From May 1 through Aug. 15 last year, workers in the Wentzville facility logged 13,228.25 hours of overtime to process “backlogged inconsistency work,” according to a report by Serco Inc., the contractor running the facility for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.

CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said the cost of that overtime was covered under the original contract with Serco at no extra cost to taxpayers.

Serco, a British-based company with U.S. headquarters in Northern Virginia, was awarded a five-year contract, worth up to $1.2 billion, to process applications for the Affordable Care Act. It was paid $114 million for the first year of the contract and $98 million for the current year, with annual renewal options.

The Post-Dispatch filed Freedom of Information Act requests after , reading or purposely working slowly because they had so little to do.

In a Feb. 10, 2015 report sent to CMS, Serco’s Jon P. Lau and Carlo Uchello addressed those allegations. They attributed the slow-downs to computer problems but said they took the allegations of worker loafing seriously and began extensive retraining so workers could do other tasks.

“Serco, at its Wentzville facility, has been accused of allowing staff who are bored to sleep on the job, read books, play games, etc.,” they wrote. “In addition, we have been accused of not providing adequate training and support to our … staff. Both accusations are baseless and untrue.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would not allow Serco officials to comment, but CMS spokesman Albright said the company was not denying the reports of what happened.

“To clarify, Serco disagreed with the assertion that the company tolerated employees engaging in activities not relating to their work,” Albright said. “According to Serco, when Serco heard about or observed questionable activities, these issues were addressed.

“Serco has high standards when it comes to rules of behavior and practice in the workplace,” Albright said. “If employees do not meet these performance standards or violate any of these workplace rules, they are appropriately disciplined or terminated. CMS has put in place additional measures to monitor Serco’s performance and worker productivity over the last year.”

‘We Played Pictionary’

, President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, became big news in the winter and spring of 2014.

The Wentzville facility was set up to process paper applications and to help resolve differences in applicants’ documents as they sought coverage under the new law.

Data on Serco’s workload showed how difficult that rollout was.

In October, 2013, workers at the Wentzville facility processed 36,093 documents, according to the data disclosed through the FOIA. A month later, that rose to 233,160, but that was a fraction of the more than 3 million that workers at the facility would eventually process in July and August of last year, according to the data Serco supplied to CMS.

Besides data entry from paper applications for health care coverage, workers at Wentzville and facilities in Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arkansas answer telephone queries about enrollment, process appeals and check supporting documents that might raise red flags about an applicant’s citizenship or income or other personal information.

The documents supplied to the Post-Dispatch said that Serco initially hired 700 workers at the Wentzville facility when it opened in late 2013 but that it added a second shift of 750 staffers last fall. Albright said the Wentzville facility currently employs about 1,500.

Lavonne Takatz, who had worked at Wentzville from October 2013 to April 2014, said: “We played Pictionary. We played 20 Questions. We played Trivial Pursuit.”

“I feel guilty for working there as long as I did,” Takatz told the Post-Dispatch last year. “It was like I was stealing money from people.”

Another whistleblower contacted Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., making similar claims.

McCaskill requested that the Department of Health and Human Service’s Officer of Inspector General look into that report. Her request was passed to the Kansas City Regional Office.

John LaBomard, a McCaskill spokesman, said that what Serco “has to say for itself is less important to Claire than what the independent watchdog — the Inspector General — has to say, and we’re continuing to be in contact with the IG’s office to get those answers.”

Mary Kahn, a spokeswoman for HHS’s Inspector General’s office, said that a review of the allegations laid out in McCaskill’s letter is still underway.

Working Overtime

Officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services previously attributed the lack of early work at Wentzville to the same computer problems that hampered applicants trying to sign up for Obamacare in late 2013 and early 2014.

Last June, Albright told the Post-Dispatch that “the same tech issues that were widely reported last fall (2013) with healthcare.gov” hampered Serco’s work.

In an August 29, 2014, report to CMS, Serco said it was not until last May, eight months after the application process began, that the system gained the functionality to process inconsistencies.

