Live Blog: Wednesday's Hearing on HealthCare.gov Problems

Sebelius: "I am as frustrated and angry as anyone." (Melina Mara/Post)
LIVE: HealthCare.gov hearing

  1. Wall Street Journal (blog) ‎
    The Obama administration's top health official, Kathleen Sebelius, on Wednesday is expected to blame contractors for some of the problems ...

    Live Blog: Wednesday’s Hearing on HealthCare.gov Problems

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    The Obama administration’s top health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, on Wednesday in testimony before a House committee is expected to blame contractors for some of the problems with the federal health-insurance website, HealthCare.gov, and to defend herself against calls that she resign. The hearing started at 9 a.m.
    • Rep. Bruce Braley (D., Iowa) asks how committed Sebelius is to having the website fully functioning by Dec. 1. She says that she has committed to that date because that’s been the assessment of the team of tech experts which examined the site and made up a long list of problems that must be fixed.
      There’s no confidence in that date “until we deliver on that date,” Sebelius says. “And that’s on me.”
    • “We intend to invite them back,” she said, but noted that won’t be happening until the website is working well. “We don’t want to do that until we are confidenct that they will have a different experience.”
    • Secretary Sebelius acknowledges that there is going to have to be an effort to convince early, frustrated shoppers to come back to HealthCare.gov and sign up for insurance. In particular, the administration is going to target younger, healthy people to sign up since they’re needed to help cover the costs of older, sicker people who are more likely to brave the website to get coverage.
    • Under questioning from Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Sebelius reiterates that CMS chief Tavenner made the decision to disable the anonymous browsing feature on HealthCare.gov (which has since been restored).
      “I did not make the decision,” Sebelius said.
    • Sebelius says “I don’t know” if an individual can currently apply for a hardship exemption from the individual mandate on HealthCare.gov, in response to a question from Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia. He says that people can’t because the administration still hasn’t finalized the form people need to fill out to claim the exemption.
    • At a September hearing ahead of the launch, Mr. Cohen said:  "We may encounter some bumps when open enrollment begins but we'll solve them." Read the full story from Sept. 19: "Pricing Glitch Afflicts Rollout of Online Health Exhanges"
    • Statement from Mitt Romney released amid hearing: "In the years since the Massachusetts health care law went into effect nothing has changed my view that a plan crafted to fit the unique circumstances of a single state should not be grafted onto the entire country. Beyond that, had President Obama actually learned the lessons of Massachusetts health care, millions of Americans would not lose the insurance they were promised they could keep, millions more would not see their premiums skyrocket, and the installation of the program would not have been a frustrating embarrassment."
    • Sebelius said that she asked Jeffrey Zients to take over the cleanup process. Asked by Rep. Michael Burgess (R., Texas) if she’ll make him available for questioning by the committee, Sebelius doesn’t say she will. She says “he is volunteering his services to us for a time.”
    • Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina wants to make sure that everyone knows what the House Energy and Commerce Twitter handle is. He puts up a little sign next to his name plate. It’s @energycommerce. Follow them now, OK?
    • Republican Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania asks whether Sebelius knows how many people will receive cancellation notices from insurers who will be phasing out current insurance policies as of November 1.
      She doesn’t. Sebelius notes that there are about 12 million people who buy insurance in the individual insurance market. Some of those people have plans that are grandfathered in under the new law, but others don’t. It’s the people in the latter category who are getting those cancellation notices in the mail.
    • After laughing about the "faux anger" of Republicans about the website's problems, Democrat Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania asks about enrollment. Sebelius said that they always thought that they would have pretty low enrollment in the first month because that's what happened in Massachusetts a few years ago when they launched a similar insurance program.
      But given the "flawed" launch of HealthCare.gov, there's no question "it will be a very small number," she said.
    • Republican Mike Rogers of Michigan raises concerns about security testing of the site on all of the new or revised software code that is being used to patch the site to fix it. For the most part, Sebelius can’t really answer his questions but says she’ll get back to him.
      He asks if she’ll take down the site so a full security test to be completed. “No sir,” Sebelius said, adding that there is daily and weekly security monitoring of the site. 
    • Sebelius tells Republican Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska that there’s a good reason why the administration hasn’t released enrollment data yet. “We don’t have any reliable data on enrollment, which is why we haven’t released it to date,” she said. The only number they have released is that 700,000 nationally have finished the process of finding out whether they are eligible for subsidies.
      “The system isn’t functioning so we’re not getting reliable data,” she said.
    • Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado asks about the contractors and whether they shared their concerns that the site wouldn't be ready on Oct. 1. Sebelius says that the contractors said in September they were ready to go and as they noted last week in last's weeks hearing that they did not suggest that the site should be delayed.
      "I don't think it's valuable at this point (to be) pointing blame," Sebelius said. (She may be in the minority on this one.) Sebelius said she's focused on getting the health exchange up and running properly.
    • Republican Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, asks about testing and whether there was enough of it before HealthCare.gov went live. Last week, contractors at another hearing complained that there wasn't enough end-to-end testing of the system. So while individual parts of the website worked, when they were put together, things didn't work that well.
