With just a few weeks left before a deadline to get health coverage, lingering bugs lurk in the part of HealthCare.gov that you can't see. And since time is running out to get things right, health officials on Thursday urged insurance companies to cover some enrollees even if their premium checks haven't come in. Under the law's guidelines, consumers have to sign up for a health insurance exchange — and pay their first month's premium — by the end of December if they want coverage in January. "The short time period presents a number of challenges," says Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group.
As a CIO watching the HealthCare.gov firestorm on the nightly news, I sometimes feel like I'm back in the office. The project is late or incomplete. It's all the IT department's fault. Let's send in more support, more hardware, and more software. Bring in the outside experts to save the day! If you've been in IT management for any length of time, this fire drill should sound familiar. Putting aside the political and hypermedia aspects of Obamacare, the reality is that the failure of HealthCare.gov is simply one more IT project gone bad. The fact that it's a highly publicized government initiative doesn't change the underlying issue.
The surgeon had no prestigious named professorship, no N.I.H. grant and no plum administrative position in the hospital's hierarchy. But to the other surgeons-in-training and me, he was exactly who we wanted to be. A decade or two earlier, he had started out like us, as a lowly resident in the medical center, but had finished his training elsewhere. When he returned to open a practice, the other doctors in town welcomed him back as one of their own. But they soon discovered that he had become a surgeon like few others.
The Food and Drug Administration has issued a strongly worded warning letter to a controversial Houston physician, Stanislaw Burzynski, who was the subject of a USA TODAY investigation last month. Burzynski – hailed as a maverick by his fans but a snake oil salesman by mainstream doctors -- has long claimed to have dramatic success in hard-to-treat cancers, especially brainstem tumors that are usually considered fatal. According to the National Cancer Institute, however, Burzynski has never produced definitive proof that his drugs save lives by publishing a randomized, controlled trial in a peer-reviewed journal.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday asked the department's inspector general to investigate the performance of private contractors in the flawed launch of the Obamacare website. The healthcare enrollment website, a key part of President Barack Obama's sweeping healthcare law, crashed on its October 1 launch and was subjected to weeks of emergency fixes. "I am asking the Inspector General to review the acquisition process, overall program management, and contractor performance and payment issues related to the development and management of the HealthCare.gov website," Sebelius said in a blog post.
Growing numbers of Americans are signing up for insurance through President Obama's health law, with more than 250,000 selecting a plan in November, according to a new government report. That is more than double the number in October, when problems with the new HealthCare.gov website made enrollment virtually impossible in most states for long stretches of time. Last month's tally is fueling renewed optimism among supporters of the Affordable Care Act who believe that fixes to the federal site will rescue the law, commonly known as Obamacare, from its disastrous debut.