WASHINGTON |
(Reuters)
- The Obama administration launched its troubled healthcare insurance
website after only a minimum of crucial system-wide testing, despite
contractors warning officials repeatedly about performance risks, a
congressional panel heard on Thursday.Witnesses said the administration did not conduct end-to-end testing of the system's technology backbone until just the two weeks before one of the lynchpins of President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare policy opened to consumers on October 1.
At a U.S. House of Representatives oversight committee hearing, contractors also blamed the administration for a last-minute design change that has been identified as a flaw responsible for leading millions of visitors into system bottlenecks.
Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency implementing the online marketplace, acknowledged the contractors' testimony.
"Due to a compressed timeframe the system wasn't tested enough," Bataille said. "What's important to realize is that we are putting in place a much more robust performance testing system now."
The glitches, delays and errors that have characterized Healthcare.gov are a growing concern for Republicans and Democrats alike. The administration is racing to solve the problems in time for millions of uninsured Americans to enroll for coverage and begin receiving health benefits from January 1, as stipulated by the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly called "Obamacare."
CMS said on Thursday that about 700,000 applications have been submitted so far for U.S. healthcare coverage through the exchanges.
"We would certainly have liked to see as much time as possible for end-to-end testing," said Andrew Slavitt, executive vice president for the parent of CGI Federal and Quality Software Services Inc (QSSI), a unit of health insurer UnitedHealth Group.
QSSI produced the federal data hub and a software tool for creating online consumer accounts, which was at the center of early logjam problems. The design change involved turning off anonymous browsing and requiring online visitors to create accounts before researching health plan information and determining their eligibility for federal subsidies to help pay premiums.
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In hearing, a startling agreement on who to blame for HealthCare.Gov
(Jason Reed/Reuters)
Everyone at the Energy and Commerce hearing this morning came to an agreement on who caused the problems with HealthCare.Gov: Somebody else.
"Our portion of the application worked as designed," CGI Federal Vice President Cheryl Campbell testified.
"We were confident it would work on October 1 and in fact it has," Andy Slavitt, who represented contractor QSSI at the hearing, said of the federal data hub that his employer built.
The hearing room, even four hours into testimony, was packed and standing-room only. When CGI's Campbell took a five-minute bathroom break, a pack of a half-dozen cameras followed her up and down the hallway.
"You probably haven't gotten a lot of sleep in the past week," Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) told her and the other witnesses somewhere between hours three and four. The hearing ended around 1:30 p.m. with about a dozen cameras chasing the QSSI representative around the House office building as he refused to answer any questions (one camera crashed into a wall).
That did not stop the hearing from stretching on for the entire morning, and greater part of the afternoon. The result of the marathon hearing yielded a few notable tidbits.
Contractors are more than happy to throw the federal government under the bus.
For a while, the government contractors were staying pretty mum on who should take the blame for HealthCare.Gov's screw-ups. And this makes sense for companies' whose main line of business is the federal government.
But at this hearing, both CGI and QSSI threw a lot of blame at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Service, mostly for three key issues: the short time left for end-to-end testing, the decision to go live on October 1 and ditching a feature allowing consumers to window shop shortly before the site went live.
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The contractors said
it wa the government's responsibility, and not theirs, to make sure the
website worked. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Testifying before the House energy and commerce committee during the first congressional hearings into the debacle, four contractors repeatedly denied their software was to blame and turned the spotlight instead on the government agency in charge of overseeing the complex system.
More than 50 different companies, five government departments and 36 states were involved in building the website, which is designed to help millions of uninsured Americans find affordable coverage from private insurers.
But extensive bugs and delays in the registration and enrolment process have now forced the government to postpone a February 15 deadline for purchasing coverage, allowing an extra six weeks before fines are levied on those without insurance.
Angry Republicans and Democrats turned on the main private contractors behind the website on Thursday to seek an explanation for the glitches, but largely failed to show who was responsible for design or implementation flaws.
The closest admission of failure came from Andrew Slavitt of Maryland-based contractor QSSI, who revealed that systems to check identity were flooded with 178,000 requests on the first day that healthcare.gov was live, after a last-minute government decision to make people create accounts on the site before they could compare insurance products.
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