“The volume of backlogged inconsistency work became large enough that Serco requested, and was granted, authorization to work overtime through the end of September,” the report says.

The Serco report also says retraining of workers was initially hampered by labor standards under the federal

Serco told CMS it eventually trained more than 600 data processors in its four locations to handle more complex citizenship, immigration and income inconsistencies. Some 141 were retrained in Wentzville, “which has helped us maintain a higher level of staff utilization than was previously possible,” according to the Serco report.

Serco reported in February, 2015, that when the anticipated number of paper applications were “coming in much lower than expected” for the second year’s enrollment, the company spent two weeks in December retraining workers to meet document-processing demands in other areas. But the volume of documents processed was less than half of the peak-processing months of July and August, according to Serco data.

The report also said Serco “achieved a major milestone” last May when it installed a performance management system monitoring individual worker productivity. That and better computer functionality prompted “a significant increase in production at our Wentzville facility,” Serco told CMS.

The Serco documents supplied to the Post-Dispatch reported that its four facilities had processed more than 20 million documents between October 2013, and the end of 2014.

“We take seriously any issues involving our contractors, work quickly to address them, and hold them accountable,” Albright said. “Over the last year, CMS has put in place additional measures to monitor Serco’s performance and worker productivity, and Serco’s employees have been cross-trained in multiple tasks to gain additional flexibility in workload demand to be as efficient as possible.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/news/obamacare-processing-center-in-missouri-paid-13000-hours-of-overtime-last-spring-and-summer/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

This story was produced in partnership with the

Company and government supervisors knew that employees at the tax-funded Affordable Care Act processing center in Wentzville were being paid to do little or no work, former employees said Thursday.

And the Missouri facility wasn’t the only one.

One worker at the London, Ky., Serco facility told the Post-Dispatch on Thursday that he rarely has any health insurance applications to process.

“I walk out every day feeling as if I have contributed nothing,” said the Kentucky employee, who declined to have his name used for fear of retribution.

The federal government, under the auspices of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, last year gave a five-year, $1.2 billion contract to Serco Inc., a processing and security group, to process paper applications for health insurance.

Now, employees are claiming there are not enough applications to generate work for them.

The Post-Dispatch on Wednesday reported that a former worker, Lavonne Takatz, said Wentzville workers played Pictionary and 20 Questions because they had so little work. Others slept, she said.

Employees were not allowed to have access to the Internet or cellphones, Takatz said.

Jaison Fleming, 33, of Florissant, worked at the center through February. He said workers were not even allowed to have pens and paper, but supervisors started providing them to entertain the employees.

Both Fleming and Takatz said Serco eventually started supplying books for recreational reading, and then allowed employees to bring their own.

Both former employees told the Post-Dispatch that CMS officials became aware of the books, and they were no longer allowed.

CMS did not respond to questions about how much they knew about a possible lack of productivity.

The worker in Kentucky said he experienced a similar environment to Wentzville.

“When the highlight of employees’ days are playing Pictionary in the training room … and you get paid decent money to go to work to talk to your friends, something is wrong,” he wrote in an email to the Post-Dispatch.

Takatz, who lives in Wentzville, said she originally took the job to help people obtain health care.

“I feel guilty for working there as long as I did,” she said. “It was like I was stealing money from people.”

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said Thursday that his office has heard of more possible cases of employees hired to process applications for the Affordable Care Act doing little work.

“I have heard that there have been allegations from other facilities, and we are looking into that,” he said.

Concurrently, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., called for a federal Inspector General’s investigation, saying she has “received allegations of wrongdoing” from a whistleblower from the Wentzville plant.

Her letter to Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says the whistleblower worked for Cognosante, a subcontractor of Serco, in Wentzville. According to McCaskill, the worker claims that she was called into work last fall “when the company was aware that its employees would not be able to work due to problems with the HealthCare.gov Web site.”

McCaskill’s letter says that the whistleblower alleges that employees were told to sit at their desks and “pretend to work” when officials from the federal CMS were on-site.

