Boston Herald
The chairman of a powerful congressional panel probing the botched Obamacare rollout told the Herald he wants a full accounting of the $180 million the feds gave the Massachusetts Health Connector, and he also blasted the White House over the federal site’s crashes yesterday — the long-awaited enrollment deadline.
“Federal dollars were used to help with the sign-up process,” said U.S. Rep. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Health Care & Entitlements.
“Obviously, Massachusetts had a head start on the rest of the nation with systems like this. We want to know how their dollars were used. … It is federal tax money we’re spending. We’re $17.5 trillion in debt. We can’t say this isn’t a problem. It is a problem,” Lankford said.
Bostonherald.com first reported on Friday that Health Connector Executive Director Jean Yang is being hauled before two House Oversight subcommittees in Washington, D.C., “examining Obamacare’s problem-filled state exchanges.” Yang is slated to testify Thursday.
Leaders of other state exchanges from Hawaii, Maryland, California, Minnesota and Oregon will also testify, Lankford said.
He also wants to know whether Massachusetts residents’ personal information was put at risk by failing to conduct proper security checks before launching the website.
“They seemed to be very much in a hurry to get the systems all online on Oct. 1st,” said Lankford.
Yesterday marked the Obamacare open enrollment deadline, which was plagued by at least two crashes to the federal site Healthcare.gov. Obama Administration officials blamed the shutdowns on a combination of software problems and high traffic.
However, Lankford said a sudden surge in visitors is no excuse.
“The IRS does this every single year on April 14,” he said. “Millions of people all log on at the same time … and they don’t seem to have this problem. … Yet somehow that’s an excuse they can get behind and say, ‘There’s a lot of people. There’s a lot of popularity and that’s why there’s such a problem.’ It doesn’t work like that at Google or Amazon or Walmart or the IRS.”
The Bay State’s $69 million Obamacare site has faced setback after setback. State officials knew in January 2013 the site might not be ready by its Oct. 1 launch. Immediately afterward, users complained of bizarre error messages, freezes and long waits, plus frustrating, hour-long hold times on customer support lines.
State officials and developer CGI have traded blame for months. Despite insisting the site “gets better every day” and that all the glitches were “nothing unexpected” in mid-November, Gov. Deval Patrick finally apologized in February for the problems and brought in new IT contractor Optum and Blue Cross Blue Shield exec Sarah Iselin. Then CGI was fired last month after collecting just $15 million.
Health Connector officials wouldn’t say how many people missed yesterday’s deadline for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), only that “more than 200,000 people are newly enrolled in state-sponsored coverage” and “another 26,000” signed up for unsubsidized care. Those who started an application have until April 15 to sign up.
“We’re proud that Massachusetts has successfully met the goal of ACA implementation: getting people insured,” said spokesman Jason Lefferts.
