It was a $6.6B deal for 9 years. Then the feds reneged. Did politics play a role?

A Medicare call line boasts a high level of consumer satisfaction. Still, the U.S. government is rebidding its contract, citing customer concerns with the company that now runs the service. On the surface, 1-800-MEDICARE is a government success story: a free, popular service helping tens of millions of older Americans understand their health insurance and options for care. The call line boasts a 95 percent satisfaction rate, according to federal officials.

Some Democrats are also asking whether rebidding the contract could jeopardize services for the more than 35 million Americans who rely on 1-800-MEDICARE, the Affordable Care Act’s customer-service call line, and other response-center operations to navigate the complexities of their health insurance.

Senate Republicans took out DeLauro’s language, clearing the way for Maximus to win the $6.6 billion contract in December 2022. “There’s no articulated problem that this is fixing,” said David Berteau, CEO of the Professional Services Council, a lobbying organization for federal contractors that counts Maximus among its members. Berteau noted that the original contract was set to run up to nine years, with annual options to renew, and that federal officials initially touted Maximus’s existing years of work in helping manage the government’s health services.

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