So sorry -- apologies matter -- Oct. 31, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In the health exchange website debacle, Washington has moved through denial, anger and finger pointing. Now we’ve hit the apology stage.

On Wednesday, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, called the online marketplace where people were supposed to be able to compare and buy insurance easily starting Oct. 1 “a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans.”

“You deserve better,” she said at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. “I apologize.”

And when the terrier from Tennessee, Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, snapped at Sebelius, asking who was responsible for the mess, Sebelius said, “Hold me accountable for the debacle. I’m responsible.”

A day earlier, Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency responsible for setting up the online marketplaces, also apologized.
  

“To the millions of Americans who’ve attempted to use HealthCare.gov to shop and enroll in health care coverage, I want to apologize to you that the Web site has not worked as well as it should,” Tavenner said at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing.

President Barack Obama, while stopping short of an actual apology, has said “nobody is madder than me.” He apparently can’t brake for pronouns at a time like this.

Seriously, the president must be mad at himself for letting this fiasco befall his signature legislative achievement. It’s his legacy at stake. Obama struck a confident note Wednesday in Boston, insisting that the rollout problems are solvable. A lot is riding on whether the website is running smoothly Nov. 30, as promised,

In his speech at Faneuil Hall, Obama sought to clear up confusion about his oft-repeated promise that people could keep their insurance under the new system. Some people who buy health insurance on the individual market have received cancellation notices. Obama explained that a few policies fail to meet consumer protection standards in the health law, but the people will be eligible for better coverage and possibly for premium subsidies.  

Typically, embattled public figures follow the old legal advice to doctors facing malpractice claims: “Defend and deny.” Testifying before Congress, the lawyered-up contractors who engineered the troubled marketplace avoided showing even a smidgen of remorse.  

When a top-level public servant like Sibelius has the wit to apologize and sound sincere, she conveys the sense that she gets it, that she knows real people are being hurt by her agency’s ineptitude.   

Don’t get me wrong. An apology – many apologies -- from Washington won’t shorten anyone’s wait on HealthCare.gov or pay the insurance premium. People want results; they want their government to work.

At the same time, though, people should realize that Obamacare is a moving political target.

“We did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a website,” the president says. As rocky as the rollout of the exchanges has been, the president insists, the Affordable Care Act is already working to make insurance more readily available and affordable. That, of course, won’t satisfy the law’s foes.

Obama repeatedly says he’ll work with anyone who wants to fix the law, but congressional Republicans have no interest in mending it. If it’s not the website, it’s the canceled policies or the cost of premiums or something else. The GOP needs to be accountable too.

Where,Republicans, is your long-promised alternative to the health law? Let us see it – or help fix what’s broken.    

A president saves his apologies for big moments. Obama reportedly apologized to irate German Chancellor Angela Merkel after news broke that the United States had been listening to her phone calls for years. He apologized Oct. 8, during the government shutdown, for the unfolding fiscal dramas in Washington.

“To all the American people: I apologize,” he said, but he couldn’t resist turning the apology into a rebuke, saying what he needs to do is to break his foes of their bad habits in negotiations.  

Speaking of apologies, I’ve yet to see tea party Republicans apologize for shutting down the government or 
sending the world’s blood pressure sky high with games over raising the debt ceiling.

An apology is not a solution, but it is a start. It takes guts to say you’re sorry. Who’ll be next?

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Battle of man vs. machine hits insurance exchanges -- Oct. 24, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama has called in the cavalry to fix the health exchange rollout fiasco. He has a new tech czar and “some of the best IT talent in the country” working 24-7 to remove the chewing  gum clogging the system.   

Too bad Obama can’t fix human nature. People naturally resent playing by tech rules, even when it’s in their best interest. More on that in a minute.

Congressional hearings with political overtones are investigating the botched healthcare.gov website. Contractors who engineered parts of the contraption blame each other and the federal government. Republicans, and even a few Democrats, want the head of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. She will face the wrath of the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which was in charge of the rollout, went ahead with it despite warnings the system wouldn’t work.

An insurance executive who was involved in an industry testing group told The Washington Post that it was clear a month before the launch that CMS was still working on how the exchanges would handle enrollment, federal subsidies and the security of consumers’ personal information, such as income.

That’s a lot. But the last item -- security of personal information – is most crucial. Millions of people have to give up their birth dates, Social Security numbers, employment and income information to sign up for insurance. For people to sign up, they must be confident the government will keep their sensitive information safe.   

And that leads to another issue. As bad as the tech problems are, the inevitable conflict between man and machine is more troublesome. The insurance marketplaces – like other online accounts – safeguard personal information by requiring customers to answer security questions to verify their identity.

Big problem: Many people are flummoxed by online security questions, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Among the questions: What was your high school mascot? Favorite childhood superhero? Street you lived on in third grade?

