HHS:Hey,someofoure-mailsCongresswants

HHS: Hey, some of our e-mails Congress wants are missing too

posted at 10:41 am on August 8, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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It’s an epidemic! Or so it seems in the most transparent administration ever, anyway. Congress has been probing the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare, to find out exactly how the Department of Health and Human Services could have botched the job with three and a half years and nearly a billion dollars to spend. Once again, key records that are required to be retained have been deleted before investigators could see them:

A top U.S. healthcare official involved in the botched rollout of the website HealthCare.gov may have deleted some emails that were later sought by Republican congressional investigators, administration officials said on Thursday.

The emails were from a public email account maintained by Marilyn Tavenner, who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agency chiefly responsible for implementing President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law.

What excuse did the Obama administration give? The same excuse as with the IRS:

The letter made no reference to any evidence that Tavenner intentionally hid or destroyed the emails. An administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, attributed the potential loss to “sloppy record keeping”.

Tavenner is no low-level employee from an office in Cincinnati. She ran the agency responsible for the creation of Healthcare.gov and for the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars in its failure. Despite the failure of Healthcare.gov and the disaster of the rollout of the Obama administration’s central policy project, Tavenner still inexplicably remains head of CMS — and perhaps her “sloppy record keeping” might be one reason why.

This isn’t merely inconvenient. It’s a violation of federal records retention law. As a high-ranking politically-appointed official, it’s even more incumbent on Tavenner to abide by these statutes and provide a clear record of her professional communications. Congress has the authority to oversee those operations, and the e-mail record is in the final analysis owned by taxpayers, not Tavenner. She had no business deleting e-mails relating to her job, and Tavenner cannot have been ignorant of those requirements at her level. Deletion of e-mails relating to the failures of ObamaCare has to be presumed to have been deceptive.

Katie Pavlich reports on the response from House Oversight chair Darrell Issa:

“Today’s news that a senior HHS executive destroyed emails relevant to a congressional investigation means that the Obama Administration has lost or destroyed emails for more than 20 witnesses, and in each case, the loss wasn’t disclosed to the National Archives or Congress for months or years, in violation of federal law,” Issa said in response. “It defies logic that so many senior Administration officials were found to have ignored federal record keeping requirements only after Congress asked to see their emails. Just this week, my staff followed up with HHS, who has failed to comply with a subpoena from ten months ago. Even at that point, the administration did not inform us that there was a problem with Ms. Tavenner’s email history. Yet again, we discover that this Administration will not be forthright with the American people unless cornered.”

What does this tell us? It tells us that Congress needs to keep looking into these issues. Bureaucrats don’t keep losing records unless they have a reason to make sure those records have to be kept out of sight.

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Tags: cms, Darrell Issa, Department of Health and Human Services, House Oversight Committee, Marilyn Tavenner, ObamaCare

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NewWHregsprovideObamaCarebailoutfundingfor

New WH regs provide ObamaCare bailout funding for insurers – while bypassing Congress

posted at 2:41 pm on May 21, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Their lips say no no no, but their regulations keep saying yes. Despite denials that the Obama administration intends to spend massive amounts of taxpayer dollars to rescue insurers from losses caused by ObamaCare mandates, the LA Times’ Noah Levey reports that new regulations earmark “billions” of dollars in federal funds to indemnify the indemnifiers. The White House plans to use the funds to entice insurers into keeping premium increases low:

The Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if companies providing coverage through the Affordable Care Act lose money.

The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week. It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall’s congressional elections.

Administration officials for months have denied charges by opponents that they plan a “bailout” for insurance companies providing coverage under the healthcare law. …

But the change in regulations essentially provides insurers with another backup: If they keep rate increases modest over the next couple of years but lose money, the administration will tap federal funds as needed to cover shortfalls.

In other words, it’s a payoff to perpetrate a fraud. The White House has long argued that their takeover of the health-insurance industry would “bend the cost curve downward,” but instead, premiums have spiked upward dramatically — as have deductibles, a powerful one-two punch to the gut of consumers. That threatens the political prospects of Democrats in the midterms, especially since the next round of premium increases will hit right before the election.

