#Contractors stand by work on #healthcare #website in #defiant #testimony – #liveupdates • #Contractors #blame #government for #insufficient #testing • #Head contractor #predicts #full #functionality by 15 December • We have #confidence in our #ability to #deliver, #CGI says • Read the #latest blog #summary #Obamacare website A woman looks at the #HealthCare .gov #insurance #exchange site. Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images theguardian/world/2013/oct/24/obamacare-website-testify-congress-live?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-3%20Main%20trailblock:Network%20front%20-%20main%20trailblock:Position2 1h 22m ago Rogers, the chair of the House intelligence committee, is grilling the contractors about possible security flaws in the web site. You are constantly changing code, youre introducing new code, you cant quite tell me thats secure, Rogers says. I am more nervous today than I was when I got here. I am shocked, shocked. This is a significant event... you cannot expose this much information with this low threshold of security in a day with such great cyber-security threats, he says. Campbell says CGI does not throw code in willy-nilly. Rogers says the code can be perfect but putting code in could create security vulnerabilities. 1h 19m ago Under questioning by GK Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina, Campbell denies that the White House got involved in the web site to try to hide some costs associated with the new law. The House oversight committee chair, Darrell Issa of California, is setting up hearings to investigate an alleged nefarious White House role in cooking the health care site. Butterfield is out to debunk the assertion. The White House has not given us direct instructions, Campbell says. She says shes not aware of any intervention by the White House in the development of the web site. 1h 18m ago Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, asks the contractors how many change orders they received over the course of the project. Eight change orders, as recently as August of this year, Campbell says. Slavitt says he does not know. Both say the fixes theyre making involve changes to the computer code. 1h 7m ago We talked to CMS about our testimony, but not in any detail, Campbell says. But not her personally. Shes being questioned by Lee Terry, Republican of Nebraska. 1h 5m ago Two weeks for end-to-end testing was not enough, the contractors say. Months would have been nice, says QQSI of end-to-end testing time. This was one thing that *definitely* CMSs call. — Suzy Khimm (@SuzyKhimm) October 24, 2013 1h 1m ago Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, asks Campbell whether she ever told the committee that more testing was needed. Campbell said no. But she says no one ever asked her. 54m ago Gene Green, Democrat of Texas, asks the contractors if they were overly optimistic when they last appeared before the committee, on 10 September, and said the site would be ready. No, Campbell says. [On] September 10 we were quite optimistic that our portion of the system would work effectively when the system went live. Slavitt echoes her: We believe weve been prudent and cautious all the way through this project. This hearing is one long slow-motion throwing the government under the bus for poor project management. The individual contractors admit to little or no fault. 50m ago Rep Joseph Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, asks whats wrong with the site. Campbell produces some fine corporate jargon: If there was a silver bullet answer to that question, Id give it to you... its a number of things... its the end-to-end aspect... its components across the entire ecosystem. Slavitt says We take responsibility for problems with the data hub in the early days. But fortunately today to hub is performing well. Campbell again makes the blind men-touching-an-elephant argument. We were not part of the end-to-end visibility throughout the system, to understand the vulnerability. 46m ago Summary Heres a summary of the hearing so far: • The top contractor behind healthcare.gov said the site should be running smoothly in time for people to enroll for health insurance by 15 December, which would allow them to procure coverage by 1 January 2014. • I cannot give you an exact date, said Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI federal. I would prefer not doing that, I dont like to raise expectations. • Executives from four site contractors acknowledged problems with the site but made no major admissions of difficulties or of obstacles to getting the site running as needed. Over the past two weeks, the federal exchange has steadily improved... We have confidence in our ability to deliver successfully, said Campbell. • The contractors repeatedly rejected responsibility for end-to-end testing of the site. They said they tested their individual functions and they worked. Holistic testing did not begin until the last two weeks of September, they said. