30-40% of Obamacare website never built

By USA Today November 20, 2013 12:25 pm

The deputy chief information officer with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Tuesday that he did not see a consultant's report in March that highlighted numerous problems facing the launch of the federal health care exchange.
Henry Chao told a House committee he had not seen the McKinsey & Co. report and did not choose the Oct. 1 start date for HealthCare.gov, which has been plagued by problems in the six weeks since its launch.
Chao also told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that the tech team fixing HealthCare.gov still has to build 30% to 40% of systems needed to support the website.
At the White House, press secretary Jay Carney said President Obama and top aides were briefed in recent months about the kinds of implementation issues and problems raised in the McKinsey report but were told the website would be ready for operation by October.
Obama, speaking to a group of corporate executives Tuesday, said that "my website's not working the way it's supposed to," and officials are working on improvements.
"We are getting it fixed," he said at the meeting of The Wall Street Journal/CEO Council. "But it would have been better to do it on the front end, rather than the back end."
Republicans cited the McKinsey study throughout the House hearing, stressing that at least some officials were warned about the website problems. "We're concerned at multiple levels," said Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa. "It is absolutely clear that the start-up of the website was not going to work well if at all by Oct. 1."
White House and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officials said red flags were raised during development, but contractors said it would be ready and no one expected the ensuing problems.
"The president, as we said repeatedly, got regular briefings and was told that there were problems that were being addressed," Carney said, and no one at the White House was warned that "the site would perform as poorly as it did."
CMS spokeswoman Patti Unruh said of the McKinsey study, "The review was completed six months before the beginning of open enrollment ... and was followed by concrete action to address potential risks -- as was intended."
CMS contracted with McKinsey in 2010 to review the progress made in the development of the health care exchange, which is where residents of 34 states can go to buy insurance required by the Affordable Care Act. People who live in other states can buy insurance on state exchanges.
McKinsey's role was to conduct "red team" exercises, reviewing possible pitfalls with the exchanges and how they could be fixed.
The hearing was another front on which Obama and aides played defense Tuesday on health care.
A woman spotlighted as a success story said she has had to drop her new insurance policy because the costs shot up after her enrollment.
Jessica Sanford, a single mother from Washington state whose enrollment was cited by Obama on Oct. 21, told CNN that her initial cost of $169 a month rose to as much as $390, in part because the state had mistakenly said she qualified for a subsidy.
Carney said Sanford went through a state-based insurance exchange, and it is his understanding that officials in Washington are reaching out to her to discuss alternatives.
Contributing: Kelly Kennedy
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