In that context, the new regulations make it clear that the White House intends to use its regulatory authority to provide a false sense of relative affordability, or at least disaster avoidance. It’s also clear that they want to avoid having to ask Congress for the money, which my colleague Conn Carroll thought would be necessary to proceed:

But there is just one hitch: according to a January 2014 Congressional Research Service memo, it would be illegal for Obama to make risk corridor payments to insurance companies without an explicit appropriation from Congress.

This means that Republicans do not need Rubio’s legislation to stop a taxpayer bailout. It is already illegal for Obama to use taxpayer funds to pay insurance companies through the risk corridor program.

Unfortunately, from his war in Libya to his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Obama has a well established history of flagrantly breaking federal law. And progressive activists are already urging Obama to ignore federal law and illegally bailout the insurance companies through the risk corridor program anyway.

If conservatives want to stop the illegal Obamacare insurance bailout before it starts they must start planning now. The current budget deal expires this September, just two months before Election Day. They must demand appropriations language explicitly banning any payments to insurance companies through the risk corridor program that exceed payments to the program.

If they don’t, then Republicans will have missed another huge opportunity to minimize Obamacare’s damage.

Looks like Rubio’s bill needs to move forward, and fast, if we’re going to avoid another federal-government bailout of the insurance industry, and the cover-up of the true costs of ObamaCare.

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Tags: bailout, cms, insurers, ObamaCare, regulations, risk corridors

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SecondObamaCarecontractorfacilitydoingnothing—and

Second ObamaCare contractor facility doing nothing — and still hiring

posted at 10:41 am on May 20, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Last week, whistleblowers in Missouri alerted local media that an ObamaCare facilitator with a $1.2 billion contract paid its employees to do almost nothing … literally. Serco’s paper-application facility in Missouri had so little business that employees had to sit at their desks and entertain themselves most of the day, and the goal set by Serco management had employees aiming at processing just one or two applications a month. Because employees are forbidden from bringing in their own computers or smart phones, they ended up playing Pictionary and socializing most of their day.

A second local TV station in Arkansas wondered if the local Serco office had the same problem. Not only did employees make the same allegations, the office is still hiring even more employees to do nothing:

Not to be outdone, the original station in Missouri, KMOV, followed up on their original story. The work hasn’t picked up, but now Serco is paying OT for doing nothing all day long:

Now that employee said Serco is offering employees an opportunity to work overtime this weekend.

When asked why, the employee was told to catch up.

On what? Sleep?

KMOV unlocks part of the mystery of this story. Serco’s contract with CMS requires a particular level of staffing regardless of the work coming into the facility. If Serco falls below that — presumably measured in man-hours on duty — they can lose their $1.2 billion contract. The OT may well be in play because Serco has trouble getting people to get stuck for eight hours at a stretch with nothing to do, a situation that sounds pleasant until it’s experienced first-hand. (I have had this experience at two different jobs for relatively brief periods, and can attest to the torturous boredom it generates.)

This demonstrates the folly of top-down government control of a market-based industry. No insurance carrier would waste money like this for more than a week or two before shedding jobs and rescaling the effort. Anyone who expected that government control would make this process more efficient should have their heads examined … or better yet, voted out of office.

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Tags: cms, healthcare.gov, ObamaCare, Serco, waste

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Yikes:ObamaCaresignupssloweddowninFebruary

Yikes: ObamaCare signups slowed down in February

posted at 6:01 pm on March 11, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

That the 7 million people the Obama administration once hopefully projected would enroll in ObamaCare before the end of the open enrollment period on March 31st, haven’t, was to be expected; after all, they did rather tremendously screw up the rollout of their flagship website, but once they patched the federal exchange up a little (and that’s to say nothing of several individual states’ exchange calamities), signups started trickling in more smoothly. If the Obama administration was really hoping that a better-functioning website and their various PR efforts would help to spread national enthusiasm and set off a late enrollment “surge,” however… things aren’t looking too great so far. The administration just released a report on February’s ObamaCare signups, coming in at 942,000+ — a significant deceleration from January, and a lot less than their February prediction of 1.3 million. Philip Klein breaks it down:

Weeks before the health care law’s exchanges launched Oct. 1, an HHS memo projected that 5.7 million individuals would enroll in a plan through one of Obamacare’s exchanges by the end of February. In reality, HHS said Tuesday, just 4.2 million Americans had signed up in the first five months.