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was in charge of testing, they said. • The contractors said they did not warn the government that the site would not be ready by 1 October. They said that judgment was not theirs to make. It was not our position to tell our client whether they should go live or not go live, Campbell said. It was CMS call, she said. • Congress members engaged in some cross-party bashing, with Democrats particularly slamming Republicans for what they said was fear-mongering and a desire to destroy Obamacare with no concomitant desire to provide Americans with health care. • The lawmakers expressed frustration that the contractors did not admit fault. Youre essentially saying that everything was all right. Its not all right! said Rep. Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California. 40m ago Campbell is asked again when the site will be fixed. I have a team of people working around the clock... she says. But I cannot give you an exact date. I would prefer not doing that, I dont like to raise expectations. Updated 40m ago 38m ago John Shimkus of Illinois is pressing on when the end-to-end testing was performing. The integrated system was tested in the last two weeks of September, Campbell says. What was the result, Shimkus asks. Campbell says hed have to ask CMS. Who? Shimkus asks. Who can Congress ask at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services? He wants names. Campbell names Henry Chao, Michelle Snyder and one other contact. 32m ago Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, makes a strong point. The point is that to hear the contractors talk about it, nothing really went wrong and no one was at fault: Youre essentially saying that everything was all right. Its not all right! Eshoo says. 27m ago Ralph Hall, Republican of Texas, asks the witnesses to throw him a bone on what to tell constituents who dont like Obamacare and who think the health care web site is bad. The system is improving day over day, and we are continuing to work to make improvements, Campbell says. 23m ago No I will not yield to this monkey court or whatever it is. I will not yield! – Representative Frank Pallone, D-NJ #MonkeyCourt pic.twitter/fO7Ht8oIUb — Jeffrey Young (@JeffYoung) October 24, 2013 20m ago Rep Pallone of New Jersey slams Rep. Joe Barton, Republican of Texas. Barton has just gone on a long diatribe about a disclaimer on the site informing consumers that the personal signup information they enter may not be kept private. Barton says the disclaimer is hidden on the site. He says the site could violate HIPAA, the health insurance portability and accountability act, the law meant to protect patient health information. Pallone says the signup information in question does not include health information and Hipaa doesnt apply. Hipaa doesnt apply. Youre asked about your address, your date of birth... Pallone says. Youre trying to scare people! he tells Barton. Barton asks Pallone to yield so he can reply. No I will not yield to this monkey court or whatever it is. I will not yield! Pallone says. This is not a monkey court, says Barton. One of the conservative critiques of the presidents health care law – it is one of the most unlikely critiques of the law – is that it requires people to turn over their private information to the government. Such as their government-issued social security number, and household information on file with the IRS. Updated 29m ago 2m ago Ranking member Waxmans turn to talk. He asks Campbell, Does CGI expect that it will take 6 months to a year to fix this thing? No, she says: We anticipate that the system as we have seen is improving day over day, and we anticipate that people will be able to enroll in the time frame allotted. As painful as it sounds... the system is working, people are enrolling. But people will be able to enroll at a faster pace... People will be able to enroll by the December 15 time frame. She says theres no way that 5m lines of code have to rewritten. If her 300 employees on the project thought that theyd walk out, she says, laughing awkwardly. She says talk of needing to mothball the web site is simply wrong. 6m ago Slavitt, Spellecy and Lau give basically the same answer. All our internal testing worked, they say; there was no reason to recommend a delay. 7m ago Uptons second question, for Campbell: Did you know there were problems? Did you recommend a delay? Campbell basically says it was beyond CGIs pay grade to recommend a delay or not: It was not our position to do so, Campbell said; CMS had the ultimate decision for a Go or No-Go. It was not our position to tell our client whether they should go live or not go live. I did not have nor did CGI have an opinion on whether to go live, she says. The end-to-end testing was the reponsibility of CMS. It was not our decision to go live. Updated 6m ago 10m ago Uptons first question: Did any of you tell the administration the October 1 web site rollout was too soon? No one raises a hand. 11m ago John Lau, program director of Serco, goes last. We have no role in the development of the web site, he says. Well then, well want to be hearing a lot from him. He says Serco is in charge of handling paper applications. To date weve recieved about 18,000 documents, about half of those are consumer applications, and weve succeeded in keying in about half of those. The other half are missing crucial data, he says. Which doesnt bode well for the smoothness of those paper applications. 