative conference that persistent issues with the enrollment files could threaten their constituents’ coverage if inaccuracies and duplications aren’t fixed before Jan. 1.
“The back-end issues remain not resolved, and consumers’ coverage will be disrupted,” Mark Pratt, a senior vice president with America’s Health Insurance Plans, told the National Conference of State Legislatures meeting.
Industry officials said they’re working closely with Health and Human Services to fix the issues, but they couldn’t predict when they would be resolved.
“We’re all working hard to do it and get it done, but it’s not a small challenge,” said Kim Holland, head of state affairs for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.
Away from Capitol Hill, President Barack Obama is continuing the administration’s new campaign to refocus the narrative on the law’s benefits. Wednesday afternoon, he will address a group of young leaders at the White House Youth Summit and challenge them to use social media and other means to encourage their peers to sign up.
Convincing young adults to get health coverage is crucial to making the Obamacare exchanges financially viable. A robust demographic mix, especially balancing healthy with sick customers, is at least as important as the total number of people who join the rolls so that insurance plans’ risk pools can withstand the higher medical costs of the infirm and elderly.
The administration’s goal is to have about 38 percent of people enrolled on the exchanges come from the 18- to 35-year-old crowd. Analysts expect most of these enrollees to sign up closer to the end of the 2014 open enrollment period next March because they tend to need insurance less urgently. The administration has not released any specific details on enrollees, but some states have shown early success with young adults. Kentucky reported recently that they are 27 percent of its pool, and California reported them as 22.5 percent of its total as of October.
Also on Wednesday, congressional Democrats are formally joining the new Obamacare messaging push with an afternoon press conference on the White House’s theme of the day. A group of women Democrats will highlight the much touted preventive service benefits under the law, which the administration says have already reached more than 105 million Americans, including 47 million women.
Traffic to HealthCare.gov in the first two days since the administration said it had achieved its immediate repair goals has been robust – 1 million on Monday and 950,000 on Tuesday.
The site has remained stable, according to officials with the agency overseeing it, with some help from a new queuing system that can shut overflow traffic into an online waiting room to prevent it from overwhelming the site.
This marks a dramatic improvement from the first several weeks after the site’s Oct. 1 launch, when it was essentially unusable for millions of Americans. Even for much of last month, despite frantic repairs, the portal crashed or froze frequently for many people.
But the real measure of Obamacare success is how many people are signing up. The administration has said that about 100,000 people enrolled in all of the federal and state exchanges in October, with only about a quarter coming through HealthCare.gov. Bloomberg reported that another 100,000 signed up on the federal exchange in November. The report of 29,000 on Sunday and Monday would represent a 10-fold increase over the November daily average
No comments:
Post a Comment