HHS still hasn’t disclosed how many Americans who have signed up for a plan through the website have consistently paid their premiums, which is how enrollment is typically measured. Thus, HHS figures could overstate enrollment by around 20 percent to 25 percent. …

In January, 1,146,071 individuals signed up for insurance on the exchanges, according to HHS. In February, that number declined to 942,800.

That ever-present caveat — that “selecting a plan” and “actually purchasing said plan” are not necessarily one and the same thing — means that enrollment could really be somewhere in the three-to-four million range. If the pace of March’s signups don’t pick up a lot, that could be bad news for the president’s crowning legislative achievement (or, perhaps I should say, bad news for the taxpayer dollars that will then be used to bail out the president’s crowning legislative achievement, for the increasingly expensive healthcare plans consumers will have to buy, and for the overall hot mess that the administration has managed to make of the entire insurance industry and economy at large).

The even worse news, as ever, is that the proper mix of young people evidently remain oh-so-stubbornly disinterested in following the administration’s desperate recommendations that they sign up for ObamaCare. The White House was originally hoping that 40 percent of those hoped-for 7 million enrollees would be those relatively low-risk, low-cost young people to help keep prices down, but so far, it’s not even close.

Figure 1 and Table 1 show that, consistent with expectations, the proportion of young adults (ages 18 to 34) who have selected a Marketplace plan through the SBMs and FFM has remained strong. Young adults continued to account for 27 percent of the Marketplace plan selections during the fifth month, which was consistent with their share of plan selections during the fourth month (27 percent) and 3 percentage points higher than their share of plan selections during the first three months (24 percent). Meanwhile, the proportion of older adults (ages 35 and over) selecting a Marketplace plan has continued to decrease (from 70 percent during the first three months to 67 percent during the fifth month).

The law’s supporters are banking on young people being procrastinators and waiting until the tail end of the enrollment period, and no doubt some of them will — but the January-to-February ratios didn’t budge, and those ratios only barely budged from December. Hence… this.

Tags: administration, cms, enrollment, healthcare.gov, insurance, ObamaCare, sign ups, youth

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Source from: hotair

Whywon’ttheWhiteHouseexplainhowoff-budget

Why won’t the White House explain how off-budget ObamaCare money got spent?

posted at 10:01 am on March 8, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Democrats designed the ObamaCare system to mainly fund itself. The low-income subsidies come directly from taxes levied in the so-called Affordable Care Act, as well as some other spending functions. However, it became clear early on that the Obama administration miscalculated the operational costs of ObamaCare when Kathleen Sebelius began pressuring insurers to contribute to Enroll America after the non-profit hired Obama administration figure Anne Filipic to assist HHS in preparing people for the sign-up launch in October. Republicans called this an attempt to get around the Constitution by creating new lines of funding for executive-branch operations, while they also wondered exactly where HHS got its funding for other efforts in ObamaCare.

In the last bipartisan budget deal, House Republicans got an amendment that forces the White House to reveal its money transfers in HHS to explain how they found the cash. However, as Politico reports, that’s only half of the problem:

The Obama administration is dropping some new hints about how it has moved money around to fund Obamacare without Congress — but not nearly enough to put the controversy to rest.

Forced to reveal more details under a provision tucked in this year’s bipartisan budget deal, the Department of Health and Human Services declared Friday how it used Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s authority to move about $1.6 billion in departmental funds around last year — the Cabinet secretary’s version of looking for change under the couch cushions and hitting the jackpot.

But HHS didn’t say exactly how it spent the money, and it didn’t lay out the kind of detail Republicans sought. So now the Republicans will have to decide their next move, whether it’s just more records requests or new efforts to tie the Obama administration’s hands in future appropriations bills.

We already knew that Sebelius used $450 million of the Prevention and Public Health Fund to pay for Healthcare.gov, in a small bit of irony given the unhealthy status of that platform since its launch. The only thing it’s prevented is enrollments and cancellation of erroneous sign-ups. One surprise is that CMS, which runs Medicare and the federal portion of Medicaid, coughed up $268 million that just happened to be lying around in the “general program operations account.” I’ve worked for corporate units where the topline revenue number doesn’t get up to $268 million, and that’s just spare change? Sebelius also found another $300 million from HHS’ Non-Recurring Expenses Fund, which is the account where all of the unused cash from previous years gets stashed.

