Switch insurance to keep her doctors due to the fact of the Affordable Care act. Can you imagine receiving notices like this . I can tell you that just in my district the 11th of georgia many more are experiencing this situation. Madam secretary, this is akin to telling seniors that in a few weeks their Medicare Coverage will be dropped or their premiums would double. Now, i know that neither you nor the administration would ever advocate for such a policy, yet here you are subjecting those currently in the individual market to such Government Intervention and i would hope that you would agree with me in recognizing that these increases are a heavy hardship on my constituents, on all of our constituents, republican or democrat. Now ill get to my questions. You know the Health Care Law included a hardship exemption from the individual mandate. Yet the administration has failed to finalize the Application Form for the hardship exemption three and onehalf years after we passed this law. As of today, can an individual apply for a hardship exemption from the individual mandate on healthcare. Gov, yes or no . I dont know. I do, its no. On october 15th, politico reported that if the Online System for getting into obama Care Coverage is rickety, the system for getting out of the mandate doesnt even exist yet. Hhs says it will take another month at least for the administration to finalize the forms for the hardship exemption from the individual mandate. Why has it taken three and onehalf years to finalize a simple Application Form for an exemption from the individual mandate . Well, sir, as you know the individual mandate is not in place until next year. We have made it very clear that if somebody is medicaid eligible in a state that doesnt choose my last question an my last second. An estimated 16 Million People in the individual market have or will receive cancellation notices stating their Health Insurance coverage does not meet minimum coverage requirements of the Affordable Care act. The bill specifically grants you, madam secretary, the power to determine the criteria for hardship exemption. Will you provide all of these individuals a hardship exemption since the Affordable Care act has taken away their plan . Will you do that . No, sir, and i think those numbers are far from accurate. 95 of americans who have Health Insurance will be in a continuous plan, medicare, medicaid, employer based, va. 95 . 5 who are in the individual market, a portion of those 5 , a portion of them, about 12 Million People, a fraction of those 12 million will have a plan that doesnt meet the criteria an has not been grandfathered in. They are indeed receiving notices. Many of those individuals, half of them, will be eligible for financial help getting a new plan and they have many more choices in the marketplace. So we will not have a blanket exemption. Sounds like a hardship to me the gentlemans time is expired. Miss christianson. Thank you, mr. Chairman. And thank you, madam secretary, for being here and thank you for all that you and your staff at hhs has done in implementing the Affordable Care act to ensure that it would provide the many benefits to children, to women, to Medicare Beneficiaries and to insure security to those who already have insurance as well as lower costs. Of course the biggest complaint has been about the application and the enrollment website, but we have heard over and over from you that those are being addressed. But you would recall and i know my colleagues would recall that congressman rush and i have always been concerned about those who do not have internet access, those who are uncomfortable using the internet and would not use it. So i just wanted to just remind everyone that there are other avenues for enrolling, either by telephone or by paper, either alone or with the help of a certified application assistant. But my question goes to one of the rumors thats been circulating. There are many rumors about how the Affordable Care act has affected parttime workers, and some of my colleagues on the other side claim that the companies are moving workers to parttime jobs because of the Health Care Reform law and low wage workers are being detrimentally affected. I understand why these claims are being made, as just another part of the ongoing effort to undermine the law. Would you take a few minutes and just set the record straight on the parttime issue. Certainly. 95 of businesses in this country are Small Businesses, under 50 fulltime employees. And there is no responsibility that any of those employers have to provide Health Coverage for their employees. On the other hand, there are now tax credits available for some of the smaller employers who want to offer coverage to actually come into the marketplace. For the other businesses, the businesses hiring 50 or more, there is a standard that says an employee is considered fulltime if he or she works 30 hours a week and that really came from a market snapshot with help from the Small Business administration of where Employee Benefits were in the private market based on hours of work, what was a parttime or fulltime employee. What we know about the Economic Data is the high point of parttime workers was in 2008 and 2009 at the height of the last recession. It has been decreasing each and every year. There is no data to support the fact that there is an up tick based on the impending Affordable Care act. I am sure that there may be some individual employers making some Business Decisions about how many workers they want full time and how many parttime, but i can tell you there is no Economic Data or Employment Data that supports the notion that this is an effect of the law. True. In fact its my understanding that