Health Agency Chief Apologizes for Federal Website Woes

By Karen Pallarito

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, Oct. 29 (HealthDay News) -- The head of the federal agency responsible for HealthCare.gov issued a public apology Tuesday for problems that have plagued the health insurance website since its Oct. 1 launch.

"I want to apologize to you that the website has not worked as well as it should," Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told members of the House of Representatives' Ways and Means Committee at a hearing on the Affordable Care Act.

Tavenner told the committee that the website problems were being fixed.

"We are seeing improvements each week, and as we've said publicly, by the end of November, the experience on the site will be smooth for the vast majority of users," she said.

Last week, the Obama administration announced that a "punch list" of website fixes have been identified and were being implemented to eliminate the bugs in the system and improve the consumer shopping experience.

Tavenner's apology comes one day before the Obama administration's top health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Sebelius is expected to face tough questioning from committee members about the troubled rollout of the federal marketplace, a key component of the historic and controversial Affordable Care Act that is intended to bring health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.

The law requires most Americans to have health insurance or pay tax penalties. But in light of the HealthCare.gov website foul-up, many Republicans and some Democrats are seeking a one-year delay of the penalties.

Tavenner admitted that the website's "initial experience has not lived up to our expectations or the expectations of the American people, and it is not acceptable."

"We are committed to improving the performance and have already made progress," she said, citing efforts to debug the site, add capacity and improve the consumer shopping experience.

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the committee, repeatedly asked Tavenner for the number of people who have actually enrolled in health plans through the federal and state marketplaces. HealthCare.gov handles insurance registration for 36 states; the remaining 14 states and the District of Columbia operate their own sites.

"We will not have those numbers until mid-November," Tavenner said, noting that the initial number is expected to be small.

Camp expressed concern about preventing a spike in premiums if not enough young adults enroll in coverage. Tavenner said health-plan rates for 2014 are "very competitive."

The successful enrollment of younger, healthier adults is considered vital to the success of the Affordable Care Act -- sometimes called Obamacare -- because their premiums are expected to help offset the cost of care required by older, sicker Americans.

View the original article here

Read More

Urban schools don't need gifted-and-talented chief

D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson told me recently that a plan to hire a gifted-and-talented coordinator had been cut from her budget. Times are tough, she said. Sacrifices have to be made.

But I don't think this is any great loss at all.

God dispenses his blessings and talents to poor and minority kids, too, so our cities have many gifted children. But public schools, including those in the suburbs, rarely have the resources or teaching expertise to challenge them. For urban schools, the standard gifted and talented system is often a waste of time.

I was reminded of this in a new book by the best inner-city high school principal I have ever known.

Henry Gradillas, who ran two large high schools in Los Angeles, including Garfield in low-income East L.A., figured this out nearly 30 years ago. He had listened to his most talented teacher, Garfield Math Department Chairman Jaime Escalante, make fun of designating some kids gifted on the strength of a second-grade intelligence test. Gradillas began to see why Escalante (later made famous by the film "Stand and Deliver") was right.

In his book "Standing and Delivering: What the Movie Didn't Tell," Gradillas (with co-author Jerry Jesness) describes how Garfield's high poverty - also a key factor in D.C. schools - distorted the effect of the Los Angeles Unified School District's gifted and talented (GT) rules in the 1980s.

"We had a number of what I call NFGT [non-functioning gifted and talented] students," said Gradillas, a former Army ranger. "They had IQs that qualified them for the gifted and talented program but not the grade-point averages. A lot of them were taking Mickey Mouse classes and were in no way living up to their potentials. A lot of these kids lacked both motivation and study skills."

He said, "We also had a lot of bright, hardworking kids who never were labeled gifted and talented because they lacked English skills in elementary school when monolingual English-speaking kids were being tested for GT. Others may have not had the IQ to qualify for GT, but they had the ganas [an Escalante word for drive], and they did well in higher-level classes."

When I was finishing a book about Escalante in 1987, Gradillas identified, at my request, every GT student in the famous Garfield classes that produced 26 percent of all Mexican Americans in the country that year who passed Advanced Placement Calculus exams. The GT students made up only 20 percent of the total test takers at Garfield. They had a lower passing rate on the AP exams than Garfield students not designated GT.

This amused Escalante. As Gradillas describes in his book, when a GT student from another class sought help after school with a trigonometry problem, Escalante said, "I'll let one of my students who's not gifted explain it to you."

Gradillas was a genius at finding loopholes in school regulations. Most districts let only GT students into GT classes funded by state grants based on the number of GT kids. But Gradillas discovered the rules actually said 49 percent of the class could be non-GT, so he added many undesignated students who were doing well. To appease GT teachers who feared dilution by these outsiders, he promised to remove any non-GT student who fell below a B in the course.

The GT label fixation appears similarly useless these days in the District, where the most successful schools try to raise the achievement of all students, no matter how high or low they start the year. If Henderson uses money saved by the GT coordinator budget cut to train more teachers in how to do that, Henry Gradillas (still doing some teaching in Wisconsin at age 76) will approve.

View the original article here

Read More