the secretary of health and human services, gamely defended the problem-plagued rollout of President Obama’s health care law on Wednesday and tried to explain the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of individual insurance policies.
In three and a half grueling hours of testimony before a House committee, Ms. Sebelius apologized for the missteps and problems in efforts to carry out the president’s most important domestic initiative.
But nothing Ms. Sebelius said at the hearing could overcome the stark message displayed on a large video screen that showed a page from HealthCare.gov: “The system is down at the moment. We are experiencing technical difficulties and hope to have them resolved soon. Please try again later.”
That message undercut Ms. Sebelius’s statements that the federal online insurance marketplace was improving every day and would be fully functional and able to accommodate millions of users by Nov. 30 — about a month before the deadline for buying coverage on Jan. 1.
Ms. Sebelius, testifying under oath before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said she had told Mr. Obama that “we were ready to go” with the insurance website before it opened on Oct. 1.
“Clearly I was wrong,” she said.
In her testimony, Ms. Sebelius came across as a hapless official, aloof from many operational decisions about the website, which was conceived as a shopping mall for health insurance products.
She said she was as surprised as anyone when the website collapsed on Oct. 1, under pressure from millions of users, and was crippled by technical problems in subsequent days.
“No one anticipated this level of problems,” Ms. Sebelius said. While she was aware of the risks in operating a big new system, she said, “no one indicated that this could possibly go this wrong.”
In hindsight, she said, “we should have anticipated, we should have planned better, we should have tested better.”
Ms. Sebelius told the committee: “Hold me accountable for the debacle. I’m responsible.”
She said she had given “regular reports” to Mr. Obama, and she acknowledged that, as chief executive, he was ultimately “responsible for government programs.”
At the same time, Ms. Sebelius said that a government contractor, Terremark, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications, was responsible for failures that disrupted the website on Sunday and again on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Ms. Sebelius said crucial decisions were made by other officials, including Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Michelle Snyder, the chief operating officer of the agency.
But at no time, she said, did any contractor or senior official advise her to delay the opening of the federal marketplace.
“Our C.M.S. team felt we were ready to go,” she said of the agency. “I told the president that we were ready to go.”
Ms. Sebelius tried, with little success, to allay concerns about notices sent to hundreds of thousands of consumers stating that their individual insurance policies would soon be terminated because they did not comply with new standards under the health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act.
She said the cancellation of some policies was a justifiable result of the law. These policies will be replaced, she said, with ones that provide better benefits and more consumer protections, at similar or lower prices.
Republicans said the premiums for new policies were often higher than what people had been paying.
Ms. Sebelius said that those in the individual market — perhaps 12 million people — had never had consumer protections. “They could be locked out, priced out, dumped out,” she said. “This market has always been the wild west.” Indeed, she said: “It wasn’t a marketplace at all. It was unprotected, unregulated and people were really on their own.”
Ms. Sebelius acknowledged that comprehensive testing of the federal website had begun too late, just two weeks before the website went live.
“Clearly we did not adequately do end-to-end testing,” Ms. Sebelius said Wednesday. “Each of the component parts was tested and independently validated.” But, she said, the government did not do enough testing of the whole system from start to finish.
Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said the administration had not properly tested the security of the website, which receives financial information from consumers seeking subsidies to help pay their premiums.
An internal government memorandum shows that administration officials were concerned that a lack of security testing created “a high risk” for the federal exchange. Ms. Sebelius said that she did not share the concerns and that consumers should not worry.
Ms. Sebelius refused to disclose the number of people who had enrolled in health plans through the federal marketplace.
“We do not have reliable enrollment data,” she said. Data for the first month will be disclosed in mid-November, she said, and she predicted that “it will be a very small number,” given the problems that have hobbled the federal website.
Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, introduced a bill this week that would require the administration to issue weekly reports showing how many people had obtained insurance through the federal exchange, which serves 36 states that did not set up their own state insurance exchanges.
“Before the Internet, RCA knew how many records Elvis was selling every day, Ford knew how many cars it was selling and McDonald’s could tell you how many hamburgers it had sold each day,” Mr. Alexander said. “Yet the Obama administration cannot tell us how many Americans have tried to sign up for Obamacare. That’s the biggest secret left in Washington. source
