Internal Emails Reveal Warnings HealthCare.Gov Wasn't Ready
HealthCare.gov could barely function on the day the health insurance marketplace debuted, and internal emails show at least some top health officials could see the failure coming.
In emails from July of this year, released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Obama administration officials write of unskilled developers and a series of missed deadlines. One email said the "entire build is in jeopardy." But when the administration's top people in charge of the implementation testified before the committee in the months leading up to the site launch, they said just the opposite — that they were ready.
"Administration officials looked us in the eye and told us everything was 'on track' but when we pull back the curtain now, the mess is disturbing," committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said in a statement.
You can read the full email exchanges at the committee site. But here are the most dire warnings detailed in the emails between Henry Chao, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services project manager in charge of HealthCare.gov, and other officials:
Three months before launch, only 10 developers from contractor CGI Federal were working on a crucial part of the site — the marketplace for choosing plans — and of those, only one was "at a high enough skill level."
Coordination issues between two main contractors — CGI Federal and QSSI. In all, HealthCare.gov has at least 47 different federal contractors involved, but CGI and QSSI won the big contracts for major chunks of the build. It seems QSSI and CGI couldn't seem to work smoothly together. Today, QSSI is the "lead contractor" in charge of getting everyone on the same page.
The only developer who was working on the payment pages for enrollment quit CGI without programming the 10 key user interface pieces of the transaction part. "Needless to say it is in jeopardy," wrote CMS' Jeffrey Grant.
The part of the system that does monthly payment calculation of insurance plans did not get priority by the contractor, who called it "not an October 1 item." [The health care insurance website launched Oct. 1.]
"Seriously substandard staffing," is how Grant described its contractor's people power. The key contractor, CGI, missed deadlines due to "insufficient" programmer resources. A month from testing certain parts of the system, no development work had even started. CGI Federal got at least $93.7 million to build HealthCare.gov.
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