Challenges ahead for Obamacare
Former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, (R-TX), and former Gov. Ed Rendell, (D-PA), share their thoughts on the future of the struggling government health care program. The President and his administration needs to get realistic and admit the roll out didn't work, says Sen. Hutchison.
Massachusetts has already paid CGI $11 million under a $69 million contract.
Mr. Lefferts said that the exchange continued to perform slowly and that people had ''recurring problems'' creating accounts and logging in. ''We still don't have the automated ability to process an application and determine someone's eligibility,'' he said. ''We also don't have the ability to send enrollment information directly to the insurance carrier.''
Lorne Gorber, senior vice president for global communications and investor relations at the CGI Group, said: ''The goal of the clients and the goal of ourselves is the same: that's to get everything right and not be wasting a lot of time and effort in the clauses of the contracts when we're doing that.''
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Noting that CGI is involved in nine state exchanges, he said, ''It's expected that some of them are not the best performing ones.''
''It's important to note that we're not at the bottom of the worst performing ones,'' he added, ''and we're at the top of the list of the best performing ones.''
The exchange's performance has been especially nettlesome in Massachusetts, which had its own online health insurance system before the Affordable Care Act. Because the federal law required so many extra features, the state decided to build a new website — which is now malfunctioning.
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In Vermont, Gov. Peter Shumlin has frequently expressed frustration with his state's insurance exchange, complaining of repeated delays since its unveiling.
''I won't tolerate a situation where Vermonters go into the holiday season worried and confused by their health care options come January 1st,'' the governor said in late October, when problems with the state website forced him to delay some enrollment deadlines.
Continued trouble, though, has prompted Vermont to hold back a $5.1 million payment and threaten to withhold more if the problems are not fixed. So far, the state has paid only $19 million of its $83 million contract with CGI.
Mark Larson, Vermont's commissioner of health access, sent CGI two letters last month contending that the company had failed to deliver on its contract by missing critical deadlines and charging for services never performed, among other things.
''Most importantly,'' Mr. Larson wrote, ''CGI has yet to provide the state of Vermont with a fully functioning website. Vermont residents still cannot buy their health plans online, as promised.''
—By Rick Lyman, The New York Times; Ian Austen contributed reporting.
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