The fresh calls for investigations came as the White House referred all questions to CMS, which confirmed the letters are being reviewed.

In an emailed statement, a Serco spokesman said the company’s workforce “has processed more than 1 million documents and made 1.4 million outbound phone calls to applicants” from Oct. 1 through April 30.

“As in any business or major program there are peaks and valleys as the various tasks stop and start,” wrote Alan Hill, Serco senior vice president of corporate communications and government relations.

The allegations from the facility at Wentzville come just as controversy over the Obama administration’s mistake-riddled rollout of computer sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act had faded.

A letter similar to McCaskill’s, signed by all of Missouri’s six Republican members of the U.S. House, was sent Thursday to Marilyn Tavenner, the CMS administrator.

“We wonder whether or not there was any sort of concern voiced by CMS staff or any question of legitimacy stemming from that visit that may have made its way to CMS headquarters,” the letter states. It was signed by Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer, Ann Wagner, Vicky Hartzler, Jason T. Smith, Billy Long and Sam Graves.

Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, said Thursday he was not asked to sign the letter, but through a spokesman he said that “any time tax dollars have been misspent, or misused, I support a full investigation and a complete recovery of the funds.”

According to CMS, the contract was awarded through a full and open competition that followed the Federal Acquisition Regulations “to ensure the selection process was fair and transparent, and to ensure the selection of the most qualified organization.”

The tasks outlined in the contract include intake, routing, review and troubleshooting of applications, according to John Lau, the Serco program director for the CMS contract.

Lau, in testimony in September before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, outlined some of the tasks in the contract, such as sorting and categorizing mail; processing paper applications; verifying eligibility under state-specific requirements; addressing complex issues; telephone support; code development; test support; and more.

Though most sign-ups for insurance under the new marketplace were to be made online, officials at the time estimated that a third of the 20 million people expected to apply would submit paper applications. But as of December, CMS figures show only 17 percent of applications were made on paper, according to a release by Blunt.

Lau, in his testimony, said Serco was being paid more than $114 million for the base year tasks, but that would need to be increased to $1.2 billion for additional tasks.

Those tasks included an increase in appeals requests and a growing staff. In addition, the testimony states that CMS requested translation and interpreter services in August, as well as background checks on employees.

Allegations that employees in Wentzville were doing little or no work were first reported by KMOV (Channel 4) on Monday.

Former employees told the Post-Dispatch that boredom and staring at screens led to hostility. What followed was gossip, harassment and fights.

Monica Colvin, of O’Fallon, Mo., who worked at the center through January, said she had been physically pushed by co-workers, and at one point, had her computer unplugged behind her back.

“There were a lot of pretenses of things going on in there,” she said. “Basically tattletaling and making up stories … on individuals to get them fired.”

Some said the job led them to visit a doctor for stress.

Colvin, 54, said she went to her doctor when she started experiencing anxiety and depression

“When I got there, my blood pressure was almost at the stroke point.”

CMS stated Wednesday that Serco employees were still receiving mail to process and working with customers, but CMS regularly reviews and makes adjustments to the center’s staffing levels.

A CMS spokesman said CMS was committed to ensuring federal funds were spent appropriately and performance expectations were “clear and monitored closely.”

Serco won the federal contract in July and selected Wentzville as one of three sites to carry it out. The others are in Arkansas and Kentucky.

Blunt, noting that a Canadian company received the computer contract to run the Affordable Care Act website, raised questions about why a British company whose parent company, Serco Group, is reportedly under a fraud investigation in the United Kingdom for monitoring inactive criminals, was chosen to do the health law’s paperwork.

He and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., have sent a letter to the head of the CMS asking for answers. Luetkemeyer has also said he would approach congressional committee chairs to probe the allegations.

“Right now on this issue we have a lot more questions than we have answers,” Blunt said. “And they are questions that need to be asked and questions that need to be answered.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-industry/employees-no-work-at-obamacare-processing-centers-and-bosses-knew/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

From May 1 through Aug. 15 last year, workers in the Wentzville facility logged 13,228.25 hours of overtime to process “backlogged inconsistency work,” according to a report by Serco Inc., the contractor running the facility for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.

CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said the cost of that overtime was covered under the original contract with Serco at no extra cost to taxpayers.

Serco, a British-based company with U.S. headquarters in Northern Virginia, was awarded a five-year contract, worth up to $1.2 billion, to process applications for the Affordable Care Act. It was paid $114 million for the first year of the contract and $98 million for the current year, with annual renewal options.

The Post-Dispatch filed Freedom of Information Act requests after , reading or purposely working slowly because they had so little to do.

In a Feb. 10, 2015 report sent to CMS, Serco’s Jon P. Lau and Carlo Uchello addressed those allegations. They attributed the slow-downs to computer problems but said they took the allegations of worker loafing seriously and began extensive retraining so workers could do other tasks.

“Serco, at its Wentzville facility, has been accused of allowing staff who are bored to sleep on the job, read books, play games, etc.,” they wrote. “In addition, we have been accused of not providing adequate training and support to our … staff. Both accusations are baseless and untrue.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would not allow Serco officials to comment, but CMS spokesman Albright said the company was not denying the reports of what happened.

“To clarify, Serco disagreed with the assertion that the company tolerated employees engaging in activities not relating to their work,” Albright said. “According to Serco, when Serco heard about or observed questionable activities, these issues were addressed.

“Serco has high standards when it comes to rules of behavior and practice in the workplace,” Albright said. “If employees do not meet these performance standards or violate any of these workplace rules, they are appropriately disciplined or terminated. CMS has put in place additional measures to monitor Serco’s performance and worker productivity over the last year.”

‘We Played Pictionary’

, President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, became big news in the winter and spring of 2014.

The Wentzville facility was set up to process paper applications and to help resolve differences in applicants’ documents as they sought coverage under the new law.

Data on Serco’s workload showed how difficult that rollout was.

In October, 2013, workers at the Wentzville facility processed 36,093 documents, according to the data disclosed through the FOIA. A month later, that rose to 233,160, but that was a fraction of the more than 3 million that workers at the facility would eventually process in July and August of last year, according to the data Serco supplied to CMS.

Besides data entry from paper applications for health care coverage, workers at Wentzville and facilities in Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arkansas answer telephone queries about enrollment, process appeals and check supporting documents that might raise red flags about an applicant’s citizenship or income or other personal information.

The documents supplied to the Post-Dispatch said that Serco initially hired 700 workers at the Wentzville facility when it opened in late 2013 but that it added a second shift of 750 staffers last fall. Albright said the Wentzville facility currently employs about 1,500.

Lavonne Takatz, who had worked at Wentzville from October 2013 to April 2014, said: “We played Pictionary. We played 20 Questions. We played Trivial Pursuit.”

“I feel guilty for working there as long as I did,” Takatz told the Post-Dispatch last year. “It was like I was stealing money from people.”

Another whistleblower contacted Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., making similar claims.

McCaskill requested that the Department of Health and Human Service’s Officer of Inspector General look into that report. Her request was passed to the Kansas City Regional Office.

John LaBomard, a McCaskill spokesman, said that what Serco “has to say for itself is less important to Claire than what the independent watchdog — the Inspector General — has to say, and we’re continuing to be in contact with the IG’s office to get those answers.”

Mary Kahn, a spokeswoman for HHS’s Inspector General’s office, said that a review of the allegations laid out in McCaskill’s letter is still underway.

Working Overtime

Officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services previously attributed the lack of early work at Wentzville to the same computer problems that hampered applicants trying to sign up for Obamacare in late 2013 and early 2014.

Last June, Albright told the Post-Dispatch that “the same tech issues that were widely reported last fall (2013) with healthcare.gov” hampered Serco’s work.

In an August 29, 2014, report to CMS, Serco said it was not until last May, eight months after the application process began, that the system gained the functionality to process inconsistencies.

