Strangely similar Let’s play a quick game: who made this statement? This is a huge undertaking and there are going to be glitches. My goal is the same as yours: Get rid of the glitches. A Democrat in 2013? Wrong! Actually, it was Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee, about Medicare Part D in 2006. The similarities between the two health care programs, both heralded as the signature domestic achievements of the presidents who signed them into law, are at times eerie. Supporters of the laws asked for time and promised a quick fix. Critics did not mince their words. Even the lingo -- words like glitches -- has been recycled. A report documenting the history of Medicare Part D was released earlier this year by a group of health policy experts at the Center on Health Insurance Reform at Georgetown University. It highlighted several areas where Medicare Part D struggled in its implementation that sound extremely familiar. For one thing, the Bush administration faced a difficult political battle to get the bill passed in 2003. That damaged public opinion of the law, making it a challenge to educate 43 million seniors on its nuances. Enrollment in the law was set to begin in late 2005. In April of that year, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 27 percent of respondents understood the law, while only 21 percent favored it. (In a comparable Kaiser poll in April 2013, 35 percent viewed the Affordable Care Act favorably and less than half felt they were well-informed of its details.) The Medicare site, meant to help seniors pick benefit plans, was supposed to debut Oct. 13, 2005, but it didn’t go live until weeks later in November. Even then, the tool itself appeared to be in need of fixing, the Washington Post reported at the time. Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly, the Post reported. (Sensing a pattern?) Once seniors began to enroll, problems persisted. According to the report, the online tools had accuracy problems, and local organizations designated with assisting seniors reported problems getting necessary and accurate information. Call centers provided by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services underestimated the needed capacity to ensure that reliable answers could be provided and service representatives were not knowledgeable or failed to provide accurate information.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 03:17:02 +0000
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