So now that I'm interning on the Hill in DC, I'm expecting that I'll run into various examples of government goof-ups. Well, here's the first one. This afternoon I went to a House subcommittee hearing on beneficiary protections in medicare part D. The first witness is the acting administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). She blabs on for her allotted 5 minutes on how CMS is working to improve medicare, what a great job they're doing and how they have an 80% approval rating. So far, pretty standard. The next witness is a medicare specialist in the Government Accountability Office. She outlines a GAO report which basically shows that CMS made prescription drug coverage retroactive for beneficiaries but (whoops) didn't inform them of their right to reimbursement. This is a bit of a problem considering that congress gave CMS 100 million dollars to provide these services to medicare beneficiaries. Needless to say, the congressmen are a little peeved.
So they begin the Q+A session with the first witness, which is supposed to last maybe 5-15 minutes. Soon it becomes apparent that CMS doesn't know where the 100 million dollars went ("but we'd like to know!") It also comes out that CMS isn't paying pharmacists, is avoiding collaborating with state insurance agencies, and is using aggressive and potentially illegal marketing tactics, among many other mishaps. Oops. The congressmen were furious with her, especially since she didn't know how to answer even their most basic questions. I left 2 hours into the hearing and they were still grilling this one witness (by the way, there were 5 more to go after her). So yeah. Politics is pretty special. Looking forward to hearing some good stories from the Motherland as well. If American politics is this awesome, I can't wait to hear what's going on there.