“The volume of backlogged inconsistency work became large enough that Serco requested, and was granted, authorization to work overtime through the end of September,” the report says.

The Serco report also says retraining of workers was initially hampered by labor standards under the federal

Serco told CMS it eventually trained more than 600 data processors in its four locations to handle more complex citizenship, immigration and income inconsistencies. Some 141 were retrained in Wentzville, “which has helped us maintain a higher level of staff utilization than was previously possible,” according to the Serco report.

Serco reported in February, 2015, that when the anticipated number of paper applications were “coming in much lower than expected” for the second year’s enrollment, the company spent two weeks in December retraining workers to meet document-processing demands in other areas. But the volume of documents processed was less than half of the peak-processing months of July and August, according to Serco data.

The report also said Serco “achieved a major milestone” last May when it installed a performance management system monitoring individual worker productivity. That and better computer functionality prompted “a significant increase in production at our Wentzville facility,” Serco told CMS.

The Serco documents supplied to the Post-Dispatch reported that its four facilities had processed more than 20 million documents between October 2013, and the end of 2014.

“We take seriously any issues involving our contractors, work quickly to address them, and hold them accountable,” Albright said. “Over the last year, CMS has put in place additional measures to monitor Serco’s performance and worker productivity, and Serco’s employees have been cross-trained in multiple tasks to gain additional flexibility in workload demand to be as efficient as possible.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/news/obamacare-processing-center-in-missouri-paid-13000-hours-of-overtime-last-spring-and-summer/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

This story was produced in partnership with the

Company and government supervisors knew that employees at the tax-funded Affordable Care Act processing center in Wentzville were being paid to do little or no work, former employees said Thursday.

And the Missouri facility wasn’t the only one.

One worker at the London, Ky., Serco facility told the Post-Dispatch on Thursday that he rarely has any health insurance applications to process.

“I walk out every day feeling as if I have contributed nothing,” said the Kentucky employee, who declined to have his name used for fear of retribution.

The federal government, under the auspices of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, last year gave a five-year, $1.2 billion contract to Serco Inc., a processing and security group, to process paper applications for health insurance.

Now, employees are claiming there are not enough applications to generate work for them.

The Post-Dispatch on Wednesday reported that a former worker, Lavonne Takatz, said Wentzville workers played Pictionary and 20 Questions because they had so little work. Others slept, she said.

Employees were not allowed to have access to the Internet or cellphones, Takatz said.

Jaison Fleming, 33, of Florissant, worked at the center through February. He said workers were not even allowed to have pens and paper, but supervisors started providing them to entertain the employees.

Both Fleming and Takatz said Serco eventually started supplying books for recreational reading, and then allowed employees to bring their own.

Both former employees told the Post-Dispatch that CMS officials became aware of the books, and they were no longer allowed.

CMS did not respond to questions about how much they knew about a possible lack of productivity.

The worker in Kentucky said he experienced a similar environment to Wentzville.

“When the highlight of employees’ days are playing Pictionary in the training room … and you get paid decent money to go to work to talk to your friends, something is wrong,” he wrote in an email to the Post-Dispatch.

Takatz, who lives in Wentzville, said she originally took the job to help people obtain health care.

“I feel guilty for working there as long as I did,” she said. “It was like I was stealing money from people.”

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said Thursday that his office has heard of more possible cases of employees hired to process applications for the Affordable Care Act doing little work.

“I have heard that there have been allegations from other facilities, and we are looking into that,” he said.

Concurrently, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., called for a federal Inspector General’s investigation, saying she has “received allegations of wrongdoing” from a whistleblower from the Wentzville plant.

Her letter to Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says the whistleblower worked for Cognosante, a subcontractor of Serco, in Wentzville. According to McCaskill, the worker claims that she was called into work last fall “when the company was aware that its employees would not be able to work due to problems with the HealthCare.gov Web site.”

McCaskill’s letter says that the whistleblower alleges that employees were told to sit at their desks and “pretend to work” when officials from the federal CMS were on-site.