In other words, in just three line items, the federal government got its hands on more than one billion dollars of loose cash, used for purposes that Congress never authorized. Remember when Obama demanded an end to the “era of austerity” last week in his budget proposal?

So … how did all of this money get spent? Republicans may need another amendment to find out:

The report doesn’t say anything about how the money was spent — just where it came from. It also doesn’t say how much more there might be from the sources that have been tapped before. That’s likely to make Republicans re-up their demands for greater transparency.

Republicans have pressed for detailed information on the contracts issued for Obamacare implementation and the personnel used to do the work, particularly on the botched HealthCare.gov rollout and the subsequent website salvage mission. The new report gave them exactly nothing on that score.

“In their half-hearted attempt to respond to Senate language requesting detailed Affordable Care Act expenditures, the administration refused to reveal how much was spent on specific activities and projects,” Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, the top Republican on the appropriations subcommittee responsible for HHS, said in a statement. He said he was disappointed in the “budgetary smoke and mirrors” of the new accounting.

If that cash was put to efficient and effective use, the White House would hardly be so reticent to explain it. They would confidently reveal how the administration used scarce resources to succeed in its efforts, and proudly highlight the program’s progress. The fact that they’re playing a shell game with Congress over the sources and uses of the money tells us all we need to know about HHS and ObamaCare.

Tags: Budget, cms, Department of Health and Human Services, Enroll America, ObamaCare

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Source from: hotair

WhiteHouse:Websitewon’tbefixedbyDecember

White House: Website won’t be fixed by December 1

posted at 10:41 am on November 26, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

Old and busted: Healthcare.gov will be fully operational by November 30th. New hotness: Healthcare.gov will, er, work better than it did by December 1!

Brought to you by the same people who insisted that if you liked your insurance plan, you could keep it:

Obama administration officials said Monday that some visitors to HealthCare.gov will experience outages, slow response times or try-again-later messages in December.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) delivered the message in the latest attempt to downplay expectations for Nov. 30, the administration’s self-imposed deadline for fixing ObamaCare’s federal enrollment site.

CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said errors that persist past this weekend would be “intermittent” and, in line with a promise made by the White House, would not affect the vast majority of the site’s users.

But Bataille acknowledged that some would still experience “periods of suboptimal performance” by the system due to either heavy traffic or technical issues that are still being addressed.

“The system will not work perfectly on Dec. 1, but it will work much better than it did in October,” Bataille said.

Speaking of suboptimal performance …

The comments came after HealthCare.gov experienced an unscheduled outage on Monday for one hour. The CMS had recently touted the site for not randomly crashing. Bataille said the problem was remedied quickly by the site’s tech team.

Let’s recall that the pledge last month was specifically that Healthcare.gov would be “fully functional” by December 1.  That date was not an accident.  In order to have coverage by January 1, enrollees have to complete their enrollment by mid-December, although the administration is trying to get insurers to wait until December 23rd rather than the 15th as the cutoff.  If the web portal still can’t handle the enrollments properly and fully by that time — and the 834s to the insurers seem to still be a big problem in that regard:

Behind the scenes, when an individual selects a plan, the federal system transmits a file, known as an “834,” with all of the relevant information about that individual and his or her plan selection.

These files have been plagued by errors, from spouses and children being mixed up to enrollments being duplicated or inadvertently cancelled. According to HHS, they have “completed fixes for two-thirds of the high-priority bugs that our tech team working with issuers identified as being responsible for the issues with 834 transactions and other issuer priorities.”

But according to an insurance industry source, though the 834 problems are getting better, there is still a long way to go. Insurers still haven’t reached the point where they can feel confident that the data is reliable.

As a result, though they have been able to process some payments from individuals, they’ve only been able to do so on piecemeal basis in cases where they are fully confident in the data, often because it’s been verified by hand.

That’s another problem. If the front end starts working better, the deluge of last-minute enrollments to comply with the individual mandate will flood insurers with bad data, which will be impossible to fix by hand in that level of throughput. Let’s also not forget that the subsidy-payment system doesn’t exist yet, either. This announcement only relates to the consumer experience of Healthcare.gov, not the full functionality.  Without the subsidy payments to the insurers, there’s still a large question as to whether those subsidy-qualifying enrollees will actually have coverage on January 1 if insurers don’t get the full premiums in hand by December 31st, a deadline which now looks impossible to meet.

