Democrats: Fire culprits

WASHINGTON - Frustrated Democrats lamented Wednesday that persistent problems with new healthcare exchanges have inflicted damage on the public’s perception of the health overhaul - with some lawmakers insisting that President Barack Obama should ensure that those responsible lose their jobs.

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., said Wednesday that he supported giving Americans more time to sign up for coverage under the new health-insurance pools. Later in the day, the administration announced that it would give Americans who buy health insurance through the new online marketplaces an extra six weeks to obtain coverage before they risk having to pay penalties.

Emerging from a private briefing Wednesday afternoon with health officials from the Obama administration, House Democrats appeared to have at least as many questions as answers about how and when the beleaguered website will be fixed. Although they resolved not to let setbacks with one aspect of the health law outshine the parts that are working, they griped that the website had given Republicans an opening to do just that.

“I think the president needs to man up, find out who was responsible and fire them,” Rep. Richard Nolan, D-Minn., said after the briefing. He said Obama should tell Democrats when the problems will be fixed so they can prepare to move on.

“You don’t get many second chances to get a good first impression,” he said.

Nolan wasn’t the only one upset.

“Somebody should be held accountable,” said Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif. “Absolutely.”

The briefing with House Democrats came as the Obama administration was appealing to its allies in Congress, on Wall Street and across the country to stick with the health-care law despite embarrassing problems that continue to crop up.

On Wednesday, lawmakers heard from Gary Cohen and Julie Bataille, two high-level officials with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal agency with responsibility for the website where millions of Americans are expected to purchase insurance.

Democrats said they requested the briefing. A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said House Republicans were arranging a similar briefing with health officials in the coming days.

Echoing party leaders and Obama, Democrats said it was unacceptable that the website’s debut had been so flawed. But Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said it was essential that Democrats not lose sight of the bigger picture and the law’s other benefits.

“It’s regrettable. It can’t be accepted. Gotta move on,” DeLauro said.

Obama has turned to longtime adviser Jeffrey Zients, a veteran management consultant, to provide advice to help fix the system. And Obama has said he’s instituted a “tech surge,” bringing in leading technology talent to repair the slow and often unresponsive website.

But the administration has repeatedly declined to say how long the repair will take, raising questions about whether the full extent of the problems has been fully determined.

“They were reluctant to give a date - I don’t blame them - on the fixes,” said Rep. Janice Schakowsky, D-Ill. But they said the problems would be fixed in time for people to enroll by Jan. 1, the day coverage through the exchanges begins.

On Wednesday, the White House signaled that a change was underway in the timeline for signing up for coverage. Consumers have until Dec. 15to apply for coverage that’s effective Jan. 1. Even though open enrollment lasts until March 31, consumers would face penalties if they postponed buying coverage past mid-February.

Calling that timeline a “disconnect,” the White House said officials will soon issue policy guidance so that if consumers sign up by the end of March, they will not face penalties. No action from Congress is needed to make that happen, the White House said.

Administration officials said the new deadline is unrelated to the website’s many technical problems. Instead, they said, the move is designed to clear up confusion about when people would face penalties under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., has called for delaying the deadline to sign up for coverage. In a letter to Obama, she urged the president to consider a year-long open-enrollment period for the exchange and a delay of the tax penalty on those who do not sign up.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was House speaker when the health law was passed in 2010, said she doesn’t support Shaheen’s request.

“We should try to fix what we have, move forward with the deadline,” Pelosi said Wednesday. “While there are glitches, there are solutions as well.”

“It is premature to consider that,” Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House’s No. 2 Democrat, said of delaying the enrollment deadline. “We will see what happens in the next few weeks in terms of fixing the system. I think it’s going to be fixed.”

Pryor supported the request. “I believe, given the technical issues, it makes sense to extend the time for people to sign up,” he said in a statement released by his staff.

Shaheen’s letter said the Obama administration is “losing valuable time to educate and enroll people in insurance plans” because of the problems with the health-exchange website. Open enrollment, when people can sign up for private insurance plans on the exchanges, ends March 31.

She also asked for more information about the tax penalty that will be assessed on people who do not have health insurance.

“If an individual is unable to purchase health insurance due to technical problems with enrollment, they should not be penalized because of lack of coverage,” Shaheen wrote.