“I don’t think they took baby boomers into account when they invented those questions,” a 58-year-old massage therapist in Texas told the Journal. Margo Benge said she gave up when she could answer only two of the 12 possible questions – and she needed to answer three.  “I barely remember two weeks ago, let alone childhood,” she said.

And I thought it was just me.

I’ve been resisting online security questions for years. The problem is the questions sound so reasonable.  In what school did you start first grade?

Anyone would know that, right? Not necessarily. An Air Force brat, I went to 10 schools before I graduated from high school. I don’t remember a thing about my school in first grade, except that it was in Germany.

The street I lived on in third grade? No clue. It was in Maryland.

Favorite color? It varies.

Favorite song? Movie?  Ditto. Ditto.

In California, the state’s insurance exchange presents 30 security questions; shoppers must  answer five, the Journal reported. Among them: “What is your significant other’s favorite color?” and “what is your youngest child’s birth weight?” And the ever popular: “What color was your first bicycle?”

These are details a machine can summon effortlessly. It’s not as easy for men and women. Life is messy. Our memories overlap, fade and reconstitute.     

Best friend? Don’t make me choose.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I want websites to do whatever they can to assure privacy. But many web-savvy people say the questions don’t stop determined hackers anyway. Sarah Palin’s email was hacked by someone who found out her birth date, ZIP code and the name of her high school – information that’s widely available on Google and Facebook.

Here’s a solution. Anyone can arbitrarily decide from today forward that he or she had Miss Raven as first grade teacher, lived on Lenore Street in third grade and rode a red bike to Edgar Allen Poe Elementary School.  Stumped by security questions? Nevermore.    

We humans just have to remember what we made up. We can make a note. On paper.

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Why House GOP is wrong on Obamacare -- March 21, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Mitt Romney promised during his presidential campaign to repeal the health law on his first day in office. 

Big mistake, he says now.  

“I think Obamacare attractiveness…was something we underestimated, particularly among lower incomes,” Romney said in an interview March 3 on “Fox News Sunday,” adding, “Obamacare was very attractive, particularly to those without health insurance.”

Leaving aside the reference to people as “lower incomes,” this is like Romney’s saying he underestimated how attractive food is to someone who’s starving.

A hungry person chooses a meal over a sermon on the virtues of eating less. Who knew?

And yet it didn’t dawn on Romney until too late that when 49 million people are uninsured, that’s a lot of votes for someone else who’s trying to make their lives better. President Barack Obama got 65 million votes last November.

If the enlightened Romney was trying to warn Republicans to back off their war on Obamacare, it didn’t work. House Republicans are in denial about the Affordable Care Act – even though the Supreme Court upheld it, Obama got four more years and the Senate stayed in Democratic hands.

House Republicans keep fighting. They may be encouraged by the tepid approval that Americans have in polls for the Affordable Care Act.

When President Obama signed the health law March 23, 2010, in a festive White House ceremony, 46 percent of people approved of the law and 40 percent disapproved, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

An optimistic Obama declared, “The bill I’m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see.”

In fact, the signing set in motion non-stop barrage of opposition. 

House Speaker John Boehner called it a “somber” day for the American people, and House Republicans haven’t stopped bashing since.

Although Obama won the 2012 election, Republicans think they’re winning the marketing war. So, although they look foolish when they insist on voting year after year to repeal a law that has been upheld, they continue to tarnish the law. Yes, many of them support some of the law’s provisions.

Support of the health law nationally has dropped to 37 percent. Forty percent view the law unfavorably and the rest declined to answer, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported Wednesday.

The law was designed so that popular provisions went into effect first. It allows young people under 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance, abolishes lifetime caps on benefits, prohibits insurers from refusing to cover children with pre-existing conditions, provides free preventive services and begins closing the donut hole for seniors’ prescription drugs.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says 3 million young people now have health insurance through their parents, 100,000 very sick people are receiving insurance through high-risk pools, and Medicare costs are actually dropping.

This is good news, but… Most people – 62 percent – haven’t seen any effects of the law, and only 17 percent say they’ve seen benefits like lower costs or greater access to care, according to Kaiser. A larger share, 22 percent, say they or their family have been negatively affected by higher costs or cuts in benefits.

And that’s a problem for Obama. With carrots first, people were supposed to accept sticks later. In January, mandates kick in requiring that individuals have health insurance and businesses with 50 full-time employees offer insurance -- or pay penalties.

Republicans now are trying to kill funding, just as the government is creating insurance marketplaces or exchanges where individuals and small businesses will shop for insurance.

With many details yet to be worked out, small-business owners worry. They want to help their employees, comply with the law and stay in business. Those goals should be compatible. 

Romney realized belatedly that the uninsured matter. It’s time Obama recognizes that small businesses matter. Senate Democrats need to make sure that the administration has the money to make the law a success.  

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.