WASHINGTON — Republicans in the House of Representatives are making plans to investigate the disastrous Oct. 1 launch of the federal health insurance marketplace established under Obamacare.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has asked Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the federal contractors involved in the rollout to explain why things have gone so badly after their earlier testimony indicated that the marketplace information technology would run smoothly.
The federal marketplace, Healthcare.gov, was supposed to provide a one-stop site for users in 36 states to browse, compare and enroll in qualified health plans.
But millions of users and numerous software problems overwhelmed the site shortly after the enrollment period for 2014 coverage began. In subsequent days, the site was shut down temporarily for repairs, which have continued since the problems first surfaced.
Two weeks later, site navigation has improved but delays and malfunctions continue to dog the system, making it difficult for users to establish personal accounts and obtain federal subsidies to offset the cost of coverage.
Nearly 15 million people had visited the site as of last Friday, but the Department of Health and Human Services won’t release enrollment figures until November.
In a Sept. 10 subcommittee hearing, Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president at CGI Federal, which designed and developed the federal insurance marketplace, testified that her company was confident that qualified individuals “could begin enrolling in coverage when the initial enrollment period begins on October 1.”
Michael Finkel, an executive vice president of Quality Software Services Inc., the company that wrote the software code for the so-called data services hub, offered similar testimony at the hearing. The hub routes information from the marketplace to various federal databases.
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