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HealthCare.gov Can't Handle Appeals of Errors
PapayaSF writes "The Washington Post reports that roughly 22,000 people have claimed they were charged too much, steered into the wrong insurance program, or denied coverage, but the HealthCare.gov website cannot handle appeals. They've filled out seven-page forms and mailed them to a federal contractor's office in Kentucky, where they were scanned and entered, but workers at CMS cannot read them because that part of the system has not been built. Other missing aspects are said to have higher priorities: completing the electronic payment system for insurers, the connections with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust coverage to accommodate major changes such as new babies. People with complaints about mistakes have been told to 'return to the Web site and start over.'"
Maybe they should have hired actual coders to do the job.
Yeah, $634 million and counting (as of... way back in 2013-10) ceartainly isn't enough to develop a website. What price would you have us pay, ridiculous, partisan one?
sig: sauer
If you created this huge of a disaster you would have lost the contract, and most likely have to pay back any payments made. You would also be on a virtual blacklist as being completely incompetent.
But here in the federal government.. it doesn't work that way. You get rewarded.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... I personally know several people, in several states that have not established their own exchanges, who have signed up for "Obamacare" using the federal site and are now taking advantage of much better coverage, at a much lower price, than they could have received before the ACA went into effect. The problems are real and clearly need to be fixed, but beware of confirmation bias--every single problem is going to get lots of press, while successes go unnoticed because they don't fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" paradigm.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
And didn't 3 guys make a working front-end site in a few weeks (the part that lets you browse for coverage). This project went quite well if the goal was to funnel $600 MM into the pockets of well-connected contracting firms, but otherwise it's hard to see how anyone could fail so badly at what's effectively a storefront website. (Yes, the backend's a bitch, and 3 guys couldn't do it in a month, but it's not that hard).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Single-payer universal nationalized healthcare is right around the corner.
Just a few more insurance rate hikes and government regulatory fiascos should do the trick.
I used to be against it. Now it looks like a blessing.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
that the government keeps hiring firms like Accenture. This is not the first time they have been involved in failed government IT projects. Here is just one of many examples: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Accenture has learned how to game the system. A system that, for large scale government projects, is very difficult to break into. The contract language makes it very difficult, or impossible, to bid on if you are a small company.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans know that the procurement system is broken and yet neither one of them have offered any concrete solutions.
The failure of Healthcare.gov is not news. It's business as usual. The difference is that healthcare.gov affects many people more directly so it has higher visibility. Many of the other failed projects do not have the same direct impact so they appear in the news for a little while and are then swept under the rug.
Probably would have cost less money to just put up a web page that says; "We can't help you, but we will gladly take your money."
Not really, as the "take your money" part also doesn't work reliably.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Maybe if they got 9 women pregnant they could have had a baby in 1 month.
Yeah, $634 million and counting...
Nope. It is more like $174 million and counting (still plenty of scratch though).
For those that don't follow the link (and are unfamiliar with government contracting practices - which is most everybody): CGI Federal was a successful bidder on an HHS umbrella contract in 2007 (Bush Administration, in other words) to provide IT services to HHS, along with IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., and Quality Software Services. These same four companies were the bidders (under said long term contract) for the specific task of site implementation, and the $634 million figure is for all of the services from CGI Federal under that contract. Only 25% of that total, dating back to 2007, was for the website.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Where did you hear that?
'The health department has provided some information on spending. It paid $174 million on contracts tied to Healthcare.gov and supporting technology through August, a sum that jumped to $319 million by the end of October, according to Albright of the Medicare agency.
The figures suggest a late surge in spending before the website’s opening. Only $18 million was spent in October, Albright said in an e-mail.
The Medicare and Medicaid agency owes $630 million for the work through September, Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the health office, has said. The agency didn’t provide updated information on the amount owed, or obligated, for work since the October debut of healthcare.gov.'
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
Obama Reid and Pelosi jammed this law through with absolutely NO Republican input (Republicans wer physically locked out of the rooms where the law was negotiated and written and heve never even been able to get the names of the lobbyists and lawyers and coproprations who were in the meetings with the Democrats, so they are under NO obligation to support it. That said, however, in every year since the GOP took back the House in 2010 they have had SYMBOLIC votes to repeal Obamacare (symbolic because Reid will never bring any such bill for even a VOTE in the senate (to protect his "moderates" from having to take a stand)) and then they have voted to give Obama all the funds to implement Obamacare (much to the outrage of the TEA Partiers).
Obamacare has been fully-funded; the GOP has failed to repeal it and failed to de-fund it... this is FACT
In those states where GOP governors have not driven their states further into debt by having their states implement state exchanges, those GOP governors are faithfully following Obama's law. If you think this is "wrong" or "unfair" or a form of "sabotage", do not blame any Republican... blame the Democrats who wrote the law with provisions that specifically enabled this choice of actions. The GOP is obeying the law that the Democrats wrote, Obama Reid and Pelosi are just incompetent.
i'm pretty sure they got a decent version up and running in a long weekend...I actually used it to scan available plans in my state, the insurers involved, and to run what-if numbers quickly.
they did a real bang-up job.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
I have my own insurance for the first time in my life because of the ACA and this site; for free. I couldn't be happier.
Maybe someday you'll have a name, and a personality. Then people can take your anecdotes seriously.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I hate to feed a troll, considering how easy it is to unwind your political spin, but I just wanted to point out that we currently have death panels NOW. They are insurance companies, and the death toll they have amassed in documented neglect or denial of service absolutely dwarfs "thousands per year". There is abundant research on this; please do some.
Different AC who has also used the site to get coverage after being laid off. It worked as well as any modern moderately intimate "create an account" web experience. More used friendly (and less intrusive) than the average online job application.
I happen to live in one of the Red states that had been trying torpedo "ObamaCare", fwiw.
I hope you don't are never forced to resort to healthcare.gov, and I am sure there are plenty if people who have problems with it (like any other online or off line process), but it isn't the absolute failure that it is made out to be.
I'd like to see any private project do better when 50% of both management and customers are hoping for failure.