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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: flatsville who wrote (4172)	2/27/1999 3:05:00 PM
From: jwk	Respond to of 9818

Ken -- Why didn't you give us a hint about this? Medicare Computers May Crash On Jan. 1 Reuters Saturday, February 27 1999 01:52 AM EST <Picture: Reuters> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The year 2000 computer bug could cause havoc for the nation's Medicare system, interrupting health benefits for millions of old and sick Americans, congressional auditors said Friday. Joel Willemssen of Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO) told lawmakers that the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), which helps pay medical bills for more than 70 million people, was nowhere near ready for the so-called millennium problem, which could generate computer system crashes and errors next Jan. 1. ''There is a high probability that there will be some system failures,'' Willemssen told the House subcommittee on government management, information and technology. As a result of these problems, GAO said, billions of dollars in federal Medicare and state-administered Medicaid health benefits could be delayed, miscalculated or go unpaid, leaving the poor, elderly and sick without the money to pay their doctors' bills. HCFA, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, said GAO was overstating the risks. ''I want to personally assure beneficiaries that the care they have come to expect from our programs will continue throughout the millennium transition,'' the agency's administrator, Nancy-Ann DeParle, told the subcommittee. The problem is that many computers as now configured cannot recognize the year 2000. To save expensive disk space, early programmers tracked dates with only the last two numbers of the year. If not fixed, many computers will read ''00'' as 1900. This could cause many computers to go haywire come January 1, 2000. According to lawmakers and congressional auditors, the Health Care Financing Administration is one of several federal agencies lagging behind in year 2000 computer readiness. A congressional report released Monday singled out the Federal Aviation Administration, the State Department and the Agency for International Development for failing to prepare. GAO said the risk at HCFA was particularly acute. More than 150 different computer systems are used by the agency in administering the Medicare program. As the nation's largest health care insurer, Medicare expects to process more than a billion claims and pay $288 billion in benefits annually by 2000. ''The consequences, then, of its systems' not being year 2000 compliant could be enormous,'' Willemssen said. GAO said Medicaid -- a joint federal-state program supported by HCFA and administered by the states -- was also at risk because some states were falling behind in upgrading their computer systems. Medicaid provides about $160 billion in health coverage for 36 million low-income people, including over 17 million children. DeParle said fixing the administration's computers for the Year 2000 bug was her top priority. She said progress was being made and many critical systems were already prepared. ''I am confident that HCFA's own year 2000 systems issues will be resolved well before January 1, 2000,'' she said. Willemssen said HCFA was overstating its readiness. He said many of these computer systems were still vulnerable to crash, and urged DeParle to improve her contingency planning.