parttime workers are at the lowest percentage of workers in many, many years right now. Well, and for the first time, as you know, congresswoman, parttime workers will have options for affordable Health Coverage. They have never had that before. They have never had options in the marketplace. They have never had some help purchasing coverage for themselves and their families. Their full time colleagues have but they have not so they will have options. And just to be clear, i had another really long question, but the last part of it, it would be fair to say that at every point along the way, you expected this website to work based on everything that you had been told by the contractors up until that point . Well, i expected it to work and i desperately want to get it working. More than anyone else, i am sure. We are committed to fixing it. The only thing that i think builds back the confidence of the public is fixing it. Thank you. The general ladys time has expired. Mr. Scolese. Thank you, mr. Chairman, for Holding Hearing and thank you, secretary sebelius for being with us. Last week when the contractors were here i asked them all under oath if they had actually delivered the system they were contracted to build and all four of them answered yes. So i want to ask you, did the contractors deliver the system that you contracted them to build . I dont think i can accurately answer that question. What we know is we have a system that doesnt function properly. We definitely know that. As we fix things, we will know more about what is broken along the way and ill be able so somebody in your office oversaw the implementation and received the product. Thats true. They either said this is the contract and paid hundreds of millions of dollars to build or it wasnt. Does anybody in your office have the ability to get us that . I think we can say that the products tested individually, verified individually but clearly it was an integrated system. They dont work well together. But, i used to write programs for a living. I developed Software Products for a living. If youre developing an integrated system, its irrelevant if one isolated Program Works by itself but you plug it together and it doesnt work, thats a system that doesnt work. One of the questions i had and others had, somebody in your agency made a decision literally weeks before the deployment to change the system. Instead of going from a browser ability from Somebody Just like on kayak or amazon. Com could shop for products, look at prices before they purchase, which is how consumers are used to doing this, you decided to gather all their information first before they could see prices. Was that you that made that decision . No, sir. Was that miss tavenner. It was miss tavenner and a team did that team make the decision because they knew once people actually saw the prices and were getting reports of dramatically higher prices than what they were expecting, did you make the decision because you knew that when they saw the prices they might not want to buy the product so you wanted to gather their information first . Sir, first i did not make the decision. I was informed about the decision. Did you agree with the decision . We rolled off a number of features and clearly they can see the products. There is no requirement to buy anything. I spent two hours trying to get into the system. I did get kicked out many times and got some of those blank screens other people got. I do want to share some stories from some of my constituents because we started a page on facebook and on twitter we are collecting whats called share with scalise. Were getting lots of stories. Randall from mandeville said my Health Care Premium went up 30 to over 350 a month increase. Michelle from slidell, our Insurance Premiums are going up 400 a month and our deductible has increased. Then shawn from covington who said my current plan through United Health care is no longer being offered in 2014 due to obama care. In fact i received a letter stating that the new Health Care Law was indeed the reason for the removal of my Current Health care plan. Madam secretary, what would you tell shawn, who liked his plan and now has lost it . And he was promised by you and the president hed be able to keep that plan. What would you tell shawn now that hes lost his plan . I would tell shawn to shop in the marketplace and wouft marketplace do you think thats an acceptable answer to shawn . If shawn again, if united chose not to keep shawns plan in effect for shawn because of the law. Sir, the law said if you keep shawns plan in place, if he loi liked his plan, then the plan is still there. You and i may disagree who you work for. I work for shawn. You work for shawn. Shawn lost his plan that he liked and there are thousands and millions of shawns throughout this country that lost the plan they liked because some bureaucrat in washington said we think your plan is not good enough, even though you like it, even though you were promised you could keep it. Youre now not able to keep that plan. I think you deserve to give shawn a better answer than you have to shop for Something Else even though you lost your plan. The gentlemans time has expired. Mr. Mcnerney. