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• Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner will go before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, committee as the balky HealthCare.gov website continues to experience service problems. Adding to website woes is the political fallout from a wave of cancellation notices reaching millions of consumers who currently buy individual policies. Those plans don't meet requirements of the law taking effect next year.
• Republicans had seemingly reached a dead end in their drive to repeal "Obamacare," but they're now relishing new lines of attack and a technology fiasco handed to them by the administration.
• Democrats are uneasy. While hoping that the administration can deliver its latest promise that the website will be running smoothly for most people by the end of November, they acknowledge there's no clear evidence yet that will happen. The website went down again in the middle of the day Monday for about 90 minutes. And the administration still refuses to divulge enrollment statistics until mid-November.
• Less well known than Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Tavenner was closer to the day-to-day work of setting up the enrollment website, handled by experts within her agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and outside contractors. Through the summer, she assured Congress that everything was on track for a reasonably smooth launch of new health insurance markets in all 50 states.
• ___
Obama's promises on health care return to haunt as simple sales pitch meets complex reality
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- It sounded so simple. Too simple, it turns out.
• President Barack Obama's early efforts to boil down an intricate health care law so Americans could understand it are coming back to haunt him, leaving a trail of caveats and provisos in place of the pithy claims he once used to sell the law.
• In the summer of 2009, Obama laid out his health care agenda in a 55 minute speech to the American Medical Association. It was, his former speech writer Jon Favreau recalls, "one of the longest speeches he ever gave."
• Fine as an initial policy speech, Favreau thought, but not a communications strategy.
• "My lesson from that was, well, he can't be giving a speech this long and complicated every time he talks about health care," Favreau said.
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