17m ago Lynn Spellecy, Corporate Counsel for Equifax Workforce Solutions, says her company is in charge of income verification on the site. We have not experienced any problems or interruptions, she says. The function was tested extensively. We are monitoring the flow of verification requests from the hub to our servers and back. Equifax gets a request only after applicant creates user name and password and starts applying, Spellecy says. She doesnt say how many requests Equifax has handled. 20m ago Andrew Slavitt, executive vice-president of Optum/QSSI, begins his testimony. He says QSSI was hired to build the data services hub, a pipeline. He explains the hub function. First a consumer goes to the web portal and fills in information such as citizenship which must be verified. Then the hub takes the data to various places, including government agencies, verifies it and carries the result back to the health web site. The data services hub has performed well since the launch, Slavitt says. He says the hub processed 178,000 transactions on 1 October and millions more since. QSSI also built an EIDM tool that helps create consumer accounts. But registration component by other vendors manage user interface, confirmation emails and other functions to ensure smooth registration. 25m ago Cheryl Campbell, senior veep of CGI federal, begins her statement. Over the past two weeks, the federal exchange has steadily improved... We have confidence in our ability to deliver successfully, she says. Let me state unequivocally that CGI Federal is fully committed to its partnership with CMS, she says, referring to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversaw the construction of healthcare.gov. She said CGI was in charge of the site functions that determined eligibility for enrollment, planning management and financial management. The federal exchange, including the FFM, is not a standard consumer web site, she says, understatedly. Its unique because it assesses consumers eligibility for insurance, calculates their subsidy if any and allows them to buy a product, she says. We acknowledge that issues arising in the federal exchange made enrollment difficult for too many Americans, Campbell says. Updated 16m ago 34m ago Rep. John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, has the view from the bright side. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to make Obamacare work! he says. 41m ago Id like to think that this hearing is above board and legitimate but its not, says Rep. Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey. Republicans dont have clean hands coming here. Then he coins a heck of a slogan: Lets agree to fix it not nix it, he says. 43m ago Rep. Tim Murphy, Republican of Pennsylvania, said Congress should press pause on the tech surge to fix the site and figure out what went wrong first. His opening statement includes an interesting tidbit. He said that QSSI plans to testify that a late decision requiring consumers to register for an account before they could shop for insurance crippled the sites rollout. The original plan appeared to be to allow consumers to shop before they signed up. Its worth noting that the original plan squares more with the common online shopping experience. Most consumers dont want to turn over all their personal information until they know what theyre getting in exchange. As currently designed, healthcare.gov – like every other bureaucratic interface, of course – requires filling out all the paperwork before you get to shop. 50m ago Ranking member Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, begins in a perfectly opposite direction from Upton. The Affordable Care Act is a huge success, he says. The only thing that doesnt work is the web site. Democrats want [the law] to work, Waxman says. Thats what all of my colleagues should want, including my Republican colleagues. He says Republicans are trying to sabotage Obamacare, by voting more than 40 times to repeal the law; by intimidating organizations trying to implement it; by persuading governors not to implement it; by opposing Medicaid expansion in the states; and by shutting down the government. Republicans have not shown us that they are trying to make the law work so far, Waxman says. 54m ago Committee chair Fred Upton begins. This is not about blame, this is about accountability. Must be reassuring for the witnesses. He says that hundreds of thousands of consumers in only two states have received insurance cancellation notices. For background read Thousands Of Consumers Get Insurance Cancellation Notices Due To Health Law Changes, big on the Drudge Report yesterday. By all accounts, the new policies will offer consumers better coverage, in some cases, for comparable cost – especially