      "We did not adequately do end-to-end testing," Sebelius said. "The products weren’t locked and loaded into the system until the third week of September."
    • Democratic Rep. Gene Green of Texas asks about the cancellation issue, albeit in a much more positive way than his Republican colleauges.
      Sebelius notes that individuals have always had a harder time trying to buy insurance on the individual market but that is easier now under the new health law. Plans have to cover more conditions and people can’t be denied coverage because of preexisting conditons.
      “This market has always been the Wild West,” Sebelius said. “They have choices they’ve never had before.”
    • Republican Rep. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania asks who made the decision to turn off the browsing feature on HealthCare.gov. Sebelius said that she was aware “we were paring back features” of the site. She said that CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner made the decision to dial back several planned features of the site, including the “shop and browse” feature as well as the Spanish-language version of the site.
      Eliminating the anonymous shopping feature of the site led to many of the early problems with HealthCare.gov, because people had to sign up for accounts to look at rates. High volumes of people trying to create accounts crashed that part of the site.
    • Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel of New York compares Republicans at the hearing to Chicken Little, running around claiming that the sky is falling. He asks how the tactics of Republicans to try to impede or delay the law have affected efforts to roll out the law.
      Sebelius says that people need a lot of information about how the law will affect them, which is why she is “so disappointed the site isn’t fully functioning.”
      “It is the law and people have benefits and rights under that law so they can make good choices for themselves,” she said.
    • Eshoo also asked about the contracts and whether it was possible to assess any penalty against the two main contractors, QSSI and CGI, for building a website and underlying technology that didn't work particularly well.
      "We expect our contract partners to fulfill their obligations," Sebelius said.
      Notably, she said that while there isn't a built-in penalty in the contract, "paying for work that isn't complete isn't something we'll do," she said. HHS officials haven't previously talked publicly about financially penalizing the contractors.
    • Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat whose California congressional district includes parts of Silicon Valley, notes that HHS officials had previously expressed confidence that the site would work on Oct. 1. Now that date had been pushed back to Nov. 30. Did Sebelius have confidence in the new date?
      "The assessment we have made is that it will take the end of November for an optimally preforming website," Sebelius said. "I have confidence, but I know that it isn’t fair to ask the American people to take our word on it."
    • Rep. Ralph Hall (R., Texas) asks another question about how much the administration has been spending on the site, including repairs.
      Sebelius doesn’t provide a clear answer on that. She says that the two major contractors, QSSI – a unit of UnitedHealth Group – and CGI Federal have contracts with obligated funds through at least 2014. So far, CGI has received $104 million of a $197 million contract.
      Hall cuts her off with a totally unrelated comment asking her where she was born in Kansas (she was born in Ohio) so we don’t get any more details about the QSSI contract.
    • Rep. Frank Pallone (D., N.J.) says the uproar about the cancellation of insurance policies is a "red herring" and that there's no there there. "Insurance companies are canceling lousy policies with high prices," Pallone says.
      • 10:44 am
      • by Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky
      • Add a Comment
      Some more details on Michelle Snyder, from our story Monday: At CMS, in one camp were computer experts reporting to a veteran CMS official, Michelle Snyder, who were among the first to recognize the scale of the problems facing the website, current and former officials say, such as errors in the calculation of insurance prices and eligibility determinations. But a separate policy arm built the road map for what the exchange needed to accomplish, with strained communication with its computer counterparts; that team reported to Gary Cohen, a former California lawyer.
    • Barton goes back to questioning on some privacy issues that he brought up last week with the contractors. It's about some language in the source code of the website that seems to suggest applicants information may not be protected and can be shared.
      Sebelius says that the language on the site shouldn't be there and will be removed. "I do absolutely commit to protecting the privacy of the American people," she said.
    • After the somewhat tortured Wizard of Oz reference ( Sebelius was previously the governor of Kansas), Barton says there seems to be a parallel universe at the hearing, with Democrats thinking  "things are great," while Republicans disagree.
    • Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas) tells Sebelius, who is from Kansas, "We're not in Kansas anymore. Some might say we're in the Wizard of Oz land."
    • Rep. Blackburn wants to know who was responsible for the failed website. After some back and forth, Sebelius says that Michelle Snyder, chief operating officer of CMS.
      “Michelle Synder was responsible for the debacle?” Blackburn says?
      “Michelle Synder was not responsible for the debacle,” Sebelius says, adding: "Hold me accountable for the debacle. I'm responsible."
    • Rep. Blackburn asked if Obama is keeping his promise to let consumers keep their insurance plans if they like them. Sebelius: “Yes, he is.”
    • How much has HealthCare.gov cost so far, asks Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.)?
      “So far we have spent about $118 million on the website itself,” Sebelius says. They’ve spent another $56 million on other technology to support the website. 
    • Waxman tosses a few softball questions at Sebelius that allows her to talk about the individual insurance market and how the health law provides new protections that people who buy private insurance have never had before. That includes the end of dening coverage for pre-existing conditions. 
    • Sebelius faces an uphill battle as cancellation notices go out to many Americans. On Wednesday, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler gave Obama's pledge that "no one will take away" your health plan four Pinocchios.
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