Obamacare Missteps Revealed in Documents

At 9 a.m. on Aug. 22, a team of federal health officials sat down in a Baltimore conference room with at least a dozen employees of CGI Federal, the company with the main contract to build the Obamacare online insurance marketplace. For six weeks, the federal officials overseeing the project had become increasingly worried that CGI was missing deadlines, understaffing the work and overstating its progress.

As the meeting began, one of the officials reminded the CGI employees that HealthCare.gov was “the president’s number one priority,” assured them that the discussion would be a “blame-free zone,” and then bored in. “We must be honest and open with each other. I have to know what I don’t know.”

The top CGI executive in the room sounded contrite. “We recognize we have to build trust back,” said Cheryl Campbell, the company’s senior vice president in charge of the project.

For that day and the next, CGI staff huddled with government officials in the semicircular conference room at the headquarters of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency overseeing the project. They combed through 15 pages of spreadsheets they had brought, which spelled out the company’s level of confidence — high, medium or low — that individual components would be ready.

By the time HealthCare.gov launched 5 1/2 weeks later, many of those predictions proved wrong, internal documents show.

A final “pre-flight checklist” before the Oct. 1 launch shows that 41 of 91 separate functions that CGI was responsible for finishing by the launch were still not working.

And a spreadsheet produced by CGI, dated the day of the launch, shows that the company acknowledged 30 defects on features scheduled to have been working already, including five classified as “critical.” For example, one critical defect was that people who had finished creating applications got incorrect messages that their applications were incomplete if they tried to sign back in.

All told, of the 45 items in which CGI had expressed high confidence at the late August meeting in Baltimore, most were still not ready by the time consumers were supposed to go online. During those crucial final weeks before Obamacare opened, CGI often delivered components on time, but they contained such faulty computer code that features did not hold up under closer scrutiny — or failed later if more than several thousand people at a time tried to use them.

The Obama administration has set a Nov. 30 deadline — this Saturday — by which officials have promised that HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for about four out of five consumers. Even now, CGI’s work on the repairs is not always going well; roughly one-third to half the new computer code the company is writing cannot be used because it has revealing flaws.

This article appeared in print on page 3 of the November 25th, 2013 edition of Hamodia.