Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is expected to return to the Sunshine state Tuesday, to talk up the problem-plagued healthcare.gov website.
Sebelius will visit Miami and Orlando, according to news reports.
Sebelius has become a symbol of the botched roll-out of President Obama’s signature legislation which aims to provide health care coverage for 48 million uninsured Americans.
Compounding the messy roll-out of the government’s website, Obama has had to apologize for misleading Americans when he repeatedly said, “If you like your health care plan you can keep it.” As it turned out, many insurance companies have been canceling health insurance policies as they do not align with the Affordable Care Act.
Given the outcry, last week, Obama announced a rule change that would let insurance companies keep people on health plans that don’t meet the minimum benefits of the law.
The administration said, there have been 27,000 sign-ups on the healthcare.gov website since October 1, when the marketplace was rolled out – a far cry from the half-a-million anticipated.
Sebelius, who has testified several times before Congress on the botched website roll out, insists that there have been major improvements since the site was first launched. Healthcare.gov is expected to be 80 percent operational by the end of this month.
Meanwhile, Florida’s legislators continue to deny some 1.2 million uninsured Floridians health insurance coverage because of their refusal to expand Medicaid, another central aspect of the Affordable Care Act. Largely funded by the federal government, Florida would have received some $51 billion over 10 years to provide health care to poor Floridians who fall into a “coverage gap.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that nearly five million poor uninsured adults nationwide, will fall into a “coverage gap” in states that have said they won’t expand Medicaid.
