Health-portal fix promised by December

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s hobbled health-insurance exchange website will be fixed by December, the management consultant asked to salvage the site said Friday in the first timeline provided for correcting the flaws.

Jeffrey Zients, in his initial public comments since Obama assigned him the job this week, said the site will be working “smoothly” by then. The project’s management has been reorganized, with United Health Group Inc.’s Quality Software Services Inc. unit taking over as lead contractor.

Since opening for business this month, the federal exchange serving 36 states has been plagued by delays, error messages and hang-ups that have prevented many customers from completing enrollment. Zients said Friday that investigators had found bugs in the software that powers the site.

“With the new general contractor in place and the focus that we have and what we have seen over the last couple of days, we are confident that each week the site will get better,” Zients said. “It’ll take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed, but let me be clear: healthcare.gov is fixable.”

Healthcare.gov was intended as the main portal for millions of uninsured people in 36 of the 50 U.S. states to gain coverage from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. The remaining 14 states built and are running their own sites independent of the federal government.

“By the end of November,” Zients said, “healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.”

That self-imposed deadline is just two weeks before the Obama administration’s original Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for insurance that takes effect Jan. 1.

The administration this week announced that individuals would have until March 31 to enroll in health coverage without facing penalties. Under the law, anyone not covered for three months or longer faces a fine. For the insurance to take effect and avoid the fines, uninsured Americans would have had to sign up by Feb. 15.

Ten Democratic senators led by Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire called on the Obama administration to extend the health law’s open-enrollment period beyond March 31. Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Dianne Feinstein of California were among those who signed the letter.

“Extending this period will give consumers critical time in which to become familiar with the website and choose a plan that is best for them,” according to the letter. “Individuals should not be penalized for lack of coverage if they are unable to purchase health insurance due to technical problems.”

The Obama administration has the authority to extend the enrollment period without congressional approval, said Amber Moon, a spokesman for North Carolina Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan, who signed Shaheen’s letter. The law allows Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to determine the enrollment period and exempt individuals from the penalty.

Sebelius, at a news conference Friday in San Antonio, said the department isn’t discussing an extension because any change in dates would have “subsequent consequences” for insurance providers.

During a visit to a community health center earlier in Austin, Texas, Sebelius said her department will review the performance of the contractors hired to build the website, but the top priority was to get the site working. She said the department would begin a review right away.

“We will be looking at all the contract specs, looking at what was required, where steps were missed along the way, and we want to make sure the taxpayers get their money’s worth,” Sebelius said. “So for money that was spent, we will make sure people are accountable, but the most important thing right now is getting the website up and running as fast as possible.”

Sebelius visited Texas because it has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the nation, with more than 23 percent of Texans having no coverage. As the second most-populous state, Gov. Rick Perry’s decision not to expand Medicaid to enroll more of the working poor will significantly inhibit the federal law’s success in reducing the number of insured in the country.

“We hope that the decision on Medicaid will continue to be actively discussed in the Legislature,” she said.

Perry has called the entire Medicaid system broken and has called for abolishing it to allow states to develop their own health-care programs for the poor.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said in a statement on Sebelius’ Texas visit that citizens want accountability for the mismanaged website roll out.

“If she hasn’t come ready to answer questions about why hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on a botched product, she might as well not visit,” he said.

Sebelius said during the Austin visit that her agency tested the site using five times the maximum traffic ever experienced by Medicare.gov, a similar site. But she said that was a gross underestimate of the demand placed on healthcare.gov.

“I don’t think anyone knew that the volume would cause the problems it did,” Sebelius said. “I didn’t realize it wouldn’t be operating optimally before the launch.”

She also said the high volume not only contributed to its failure, but also exposed other problems that testing didn’t uncover.

“In an ideal world there would have been a lot more testing, but we did not have the luxury of that. And the law said the go-time was Oct. 1,” she said. “And frankly, a political atmosphere where the majority party, at least in the House, was determined to stop this anyway they possibly could … was not an ideal atmosphere.”

The U.S. government did final tests of the website just days before it went public, while similar projects are tested for months, the main contractors told a House panel Thursday.

The site previously had no lead contractor. It was built largely by a unit of Montreal-based CGI Group Inc. The United Health unit, Quality Software Services, built a service called the “data services hub” that collects information about customers from other federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration, and feeds it to both the federal website and sites run by states.

“The data hub, we believe, functions relatively smoothly,” Zients said.

Quality Software Services and Oracle Corp. were also responsible for an identity-management function used when customers create accounts on the site, according to people familiar with the project. Account creation was an early problem. Zients said 90 percent of customers can complete that step now.

In its expanded role, Quality Software Services is “overseeing the entire operation, making sure if one particular issue needs to be addressed, it gets prioritized and addressed right away,” Julie Bataille, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said on the conference call.

“Working with CMS, QSSI will help monitor, assess, prioritize and manage the technical operations of healthcare.gov to enhance the consumer experience,” the company said in a statement Friday.

It wasn’t clear whether the government officials previously in charge, including Henry Chao, the deputy chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, would remain as managers.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had been acting as its own “system integrator,” coordinating the work of 55 contractors and supervising testing before the site went live Oct. 1, Bataille said Thursday. That decision has been blamed for many of the site’s problems.

Bataille didn’t directly answer a question Friday about whether Quality Software Services would be the system integrator, instead saying the company’s role is “akin to a general contractor.”

Zients, 46, a health-care entrepreneur, was named in September to replace Gene Sperling as director of the National Economic Council starting in January, after serving the government in the past as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. He agreed this week to take a detour to his new job by helping advise the Health and Human Services Department on how to fix the website.

On the back end, health insurers have complained that information they receive from the government about their new customers is inaccurate or garbled. Zients said that problem “is at the top of the punch list” of issues with the site “and it’ll get punched out as fast as can be done.”

Despite the problems, about 700,000 people had completed insurance applications since the beginning of the month, the government said Thursday. The figure includes health-insurance exchanges in 14 states that are running their own websites and report fewer problems. About half of the applications were from states using the federal site, Bataille said.

Customers in states served by the federal exchange also can apply by phone, where 17 government-run call centers have wait times measured in seconds, according to the government. They also can apply on paper using in-person assistance at community organizations and health clinics.

Information for this article was contributed by Alex Wayne, David Mildenberg, Kathleen Miller, Michael C. Bender, Alex Wayne and David Mildenberg of Bloomberg News; by Chris Tomlinson of The Associated Press; and by Robert Pear of The New York Times.