Last week, the House
Energy and Commerce committee held
the first of what is likely to be many hearings on how the rollout of Healthcare.gov went so wrong. Today, the House
Ways and Means Committee takes its turn
with scheduled testimony from Marilyn Tavenner,
administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs
Healthcare.gov.
Here’s what you need to know:
1 Watch the hearing here:
Live streaming video by Ustream
2 Read the committee’s background.
3 Look at Tavenner’s testimony from August before the House Energy and
Commerce Committee. At the time, she said, “CMS has already completed the
majority of the development of the services required to support open enrollment
beginning on October 1, 2013, for coverage starting January 1, 2014. CMS has
been conducting systems tests since October 2012 and will complete end-to-end
testing before open enrollment begins.”
How will she respond to questions about
that now?
4 See media previews of today’s
hearing.
Sarah
Kliff at
Wonkblog writes:
Marilyn Tavenner is
head of a $1 trillion-a-year agency that provides Medicare and Medicaid
coverage to 90 million Americans — and is overseeing the
implementation of President Obama’s health-care law.As recently as late September, she predicted
that the Affordable Care Act would have a smooth launch on Oct. 1.“I talked to Marilyn a lot before the rollout,
and I think she was surprised by how it’s gone,” said Thomas Scully, a Medicare
administrator under President George W. Bush and a longtime colleague of Tavenner’s. “She seemed pretty confident it would work.”On Tuesday, Tavenner
will be the first Obama administration official to testify before Congress
about the efforts of her agency — the Centers for Medicare and Medcaid Services — to implement the 2010 law. The
agency recently hired contractor Quality Software Services Inc. to be the
general manager for the effort to fix the troubled Web site.
Paige
Winfield Cunningham and Jennifer Haberkorn at Politico write:
Eight pages of prepared testimony by CMS
Administrator Marilyn Tavenner shed no new light on
what went wrong with HealthCare.gov or on the internal decision-making
surrounding its construction, but rather her testimony restates the
administration’s plans for fixing it.Tavenner is scheduled to testify Tuesday before the
House Ways and Means Committee about the website launch. According to a copy of
her testimony obtained by POLITICO, a “subset” of contractors that built the
website haven’t met expectations.To address the website’s ongoing challenges,
the agency has updated it several times with new code including bug fixes. It’s
also adding more capacity, fixing signup and log-in problems, and trying to
“stabilize” those parts of the website, allowing for the removal of the virtual
“waiting room,” the testimony says.
And Sheryl Gay
Stolberg at The New
York Times writes:
Ten days before HealthCare.gov opened for
business, Marilyn Tavenner, the obscure federal
bureaucrat whose agency oversaw the creation of the troubled online insurance
marketplace, had a bad omen. It was a Sunday, and her mobile device was on the
fritz, forcing her to go into the office.“It reminded me that I can still be
brought to my knees by a malfunctioning BlackBerry,” she joked in late
September, recounting her technology woes to a group of insurance executives.Nobody at the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services, the
agency Ms. Tavenner runs, is joking now.