Democrats pinned their hopes of competing in the 2014 midterms on the Obama administration’s ability to deliver on this pledge.  Now they’re beginning to realize that they’ve hitched their wagons to a failing star:

For Democrats, the politics of the health care law are creating a death spiral of their own. For the White House to protect its signature initiative, it needs to maintain a Democratic Senate majority past 2015. But to do so, Majority Leader Harry Reid needs to insulate vulnerable battleground-state Democrats, who are all too eager to propose their own fixes to the law that may be politically satisfying, but could undermine the fundamentals of the law.

Race-by-race polling conducted over the last month has painted a grim picture of the difficult environment Senate Democrats are facing next year. In Louisiana, a new state survey showed Landrieu’s approval rating is now underwater; she tallied only 41 percent of the vote against her GOP opposition. In Arkansas, where advertising on the health care law began early, Sen. Mark Pryor’s approval sank to 33 percent, a drop of 18 points since last year. A new Quinnipiac survey showed Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, who looked like a lock for reelection last month, in a dead heat against little-known GOP opponents. Even a Democratic automated poll from Public Policy Polling showed Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina running neck-and-neck against Republican opposition, with her job disapproval spiking over the last two months. These are the types of numbers that wave elections are made of.

The big picture isn’t any better: The president’s approval rating, which historically correlates with his party’s midterm performance, has dipped below 40 percent in several national surveys. Democrats saw their nine-point lead on the generic ballot in the Quinnipiac survey evaporate in a month, and a CNN/ORC poll released today shows Republicans now holding a two-point lead.

“You want to prevent your race from being about Obamacare. If you enable your race to be about Obamacare, you’re making a mistake,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who’s working for Landrieu. “You need to explain what you’re trying to fix, and you better be trying to fix something. If there’s nothing you want to fix, there’s something wrong with you. At this point, it’s hard to defend the benefits, but you can say we’re not going back to the evils of the old system.”

In the old system, 85% of Americans had health insurance, and 87% were satisfied with their health care.  Good luck trying to run on the “evils” of that system, especially after getting an up-close-and-personal look at DemocratCare.

Tags: 2014 election, Barack Obama, cms, healthcare.gov, incompetence, ObamaCare, Senate Democrats, US Senate

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Source from: hotair

CMStechofficer:Roughly30-40%oftheObamaCare

CMS tech officer: Roughly 30-40% of the ObamaCare exchange system still needs to be built — including the payment system

posted at 2:01 pm on November 19, 2013 by Allahpundit

Skip to 3:15 for the key bit. We’re 50 days removed from launch and Chao’s spent hours upon hours testifying about the website before Congress over the last few weeks. And somehow only now are we hearing about this.

Am I awake?

It's just mind-boggling. If the payment system isn't even built, how in the world did HHS or the WH think this thing could go live on Oct 1?

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) November 19, 2013

Two things as you watch. First, note that Chao’s talking about the entire online exchange apparatus here, not the front end of Healthcare.gov where people sign up. The front end is in place and being repaired, he says. It’s the back end that … hasn’t completely been built yet. Second, it sounds initially like he says 60-70 percent of that back end is missing, but then he appears to correct that in the last minute or so. I’ll be conservative and assume it’s the later number that’s accurate. Regardless: How does the enrollment process work if the payment system hasn’t been finished yet? Remember, even if you’re one of the chosen few who managed to complete the sign-up process, your coverage doesn’t take effect on January 1 unless you make your first premium payment by December 15. You could make that payment directly to the insurer, bypassing the federal website entirely, but some segment of people won’t do that, whether because of absent-mindedness or their understandable assumption that payment should be made through the same site they used to enroll — i.e. Healthcare.gov.

It’s not just enrollees and insurers who are having trouble with payment either:

Add insurance brokers to the list of people stymied by HealthCare.gov…

Brokers say their clients are having trouble entering the right ID numbers in the balky website — and that’s what’s needed for the health plan to pay them…

In the chaotic days after the rollout of HealthCare.gov, many brokers were told by call center operators that they could not, or would not, enter a broker’s identification, or the “national producer number.” In other cases, the numbers seemed to be recorded — but then they got caught up in the problems with the corrupted “834” files that the exchanges send to the health plans with enrollment information.