Pryor raised a similar concern, saying that “the administration should state clearly how the enforcement mechanism will work if people can’t sign up in time.”

The campaign manager for Arkansas’ U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, a Republican seeking to unseat Pryor in 2014, said Pryor should’ve taken a stand weeks ago.

“Clearly Sen. Pryor has seen the writing on the wall that he and President Obama are rightfully taking the blame from Arkansans for a partial government shutdown that could have been avoided,” campaign manager Justin Brasell said in a news release. “Had Sen. Pryor been more concerned about Arkansas families than DC politics, we could have avoided a government shutdown and could have already provided families and individuals with the same reprieve from this mess that the administration gave big businesses months ago.”

The website’s troubled debut was overshadowed by the partial-government shutdown that started the same day the website went live.

With the debt-and-spending crisis averted for now, the spotlight has shifted to Obama’s health-care law and the Web-based exchanges, beset by malfunctions, where Americans are supposed to be able to shop for insurance. The intensified focus has increased the pressure on Democrats to distance themselves from Obama’s handling of the website’s roll out as both parties demand to know what went wrong and why.

In testimony posted on the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee website before a hearing today, an executive of CGI Group Inc. - a contractor criticized for flaws that have hobbled sign-ups for the health-care exchanges - said the government is the “ultimate responsible party” for the insurance marketplaces.

CGI “works under the direction and supervision” of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Cheryl Campbell, a senior vice president at CGI Federal Inc., a unit of CGI Group based in Fairfax, Va.

The agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, plays an “important role of systems integrator or ‘quarterback’” and is responsible for “the end-to end performance of the overall federal exchange,” Campbell said in her prepared testimony.

Today’s hearing is intended to determine whether breakdowns were caused by the contractors, or “were they told to do it this way” by the Health and Human Services Department, said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa.

As the administration races to fix the website, it’s deploying the president and top officials to urge his supporters not to give up.

“By now you have probably heard that the website has not worked as smoothly as it was supposed to,” Obama said Tuesday in a video message recorded for Organizing for America, a nonprofit group whose mission is to support Obama’s agenda. “But we’ve got people working overtime in a tech surge to boost capacity and address the problems. And we are going to get it fixed.”

Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden and top White House officials held a call with business leaders Tuesday about the health law and other issues. Business Forward, a trade group friendly to the White House, said the administration asked the group to invite leaders to hear directly from Biden.

On Wednesday night, Biden said at a forum in Boston that the country is on the cusp of what he called “remarkable changes” in the treatment of mental illness because of the health-care law.

Biden said that as a result of the law, more people have access to care for mental illness. The law bars insurance companies from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions such as bipolar disorder.

Biden was joined by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy. The event marked the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s signing of the Community Mental Health Act.

On Wednesday, the heads of WellPoint Inc., Aetna Inc. and at least 10 other insurers met with administration officials to discuss correcting flaws in how data from the health-care marketplaces are transferred to the companies.

“The CEOs were able to provide an on-the-ground perspective of how open enrollment is proceeding,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the insurance lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans, whose chief executive officer attended the meeting. “The participants discussed the ongoing technical challenges in the federal marketplace and what needs to be done.”

Each night, healthcare.gov is supposed to send a batch of new enrollments to the insurers. But some of the electronic files are being transferred with missing data or are corrupted to the point where they can’t be opened, according to Bob Laszewski, an insurance-industry consultant based in Arlington, Va., and Dan Schuyler, a director at Salt Lake City-based health-care consultant Leavitt Partners.

To fix the files, insurers have to go through them by hand. When thousands of people sign up, as the U.S. is hoping will happen before mid-December, it may create a large backlog if the problems aren’t fixed, the consultants said.

Information for this article was contributed by Josh Lederman, Alan Fram, Laurie Kellman, Steve LeBlanc and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of The Associated Press; by Roxana Tiron, Kathleen Miller, Michael C. Bender, Kathleen Hunter, Alex Nussbaum, Shannon Pettypiece, Alex Wayne, Margaret Talev, Anna Edney and Aaron Ricadela of Bloomberg News; by Sandhya Somashekhar, Amy Goldstein, Juliet Eilperin, Lena H. Sun, Ed O’Keefe and Tom Hamburger of The Washington Post; and by Sarah D. Wire of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.