President Obama and his aides will seek to rally public support for his embattled health care plan in the coming weeks, starting with a White House event Tuesday. Obama will promote the effort in a speech while surrounded by people who have benefited from the new law, according to an addition to the White House schedule. The Affordable Care Act has come under heavy political attack since its rollout in October. Problems have included a malfunctioning website and the cancellations of polices that do not meet new federal standards. In the coming days, Obama and aides will highlight what they call successful aspects of the law.
Counselors helping people use the federal government's online health exchange are giving mixed reviews to the updated site, with some zipping through the application process while others are facing the same old sputters and even crashes. The Obama administration had promised a vastly improved shopping experience on healthcare.gov by the end of November, and Monday was the first business day since the date passed. Brokers and online assisters in Utah say three of every four people successfully signed up for health coverage on the online within an hour of logging in. A state official overseeing North Dakota's navigators said he had noticed improvements in the site, as did organizations helping people sign up in parts of Alabama and Wisconsin.
Government subsidies to help Americans buy insurance under the health care overhaul may be vulnerable to fraud, a Treasury Department watchdog warned on Tuesday in the latest indication that troubles are far from over for President Barack Obama's signature legislation. The rollout of the law has been hurt by canceled policies and problems with the federal website used by people to enroll in health plans, causing political headaches for the White House and for Democrats in Congress. The new problems concern subsidies that are available to low- and medium-income people who buy insurance through state-based exchanges that opened in October.
The Food and Drug Administration hopes hospitals and clinics will vote with their pocketbooks, buying supplies from pharmacies regulated under new powers just given to the agency. Congress passed a law last month giving the FDA authority to regulate some so-called compounding pharmacies. The aim is to have some oversight over operations that are far bigger than the small pharmacies that make medicines to order. FDA demanded the changes after a fungal meningitis outbreak last year that killed 64 people and sickened more than 750 others across the country. The outbreak was traced to contaminated drugs sold by a single pharmacy – the New England Compounding Center in Massachusetts.
Oregon has spent more than $40 million to build its own online health care exchange. It gave that money to a Silicon Valley titan, Oracle, but the result has been a disaster of missed deadlines, a nonworking website and a state forced to process thousands of insurance applications on paper. Some Oregon officials were sounding alarms about the tech company's work on the state's online health care exchange as early as last spring. Oracle was behind schedule and, worse, didn't seem able to offer an estimate of what it would take to get the state's online exchange up and running.
With the enrollment deadline for 2014 Medicare plans only days away, a federal judge is about to rule on a temporary injunction that would keep UnitedHealthcare from cutting its Medicare Advantage network by an estimated 2,200 doctors. A decision awaits affidavits requested by the judge, who could rule as soon as Wednesday. The enrollment deadline is Saturday. Meanwhile, some of UnitedHealthcare's estimated 58,000 customers in Connecticut are left wondering if their doctors will be in or out of network. If they're out, customers would have to pay much more to be treated by them.