On September 26 of last year,
just days before Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges were set to
open nationwide, the Obama administration quietly made an unusual
decision to expand its contract with Serco, a health care data
entry company.
The company’s existing $114 million deal, which called for the
company to process 6.2 million paper health coverage applications
under the law, was topped off to the tune of an
additional $87 million. The company had already promised to
hire 2,000 workers to fulfill its contract duties. The added funds
would probably mean hiring even more.
Why would the Obama administration, on the verge of launching a
nationwide system for online insurance sign-ups, decide to spend so
much more money on paper processing at such a late date? A few days
later, the likely answer became clear: Practically speaking, the
federal exchange system covering 36 states didn’t work at all. It
took another two months to get the system online and usable for
most customers, during which time Serco could presumably process
whatever paper applications came in.
But by December, the consumer face of the federal exchange was
operating relatively smoothly. Not every problem was fixed,
especially on the insurer end, but consumers who wanted to submit
electronic applications could generally do so.
Serco, meanwhile, kept manning its paper processing centers.
Indeed, it still is. But according to one processing center
employee in Missouri, nothing is happening. Nothing ever happens
anymore.
“The main thing is that the Data Entry side does not have hardly
any work to do. They’re told to sit at their computers and hit the
refresh button every ten minutes—no more than every ten minutes.
They’re monitored to hopefully look for an application.” the
unnamed employee told
KMOV-TV in St. Louis. “Their goals are set to process two
applications per month and some people are not even able to do
that.”
It’s always good to have something to hope for. Maybe one
special day hitting that refresh button will actually pay off, and
an application will appear, as if by magic. But for now this sounds
like the Waiting for Godot of government contractor jobs.
At this point, with Obamacare’s open enrollment and special
enrollment periods closed, the trickle of new paper applications
has to be pretty thin. But Serco gets paid for every worker on the
clock, so workers keep showing up and hitting the refresh button
every 10 minutes—but not more often than that.
When stories about tax-funded workers who don’t do any work show
up in the media, there’s often a partially in jest debate amongst
libertarian types: Considering the alternative—that they do
something that contributes to government’s problems—isn’t it better
that they sit around and do nothing? In this case, because Serco’s
data staff aren’t government employees, there’s an even better
alternative: cancel the contract and stop paying for outside
services that clearly aren’t needed. The company’s Obamacare
contract is worth at least $1.2 billion over the next decade,
according to The Washington Post, and its British
parent company been in trouble for shady practices before, when an
investigation found that it had overbilled the government by “tens
of millions of pounds.” Sounds like, contrary to the Obama
administration’s approach, we could use less of Serco’s services
rather than more.
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