Healthcare.gov troubles foreseen

In the days before Healthcare.gov launched, officials were expressing concern over development and testing issues that were cropping up for the health insurance exchange website.

Emails in July between Health and Human Services officials and one of the site's contractors show a scramble to reset development schedules amid concerns from developers about lack of needed staff and resources.

[See also: Healthcare leadership in the hot seat]

"We just got off an extended set of development planning meetings with OIS," wrote Jeffrey Grant, of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight in a July 8 internal email. "Suffice it to say, the upshot is the FM build appears to be way off track and getting worse."

"We also finally were told that there were only 10 developers total working on the FM build for all functionality," he wrote to Sharon Arnold, director of payment policy and financial management group at CMS. "Only one of these developers is at a high enough skill level to handle complex issue resolution, which now appears to be required for all aspects of our build."

The documents, legally obtained by Republican House leaders, are adding to the heated congressional hearings taking place in Capitol Hill in an effort to understand the events leading to the rocky launch of the Affordable Care Act. 

In the July emails, Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at CMS, expressed concern about testifying at a July congressional oversight hearing where he and CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner promised the website would be ready to go on Oct. 1, a deadline self-imposed by the Obama administration.

At a hearing on Nov. 13, House members asked why, with such serious concerns looming about the website, HHS didn’t push the deadline back from Oct. 1.

The answer from federal officials was that the website needed to accommodate users who would need to purchase health insurance before Dec. 15 in order to be covered by Jan. 1, 2014, as mandated under the ACA, or face financial penalties for noncompliance.

Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer, testified that the site will work “for the majority of Americans" by Nov. 30, the date the Obama administration has set to have Healthcare.gov working.

This report is based on a story that originally was published on Government Health IT.