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you, madam secretary, for coming today. Im going to follow up on mr. Doyles line of questioning. One concern i have with the fallout from the website is that many users who tried to sign up and were discouraged because of the problems will now be too discouraged to come back once the site is fixed. What do you plan to do to get those folks to come back . Well, sir, we tend to invite them back formally by email, by message, but we dont want to do that until were confident that they will have a different experience. So fixing the site is step one. And then inviting people back to the site to make it clear that when our timetable is fulfilled, they have four months to shop for affordable Health Coverage on a fully functioning site. We know were going to have to spend special time and attention on young and healthy americans who dont start out thinking they need Health Insurance, arent aware of the law, certainly dont want to use a failed or flawed site, so well have to spend some particular attention on them. Thank you. Have the Software Specifications for the website and its related software elements, including the test specifications, has that changed since the initial rollout . I know that there certainly are some changes because since october 1st. Since the rollout, the specifications. The specifications havent changed. We are certainly fixing, as i say, speed and reliance is one of the issues were taking a look at. Thats the performance side. But there also are some functionality sides that things do not work as they can, including the enrollment passed on to insurers. So we are fixing functionality and i dont think thats a change in the specs, i think it is actually making the system work the way it should. Well, are you or is the department doing a prioritization . As of last week when jeff zients joined us, we asked him to lead a management team. We have pulled in all of our contractors as well as additional talent that they may have available. We have talked to tech folks in and out of the private sector and insurance, some of their tech experts to get all eyes and ears, made a full assessment, developed a plan for fixes along the way, have a punch list for going after those fixes and we are doing a daily tech briefing and blog to tell people what we have found, what we have fixed, whats coming next, what the functional is, and we intend to do that until its fully functional. Thank you. Madam secretary, looking past the initial problems with the aca rollout, do you think that the Affordable Care act will be successful in bending the Health Care Cost curve and reducing the fraction of our National Economy that goes for health care . Well, i think that we have already had some success. I think the goal is to continue to achieve that. A fully insured population arguably with preventive care, with an opportunity to see a primary care doctor and not go through the emergency room will in and of itself reduce costs. Having people identified earlier who may have Serious Problems and managing those problems will reduce health costs. But i think the Delivery System also needs some considerable help in paying for number of procedures, number of tests, number of prescriptions but paying for health outcomes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Latta. Thank you very much, mr. Chairman. And madam secretary, thanks very much for being with us today. Appreciate your testimony so far today. What id like to do is ill get these to you because these are questions that weve received from our constituents back home, specifically about whats going on with the website and for them. And so what ill do, i would like to get those to you, but theres a lot of questions here and a lot of thought has gone into a lot of these questions. But if i could start with last weeks testimony when four of the contractor were here. And in one of the questions that i had posed to ms. Campbell from cgi, in her testimony she had stated that they had delivered the medicare. Gov and federalreporting. Gov and i asked were these sites more or less complicated than this site that were talking about here today. She said of course this site today was more complicated. In the questioning and from her testimony, you know, weve been hearing about this endtoend testing that wasnt happening that we had individuals out there saying about two weeks had been done, but id asked her was there sufficient enough time when they had medicare. Gov and the response that she gave me back was on medicare. Gov, which was a less complicated site. And she stated that we had sufficient time to test the system before it went live. And i asked her in a followup then, what was that sufficient time and she said we had a number of months before the system went live at that time. And then i just want to make sure, because again, sometimes things dont get reported accurately. But in the u. S. News there was a report on october the 18th of this year and theres some questions going back and forth. I just want to make sure that you were quoted properly. It said after two weeks review the hhs secretary concluded we didnt have enough testing specifically for high volumes for very complicated project. The online Insurance Marketplace needed five years of construction, a year of testing, she said. We had two years and almost no testing. Is that correct . I dont know the quote. I never suggested that we needed five years. I dont know what thats from. Thats one of the things i wanted to check. We clearly did not five years. The law was signed in 2010. And then last week when you were down in texas, you were being asked by a reporter about the system and the launch. One of the parts of the question was at what point did you realize the system wasnt going to be working the way that you envisioned before the launch and why didnt we stop it before the launch. And again this is what was reported. We knew if we had another six months wed probably test further, but i dont think anyone fully realized both the volume caused such problems but volumes also exposed some of the problems we had. Now, going back, though, to miss campbells statement that they tested more extensively on a system that was not as complicat