The House Energy and Commerce Committee interrogated, scrutinzed, and criticized contractors for Healthcare.gov Thursday, just days after the Obama Administration called in a "fix it" team amid growing public frustration over the site's problems. Contractors testified that CMS was responsible for testing the site and decidind whether to go live.
"Why were we told everything was OK just weeks before one of the biggest IT disasters in government history?" asked Pennsylvania Republican Joseph Pitts.
"The website should have been the easy part. ... Taxpayers around the country really expected a user friendly system," said committee chairman Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican.
[See also: What happened to Healthcare.gov?.]
"It’s 2013, there are thousands of websites that handle concurrent volumes larger than Healthcare.gov," said Anna Eshoo, a Democrat representing much of Silicon Valley. The explanation that Healthcare.gov’s problem stemmed from large traffic: "I think that’s really kind of a lame excuse. Amazon and eBay don’t crash the week before Christmas," Eshoo said.
"If 55 contractors couldn’t create a working website," asked Pennsylvania Republican Tim Murphy, what will the fix-it team be able to do?
While the testimony and answers by leaders from two of the main contractors did not seem to satisfy lawmakers, they did seem to confirm what’s become a tech industry adage: "If you go live months late when you're ready, no one will ever remember. If you go live on time, when you're not ready, no one will ever forget."
Referring to the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services as the ultimate tester of the website and the final decision maker of the October 1 go-live date, they all but said: We didn’t have enough time.
[See also: Lessons learned from health insurance exchange launch.]
"Our portion of the system was what we testified was ready to go live," said Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president at CGI Federal, the main contractor, referring to her Congressional testimony in September. “It was not our decision to go live. CMS had the ultimate decision for live or no go. We were not in a position ... to tell our client whether they should go live or not go live."
Integration testing was done in the last weeks in September, Campbell said, and it was CMS officials who were responsible.
“Unfortunately, in systems this complex with so many concurrent users, it is not unusual to discover problems that need to be addressed once the software goes into a live production environment,” Campbell said in opening statements. “This is true regardless of the level of formal end-to-end performance testing — no amount of testing within reasonable time limits can adequately replicate a live environment of this nature.”
QSSI, a part of UnitedHealth Group’s Optum unit, didn’t see full end-to-end testing until a few days before the launch. “Ideally,” said Andrew Slavitt, QSSI group executive vice president, “we would have loved to have months.”
CMS' apparent commitment to the October go-live date in the face of potential or known problems rankled a number of lawmakers.
“I’m very disturbed that CMS did not give you an adequate amount of time for testing,” Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon, said, noting that the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles’ database overhaul in the late 1980s was scrapped after some $50 million. That failed, and he doesn’t want the same to happen to Healthcare.gov, he said. “This isn't a partisan issue about healthcare. People expect this to work."
Illinois Republican John Shimkus, raising his voice a bit (he wasn’t the only one), wanted to know who at CMS was ultimately directing the testing. Campbell, a former SAIC vice president, listed CMS deputy CIO Henry Chao and COO Michelle Snyder.
The good news, Campbell said, is that the website is gradually improving. But how are they fixing it? asked California Democrat Henry Waxman. “Do you have to start from scratch and rewrite 5 million lines of code?”
No, Campbell said. “The 300-plus employees in the office would all walk out if I told them they had to rewrite that many lines of code.”