Here’s the other part of this. One of the key points that O-Care critic Bob Laszewski has stressed all along is that the front end of Healthcare.gov shouldn’t be fixed until the back end is. The back end is where an applicant’s information, including payment information presumably, is transmitted to the insurer he signed up with. Because of the “834″ problem mentioned in the excerpt above, much of the info received thus far by insurance companies from the federal website is garbled or incomplete. That problem is manageable, says Laszewski, as long as the number of enrollments is low; if there’s only a trickle of bad data flowing in, insurers may have the time and manpower needed to correct it piecemeal. If, however, the front end of the website is fixed and enrollments pick up precipitously, the trickle turns into a flood and suddenly insurance companies are overwhelmed with garbled data. Listening to Chao here, it sounds like CMS is setting itself up for precisely that problem — they’re desperate to finish the front end first in order to get “young healthies” on the rolls ASAP, but they haven’t even begun to build part of the back end of the site. How bad, exactly, are things on that back end right now? What happens if the White House convinces hundreds of thousands of people to sign up before December 15 and then their new coverage isn’t there for them on January 1 because of a catastrophic breakdown on the non-public part of the site? Even if the coverage is there, what about the payment of subsidies that lower-income people are relying on to make their coverage affordable?

Exit question via Philip Klein: “If — as per Chao — payment system still needs to be built, has anybody fully enrolled in Obamacare?”

Tags: chao, cms, Department of Health and Human Services, exchange, gardner, healthcare.gov, obama, ObamaCare, payment, system

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Source from: hotair

Here we go: CMS letter to state regulators on ObamaCare “fix” hints at “risk corridor” bailout for insurers

Herewego:CMSlettertostateregulators

Theplotthickens:ObamaCarewebsiteprojectmanagerclaims

The plot thickens: ObamaCare website project manager claims he wasn’t told that security flaws posed “limitless” risk

posted at 11:11 am on November 12, 2013 by Allahpundit

It’s Henry Chao, who warned people back in March that he was “nervous” about the state of Healthcare.gov’s development and hoped that using the site wouldn’t be “a third-world experience.” Eight months later, that’s exactly what it is: The front end barely functions, the back end is a ripe target for thieves, and the people in charge are either dangerously ignorant about its operations or covering up what they knew. Money quote from CBS’s story about this:

Chao said he was unaware of a Sept. 3 government memo written by another senior official at CMS. It found two high-risk issues, which are redacted for security reasons. The memo said “the threat and risk potential (to the system) is limitless.” The memo shows CMS gave deadlines of mid-2014 and early 2015 to address them…

It was Chao who recommended it was safe to launch the website Oct. 1. When shown the security risk memo, Chao said, “I just want to say that I haven’t seen this before.”

A Republican staff lawyer asked, “Do you find it surprising that you haven’t seen this before?”

Chao replied, “Yeah … I mean, wouldn’t you be surprised if you were me?” He later added: “It is disturbing. I mean, I don’t deny that this is … a fairly nonstandard way” to proceed.

Note well: The estimated fix for the unspecified security problems was the middle of next year at the earliest. HHS says they rolled out the site on October 1 even though it wasn’t functioning because they thought they could fix it on the fly relatively quickly after launch. This memo proves that that’s a lie.

Now, the question: Did Chao lie to the committee about not having seen the Sept. 3 memo before or was there a deliberate effort within CMS to withhold the extent of the site’s problems from supervisors like him so that they’d greenlight it for launch as scheduled? If the latter, who’s responsible? As it turns out, the memo was written by — ta da — Tony Trenkle, lead tech officer for Healthcare.gov who left last week under mysteriously vague circumstances. As CBS reported, Trenkle himself never signed off on security for the site in September; it was his boss, Marilyn Tavenner, who signed the authorization, supposedly because she thought that a project this big should carry the John Hancock of the head of CMS. Is that the truth, or did Trenkle refuse to sign because he knew the site’s security was a travesty and couldn’t in good conscience authorize launching it? The fact that he wrote such a dire memo about “limitless” risk suggests that he knew the extent of the problem — and yet, if you believe Chao, that information somehow never made its way to the project manager. Why? Why are there so many unorthodox procedures related to approval of the site’s security here? Did Tavenner, at least, see Trenkle’s memo before she authorized the launch or was it withheld from her too? If she did see it, why didn’t she tell Obama and Sebelius that security was too weak to justify rolling it out now?