after the inclusion of federal subsidies for those who qualify. [...] But the cancellation notices, which began arriving in August, have shocked many consumers in light of President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their plans if they liked them. 57m ago One might be inclined to listen to the tech company executives this morning with a measure of sympathy for what they were asked to do and the time they had to do it in. Programmer Rusty Foster described the size of the task in the New Yorker: Early in a project, there is a phase in which the client and the contractor work together to create a description of what is to be built. This is called the specification, and building a complex software product without a clear, fixed set of specifications is impossible. TheTimes reported that the biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring…. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site. This is like being told to build a skyscraper without any blueprints, while the client keeps changing the desired location of things like plumbing and wiring. Read the full piece here. 1h 1m ago For more about how the White House quietly tweaked the rules Wednesday governing individual mandate penalties, read Sarah Kliff in the Washington Post: What the administration is doing today is probably best described as a tweak to the individual mandate: They are allowing anyone who purchases coverage during open enrollment (up through March 31) to not face a tax penalty for those three months they spent uncovered. This is only true for people who buy coverage through the marketplace. Read the full piece here. 1h 5m ago This means no coffee. Fair warning: Heads up to reporters heading to the E&C Obamacare hearing: They are being strict about no food and drink in the room. — Suzy Khimm (@SuzyKhimm) October 24, 2013 1h 27m ago Good morning and welcome to our live blog coverage of the first congressional hearing into why healthcare.gov, the governments smiling new $394m website, does not work very well. Executives from four of the technology companies that helped build the website will be appearing before the House energy and commerce committee, with chairman Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, presiding. It looks to be a potentially rough outing. The White House announced on Wednesday a small relaxation in the rules for penalties for consumers who do not obtain insurance by the end of the open enrollment period, on 31 March. Previously, some consumers whose coverage did not begin during the enrollment period, even though they signed up before the deadline, would have faced a penalty. Now no consumer who signs up during open enrollment faces a penalty, even if their coverage does not begin before the end of March. Since the launch of the site on 1 October, would-be users have complained of stalled pages, dead ends, error messages, dropped accounts, eternal loading, misinformation, lightning strikes, arrhythmia and gout. Some people have used the site and come away ecstatic about the wonderful new health insurance they were able to buy. But for now those folks appear to be in the minority. Under particular pressure today will be Cheryl Campbell, senior vice-president of CGI Federal, the biggest contractor on the project with a deal for $93.7m to help people create accounts and set up back end co-ordination with government agencies and insurers. Also in the hot seat will be Andrew Slavitt, executive vice-president of Optum/QSSI, which received $55.1m to create the data interface. More than 55 contractors reportedly worked on the site. A list of the largest ones is here. The site was meant to be – still means to be – a marvelous one-stop shop for consumers out to buy health insurance. As such it would welcome you; create a secure online identity for you; collect and store your personal information and that of household members; cross-check your income and immigration status; decide whether you qualify for a subsidy; connect you with the appropriate marketplace; advise you on your insurance options; enable the purchase of insurance and communicate the result to the pertinent government agencies and insurers. Congress members today are likely to focus not only on the contractors craftsmanship but on the steps they took – or did not take – to raise the alarm that healthcare.gov was in trouble. The hearing is titled PPACA Implementation Failures: Didn’t Know or Didn’t Disclose? (Obamacare is the nickname of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.) Health secretary Kathleen Sebelius told CNN on Tuesday that the president did not know about problems with the site until after the launch. She is scheduled to appear before the committee next Wednesday, 30 October. Updated 36m ago theguardian/world/2013/oct/24/obamacare-website-testify-congress-live?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-3%20Main%20trailblock:Network%20front%20-%20main%20trailblock:Position2
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:39:10 +0000
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