Problems implementing Medicare Part D

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/nov/13/steve-israel/medicare-part-d-and-obamacare-health-care-gov/

Steve Israel on Wednesday, November 6th, 2013

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Big programs have seen rocky rollouts only to achieve success later, they say. Their top example: the 2005 launch of Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush’s prescription drug benefit plan.

"Things went wrong with the Medicare prescription D plan that George Bush rolled out," Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told MSNBC on Nov. 6. "When things go wrong, there are two things we can do as a country. We can spend all our time figuring out who to blame, or we can spend all our time figuring out how to fix it."

Eight years after it went live, Medicare Part D is now widely popular among the seniors who use it.

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"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.

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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."

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