I assume CMS will try to pin all of this on Trenkle by claiming he didn’t do enough to warn his superiors about how bad things were. And yet the fact remains: He wrote the memo. He wanted someone to see it. The language he used was sufficiently alarming that Chao himself said it was “disturbing” that he hadn’t seen it before when it was handed to him at the hearing. It can’t be Trenkle who suppressed the bad news about security. Whodunnit?

Tags: CBS, chao, cms, Department of Health and Human Services, healthcare.gov, ObamaCare, trenkle, White House

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Obama:I’dliketoapologizeforlyingto

Obama: I’d like to apologize for lying to your faces several thousand times about keeping your plan if you liked it; Update: Or not

posted at 6:41 pm on November 7, 2013 by Allahpundit

He tried to spin away the Big Lie with another Big Lie, but when that didn’t work, he was left at a crossroads. Triple down with a Big Lie about the Big Lie about the Big Lie, or bite his lip and apologize? The quote: “I am sorry that [people who've lost their insurance] are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” I’m actually not sure what that means. It’s not his assurances that have put them in this situation, it’s the law he signed and the regulations he approved that sandbagged them. Or is he suggesting — not incorrectly, mind you — that maybe he and his pet boondoggle wouldn’t have gotten quite as many votes if he’d been honest?

Conn Carroll asks an excellent question:

I dont get it. Why is Obama apologizing for people losing their insurance? Last week he said they were all junk policies. Was he lying then?

— Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) November 7, 2013

Exactly. Until about an hour ago, the official Democratic line on the Big Lie was that O had, perhaps, “exaggerated” the extent to which people would be able to keep their plans, but that was A-OK because only crappy plans by scam artists are being denied grandfather status. That’s actually the biggest lie of all. Even some liberals are acknowledging the underlying reality. So what’s the new White House position? Are the old plans being properly and deservedly euthanized or is O sorry for their loss?

Update: Ditto.

i'd rather have an apology for all the promises he kept.

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) November 7, 2013

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Update: Here’s the transcript of the full exchange. Is this really an apology?

CHUCK TODD:
Thanks to you. I’ll start with health care. It’s probably the most quoted thing or requoted thing you have said in your presidency, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” You said it a lot during the run up. At this point, though, it’s obviously something– a promise that has not been able to be kept. Just today, the Denver Post — 250,000 people in Colorado are seeing health insurance policies cancelled. Some of those people liked those policies. And they can’t keep them. What happened?

PRESIDENT OBAMA:
Well– first of all, I meant what I said. And we worked hard to try to make sure that we implemented it properly. But obviously, we didn’t do enough– a good enough job– and I regret that. We’re talking about 5% of the population– who are in what’s called the individual market. They’re out there buying health insurance on their own.

A lot of these plans are subpar plans. And we put in a clause in the law that said if you had one of those plans, even if it was subpar– when the law was passed, you could keep it. But there’s enough churn in the market that folks since then have bought subpar plans. And now that may be all they can afford. So even though it only affects a small amount of the population, you know, it means a lot to them, obviously, when they get– this letter cancelled.

Follow the link. He goes on and on and on from there about how much “better” the new plans on the exchanges are. And you know what he means by that: “Better” = more comprehensive, period. Cost and access to a sizable provider network are almost entirely irrelevant to the calculus. No one seriously believes that, including him, but he needs to pretend in order to justify pushing healthy people into more expensive coverage. Comprehensiveness is mainly just the excuse to gouge them for higher premiums. He’s not sorry at all that people’s plans are being canceled.

Tags: administration, care, cms, Department of Health and Human Services, health, industry, NBC, obama, ObamaCare, sebelius, White House

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Obama:I’dliketoapologizeforlyingto

Obama: I’d like to apologize for lying to your faces several thousand times about keeping your plan if you liked it

posted at 6:41 pm on November 7, 2013 by Allahpundit

He tried to spin away the Big Lie with another Big Lie, but when that didn’t work, he was left at a crossroads. Triple down with a Big Lie about the Big Lie about the Big Lie, or bite his lip and apologize? The quote: “I am sorry that [people who've lost their insurance] are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” I’m actually not sure what that means. It’s not his assurances that have put them in this situation, it’s the law he signed and the regulations he approved that sandbagged them. Or is he suggesting — not incorrectly, mind you — that maybe he and his pet boondoggle wouldn’t have gotten quite as many votes if he’d been honest?

