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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.
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.
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.