Lead Obamacare Architect Urges Sebelius to Speed Repair
By Alex Wayne - Nov 6, 2013
The lead architect of Obamacare in the Senate said the U.S. health secretary needs to stay at the helm to repair the insurance exchanges and must “meet, and I’d prefer you beat” an end-of-the-month deadline for the fixes.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, said at a hearing today that implementation of the 2010 law he helped write has been unacceptable. It’s “disappointing to hear members of the administration say they didn’t see the problems coming,” he told Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Obama administration has ratcheted down expectations for initial enrollment because of website outages, garbled data and other flaws plaguing the government-run health-insurance marketplaces created last month. Lawmakers have also said people are complaining of privacy concerns, the cancellation of existing policies and sticker shock on the price of new plans.
“You assured us that the implementation was on track, that it was all going smoothly, and that the exchanges would be ready to go live on Oct. 1,” Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, said. “Now, it appears that your statements from the previous hearing were at best misinformed.”
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-06/lead-obamacare-architect-urges-sebelius-to-speed-repairs.html