Conn Carroll asks an excellent question:

I dont get it. Why is Obama apologizing for people losing their insurance? Last week he said they were all junk policies. Was he lying then?

— Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) November 7, 2013

Exactly. Until about an hour ago, the official Democratic line on the Big Lie was that O had, perhaps, “exaggerated” the extent to which people would be able to keep their plans, but that was A-OK because only crappy plans by scam artists are being denied grandfather status. That’s actually the biggest lie of all. Even some liberals are acknowledging the underlying reality. So what’s the new White House position? Are the old plans being properly and deservedly euthanized or is O sorry for their loss?

Update: Ditto.

i'd rather have an apology for all the promises he kept.

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) November 7, 2013

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tags: administration, care, cms, Department of Health and Human Services, health, industry, NBC, obama, ObamaCare, sebelius, White House

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CBSreveals:Contrarytochief’stestimony,CMSknew

CBS reveals: Contrary to chief’s testimony, CMS knew ObamaCare website had major problems before launch

posted at 11:21 am on October 31, 2013 by Allahpundit

Via John Hayward, a scoop from Sharyl Attkisson. Alternate headline: “Blogger can’t believe we’re actually debating whether the government knew that it had a nonfunctioning website on its hands.”

How did CMS know? Simple: The employees there tested the site themselves and ended up in the same circle of 404 hell that the rest of the country landed in on October 1. And so, yet again, we return to the great unanswered question of the past month. How much of this was epic incompetence by HHS and how much of it was bad faith? When Marilyn Tavenner claimed she didn’t expect a meltdown on day one, was that a shameless lie or proof that HHS is so dysfunctional that her deputies withheld the results of the testing from her? If the latter, how many people are getting fired for this?

I can think of one person.

An agitated President Obama has expressed frustration to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the faulty ObamaCare enrollment website.

A visibly annoyed Obama behind closed doors has made clear to Sebelius that it’s her responsibility to fix what has become an unwanted second-term blunder, according to senior administration officials.

White House officials say the strong words from Obama don’t mean Sebelius is necessarily in the doghouse but that she’s responsible for fixing the problem.

In the words of one senior administration official, “She’s in a tough spot. She’s on the hook.”

She’s got three weeks, realistically. If the “tech surge” team pulls a rabbit out of its hat and has the site functioning reasonably well in time for the expected post-Thanksgiving crush of enrollments, Obama will declare victory and that’ll be that. If it doesn’t — and I haven’t seen one credible outsider assessment this month suggesting that it will — then insurers will be screaming at him over adverse selection and Democrats will be screaming at him over a midterm apocalypse. The millions of people who’ve had their plans canceled will be screaming at him even louder than they are now because if they’re unable to sign up on the exchanges by December 15, they risk being without coverage of any kind on January 1. Someone will have to pay. There’s only one obvious candidate.

The latest “glitch,” by the way, isn’t so much a flaw in the website as it is a flaw in record-keeping by insurance companies that’s being made worse by the federal and state ObamaCare sites. Which doctors are included in the network for your new exchange-bought health coverage? It’s … not always clear:

Many new health exchanges don’t yet let shoppers see which doctors accept which insurance plans. Where exchanges do post the so-called provider lists, they often contain inaccurate or misleading information, some doctors say, including wrong specialties, addresses and language skills, and no indication whether providers are accepting new patients…

The new health exchanges are supposed to offer a transparent shopping experience, including clear information on participating doctors. But in addition to providing wrong information, the lists may give consumers a false impression of how big the networks are, some physicians say. Several exchanges warn shoppers to ask doctors directly if they accept the new plans.

So, on top of rate shock and the giant question mark of whether a seemingly successful online application has been received by the insurance company due to the website’s back-end problems, consumers may be misled into buying coverage whose network of providers is much less conveniently accessible than they thought. And that’s on top of the fact that many of the new, supposedly superior post-ObamaCare plans being offered by insurers aren’t being accepted by some well-known providers, including certain hospitals in New York, Atlanta, and L.A. Second look at single-payer?

Tags: cms, Department of Health and Human Services, healthcare.gov, obama, ObamaCare, security, test

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