WASHINGTON - Republicans said Sunday that they intend to press Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the Obama administration’s troubled launch of healthcare.gov, the online portal to buy insurance, and concerns about the privacy of information that applicants submit under the new system.
President Barack Obama’s administration will face intense pressure this week to be more forthcoming about how many people have succeeded in enrolling for coverage in the new insurance markets. Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner is to testify during a House hearing Tuesday, followed Wednesday by Sebelius before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The officials will also be grilled on how such crippling technical problems could have gone undetected before the website’s Oct. 1 launch.
On Sunday, the administration faced a new website problem, as servers hosting a key piece of the insurance enrollment program failed, leaving federal and independent state exchanges unable to provide most services.
The data services hub, a system that supplies tax information and other data to websites run by the U.S. and 14 states to sell medical coverage, was unavailable after a malfunction at the data center that hosts it.
The center, operated by Verizon Communications Inc. unit Terremark, lost connectivity after workers tried to replace a failed networking component, Joanne Peters, U.S. Health and Human Services Department spokesman, said in an email.Peters didn’t say when the failure happened or how long it would take to repair.
“Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue,” said Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for New York-based Verizon. “It will be fixed as quickly as possible.”
As concerns about the website mount, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said on CBS’ Face the Nation that the president had been poorly served by Sebelius “in the implementation of his own signature legislation. So if somebody doesn’t leave and if there isn’t a real restructuring, not just a 60-day somebody come in and try to fix it, then he’s missing the point of Management 101, which is these people are to serve him well, and they haven’t.”
Issa said Sebelius may need to resign because of the troubled rollout.
“If she cannot reorganize to get the kind of a team consistently to meet his agenda, then she shouldn’t be there,” he said.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the second-ranking Republican on the panel, said on Fox News Sunday that she wanted to know much has been spent on the website, how much more it will cost to fix the problems, when everything will be ready and what people should expect to see on the site.
“The incompetence in building this website is staggering,” Blackburn said.
Blackburn and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., also raised questions of whether the website could guard the privacy of applicants.
“The way the system is designed, it is not secure,” Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Rogers said consumer privacy is at risk because personal information is exchanged between government agencies.
“That’s the weakest, most vulnerable part,” Rogers said. “They do not have an overarching, solid cybersecurity plan to prevent the loss of private information.”
The administration sought to reassure applicants about their personal information. Peters said that when consumers fill out their applications, “they can trust that the information they’re providing is protected by stringent security standards and that the technology underlying the application process has been tested and is secure.”
Issa said he would press for information on why the website was changed to require users to create an account before they could check the prices on the insurance exchanges. In a letter to the administration last week, Issa charged that the problems stemmed from a “political decision” so users wouldn’t get upset about prices. Democrats have said Issa is twisting the facts.
The botched rollout has led to calls on Capitol Hill for a delay of penalties for those remaining uninsured. The administration has said it’s willing to extend the grace period until March 31, the end of open enrollment. That’s an extra six weeks. The insurance industry said going beyond that risks undermining the new system by giving younger, healthier people a pass.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., said he is trying to put together a bipartisan coalition to push back until January 2015 the $95 fine for not enrolling.
“At that time, the fine will be $325,” Manchin said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. He said his approach would “still induce people to get involved,but it will also give us the time to transition in. And I think we need that transition period to work out the things.”
The administration was under no legal requirement to launch the website Oct. 1. Sebelius, who designated her department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to implement the health-care law, had the discretion to set open-enrollment dates. Officials could have postponed open enrollment by a month, or they could have phased in access to the website.
But the administration insisted it was ready to go livein all 50 states on Oct. 1.
Democrats, while also expressing disappointment in the rollout, said the Republican hunt for a scapegoat was just a distraction from the job of getting the website working.
“I think she [Sebelius] should stay, and I think she will get the job done,” Manchin said on ABC’s This Week.
Sebelius responded to the calls for her resignation last week, saying, “The majority of people calling for me to resign, I would say, are people who I don’t work for and who do not want this program to work in the first place.”
The online insurance markets are supposed to be the portal to coverage for people who do not have access to a health plan through their jobs. The health-care law offers middle-class people a choice of private insurance plans, made more affordable through new tax credits. Low-income people will be steered to Medicaid in states that agree to expand that safety-net program.
Information for this article was contributed by Ken Thomas of The Associated Press; by Todd Shields and Carter Dougherty of Bloomberg News; and by Joseph Tanfani of the Tribune Washington Bureau.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/28/2013