The fresh calls for investigations came as the White House referred all questions to CMS, which confirmed the letters are being reviewed.

In an emailed statement, a Serco spokesman said the company’s workforce “has processed more than 1 million documents and made 1.4 million outbound phone calls to applicants” from Oct. 1 through April 30.

“As in any business or major program there are peaks and valleys as the various tasks stop and start,” wrote Alan Hill, Serco senior vice president of corporate communications and government relations.

The allegations from the facility at Wentzville come just as controversy over the Obama administration’s mistake-riddled rollout of computer sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act had faded.

A letter similar to McCaskill’s, signed by all of Missouri’s six Republican members of the U.S. House, was sent Thursday to Marilyn Tavenner, the CMS administrator.

“We wonder whether or not there was any sort of concern voiced by CMS staff or any question of legitimacy stemming from that visit that may have made its way to CMS headquarters,” the letter states. It was signed by Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer, Ann Wagner, Vicky Hartzler, Jason T. Smith, Billy Long and Sam Graves.

Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, said Thursday he was not asked to sign the letter, but through a spokesman he said that “any time tax dollars have been misspent, or misused, I support a full investigation and a complete recovery of the funds.”

According to CMS, the contract was awarded through a full and open competition that followed the Federal Acquisition Regulations “to ensure the selection process was fair and transparent, and to ensure the selection of the most qualified organization.”

The tasks outlined in the contract include intake, routing, review and troubleshooting of applications, according to John Lau, the Serco program director for the CMS contract.

Lau, in testimony in September before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, outlined some of the tasks in the contract, such as sorting and categorizing mail; processing paper applications; verifying eligibility under state-specific requirements; addressing complex issues; telephone support; code development; test support; and more.

Though most sign-ups for insurance under the new marketplace were to be made online, officials at the time estimated that a third of the 20 million people expected to apply would submit paper applications. But as of December, CMS figures show only 17 percent of applications were made on paper, according to a release by Blunt.

Lau, in his testimony, said Serco was being paid more than $114 million for the base year tasks, but that would need to be increased to $1.2 billion for additional tasks.

Those tasks included an increase in appeals requests and a growing staff. In addition, the testimony states that CMS requested translation and interpreter services in August, as well as background checks on employees.

Allegations that employees in Wentzville were doing little or no work were first reported by KMOV (Channel 4) on Monday.

Former employees told the Post-Dispatch that boredom and staring at screens led to hostility. What followed was gossip, harassment and fights.

Monica Colvin, of O’Fallon, Mo., who worked at the center through January, said she had been physically pushed by co-workers, and at one point, had her computer unplugged behind her back.

“There were a lot of pretenses of things going on in there,” she said. “Basically tattletaling and making up stories … on individuals to get them fired.”

Some said the job led them to visit a doctor for stress.

Colvin, 54, said she went to her doctor when she started experiencing anxiety and depression

“When I got there, my blood pressure was almost at the stroke point.”

CMS stated Wednesday that Serco employees were still receiving mail to process and working with customers, but CMS regularly reviews and makes adjustments to the center’s staffing levels.

A CMS spokesman said CMS was committed to ensuring federal funds were spent appropriately and performance expectations were “clear and monitored closely.”

Serco won the federal contract in July and selected Wentzville as one of three sites to carry it out. The others are in Arkansas and Kentucky.

Blunt, noting that a Canadian company received the computer contract to run the Affordable Care Act website, raised questions about why a British company whose parent company, Serco Group, is reportedly under a fraud investigation in the United Kingdom for monitoring inactive criminals, was chosen to do the health law’s paperwork.

He and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., have sent a letter to the head of the CMS asking for answers. Luetkemeyer has also said he would approach congressional committee chairs to probe the allegations.

“Right now on this issue we have a lot more questions than we have answers,” Blunt said. “And they are questions that need to be asked and questions that need to be answered.”

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-industry/employees-no-work-at-obamacare-processing-centers-and-bosses-knew/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">