Federal officials said Friday that they had spent $630 million on information technology for the repair health portal insurance website, and they expressed growing frustration with hardware and software problems that continued to thwart millions of people trying to buy insurance in the online market.
“We made progress and also ran into some roadblocks that slowed us down,” said Jeffrey D. Zients, the troubleshooter appointed by President Obama to fix the website and bail the administration out of a political crisis caused by its disastrous debut.
Mr. Zients’s progress report, delivered during a conference call with reporters on Friday, was less upbeat than one he delivered on Oct. 25, just before the crash of a Verizon data center that hosts the website, HealthCare.gov. “Make no mistake,” Mr. Zients said. “The hardware failure was a setback and was extremely frustrating.”
On the other hand, Mr. Zients said, the team working to address the website’s technical issues had made some progress, decreasing the load time so users can see pages after an average wait of one second, down from eight seconds in the first few weeks after the site opened on Oct. 1.
The briefing was notable for its emphasis on computer metrics and software bugs, rather than Mr. Obama’s overarching vision of affordable health insurance for all Americans.
Mr. Zients said he was focused on measuring and analyzing system performance, but he was unable to say how many hours the website had been down because of failures at the data center run by the Terremark unit of Verizon.
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has responsibility for the website, said earlier in the week that the shutdowns, on Sunday and again at midweek, appeared to have lasted more than 36 hours, or one-fourth of the time from Sunday through Friday.
The administration provided no estimate of the number of people who filed applications for insurance in the last week. The latest official figures indicate that 700,000 people filed applications through Oct. 25, about half in the federal marketplace and half in the 14 state-run exchanges.
During the conference call, administration officials were asked if they still had confidence in Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the online insurance marketplace, who works at C.M.S.
Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the agency, declined to answer directly. “We have confidence in the team that is in place working 24/7 to make improvements week by week,” she said.
Top administration officials said this week that the lead contractor on the project, CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI Group, had not met their expectations. But they said they would not remove the company.
“CGI is an important part of the team to make sure that we fix the website, get rid of the glitches and work through our punch list,” said Mr. Zients, who is in line to take over as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser on Jan. 1. Mr. Zients said he was methodically working through a list of tasks, which he refused to enumerate. “We’ve fixed the failed hardware, and we will be making further hardware upgrades” over the weekend, he said, so the White House can keep its latest promise: “By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.”
Republicans in Congress say taxpayers should not have to pay more to fix a website riddled with flaws.
Cheryl R. Campbell, a senior vice president of CGI Federal, told Congress on Oct. 24 that its work on the website had been performed under “a cost-plus contract.” Ms. Bataille, asked how much the fixes would cost, gave a different account on Friday. “All of that is covered with our contractual obligations that already exist, that $630 million number,” she said.
The Obama administration assigned new responsibilities last week to Quality Software Services, a unit of the UnitedHealth Group, saying it would be the general contractor, coordinating work on the project.
Quality Software Services, which built parts of the current system, is apparently negotiating with the government over how it will be compensated.
Millions of people tried to use the website on its first day of operation, but few successfully enrolled in health plans, according to newly disclosed records of internal government meetings. The records indicate that only six people enrolled on the first day. One document, from the afternoon of Oct. 2, says, “Approximately 100 enrollments have happened.” A day later the tally climbed to 248. The numbers come from notes taken during meetings in a “war room” established by the Medicare agency. The meetings included administration officials and federal contractors trying to determine what had gone wrong with the federal exchange. Ms. Bataille said the notes were “not official documents.”
The White House has predicted that seven million people will sign up for coverage through the exchanges by the end of the six-month open-enrollment period on March 31. source
