Federal Reports

To reimburse the Postal Service for unpaid amounts for revenue forgone, Congress promised to pay the Postal Service $29 million a year from 1994 through 2035 without interest. Starting in FY 2011, the $29 million payments were reduced or skipped for 4 years. They have now resumed, but there is a risk that payments could stop again. If payments stop permanently, the Postal Service will have to declare a bad debt on its bottom line. One solution is to offset the remaining amount owed with interest, $1.6 billion, against the Postal Service’s current debt to the Treasury.

As required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), HealthCare.gov is the Federal website that facilitates purchase of private health insurance for consumers who reside in States that did not establish health insurance marketplaces. At its launch on October 1, 2013, and for some time after, HealthCare.gov users were met with website outages and technical malfunctions. After corrective action by CMS and contractors, HealthCare.gov performance improved and facilitated health plan enrollment for millions of consumers. The problems at launch raised concerns about the effectiveness of CMS management of the Federal Marketplace. The objective of this case study was to gain insight into CMS implementation of the Federal Marketplace, focusing primarily on HealthCare.gov.

Not all of the District of Columbia marketplace's (District marketplace) internal controls were effective in ensuring that individuals were enrolled in qualified health plans (QHP) according to Federal requirements.