The Obama administration has given scant explanation for the website problems. | REUTERS Tech experts fear Obamacare bugs

The glitch-plagued Obamacare rollout might be just the beginning: A series of potential technology problems could thwart the Obama administration’s goal of getting 7 million people enrolled in the new exchanges by the end of March.

Millions of people have already encountered error messages, delays, crashes and stuck accounts. Technology experts and Obamacare backers worry that each step ahead in the process — filling out applications, checking on subsidies and selecting a health insurance plan — creates a potential technology choke point. And that doesn’t even count any additional chaos when people try to use their new health insurance come January.


“There is grave concern that many individuals who are intent on securing coverage by [Jan. 1] may not be able to do so by that date,” said consultant Dan Schuyler, who helped design a health insurance exchange in Utah and is now the senior technology expert at Leavitt Partners. “There’s a small window [the Department of Health and Human Services] has. If the problems persist another three or four weeks, those at the back of the line will not have coverage.”

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The Obama administration and the contractors building the federal website have given scant explanation for the problems, other than blaming early problems on overwhelming turnout.

Senior Hill Republicans, who had been predicting a “train wreck” even as they refused repeated administration requests for money to set up the system, are pressing HHS and the lead Obamacare software contractors — CGI and Quality Systems Software — to explain what went wrong.

“Despite the widespread belief that the administration was not ready for the health law’s Oct. 1 launch, top officials and lead IT contractors looked us in the eye and assured us all systems were a go,” Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in a statement Thursday. “Instead, here we are 10 days later and delays and technical failures have reached epidemic proportions.”

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Obamacare advocates knew there would be glitches at the start, but they didn’t expect anything like the technological logjam that has kept enrollment to a trickle.

Outside tech experts have offered all sorts of explanations for the meltdown, but only those with direct knowledge of the tech infrastructure know — and they are still working through it. And when they put out one fire, another one could flare up.

Some software engineers have suggested that the consumer end of the website, designed by one contractor, is not “talking to” the back end of the website, developed by a different company.

Diagnostic tools in Web browsers have identified coding issues that may be complicating account creation. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the administration is considering an overhaul of the registration system this weekend to allow people to browse health plan options without first creating an account. The paper said the tech experts are focused on a bottleneck where a flood of data meets an Oracle software component involved in identification verification.

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But no one knows for sure whether or where other serious bugs lurk. Insurers and other businesses involved have complained about inadequate time to test the system after the already ambitious timetable was compressed because of delays in finalizing regulations for the Obamacare insurance exchanges and in signing off on contracts with insurers.

There have been some improvements since the rocky start; wait times are shorter and more people have been able to create accounts. But still, relatively few visitors to HealthCare.gov get through from start to finish — including registration, personal data submission, identity verification, tax credit eligibility and plan selection. And when the first obstacles come down and millions of people log on and try to complete each of these steps — any or all could turn into another choke point. There’s particular worry about that tax credit calculation, which determines how much of the premium people have to pay.

“If we are already running into issues at the user account stage, we’re going to run into a lot more issues when we get to the more complex operations at the [subsidy] eligibility determination,” said Leavitt’s Schuyler. “That’s the reality. It’s a very complex process, and I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

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HHS declined to comment on The Wall Street Journal report or to respond to POLITICO’s specific questions about possible problems with subsidy determinations or the enrollment transfers to insurers, two of the areas that experts pointed to as of particular concern.

“We know that people are enrolling in coverage and the system works. As individual problems are raised by insurers, we work aggressively to address them,” spokeswoman Joanne Peters said.

Part of the problem is that signing up for Obamacare coverage is far more complicated than the online transactions Americans are used to, like checking a bank balance or ordering a book. The Obamacare website must knit together platforms from five huge federal agencies — Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, HHS, the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice — each of which marches to its own IT specifications. It must also interact with separate systems set up by the 15 states that built their own exchanges, plus all of those outside insurers.

It’s an unprecedented experiment in federal information technology.

“If they pull it off, they will be making IT history,” said Stephen Parente, director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota and a former health care adviser to Sen. John McCain. “This has never been done before.”

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But it wasn’t a pop quiz. The government had 3½ years to prepare, and the warning signs were visible.

Funding, in particular, has been a challenge, given the general budget impasse and the deep GOP opposition to Obamacare. The White House’s April budget laid out an impossible request for an additional $1.5 billion for the final push to set up the law. Acknowledging Republican lawmakers would never agree to pony up those funds, administration officials assured the public they could move some money around and make do with what they had.

Whatever the cause of the problems, the first 10 days have given plenty of fuel to the GOP complaint that Obamacare wasn’t ready for prime time. “A complete fiasco” is how Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming summed it up this week.

It shook the confidence of some Obamacare supporters, too.

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Washington and Lee University School of Law professor Tim Jost, a staunch Obamacare backer and a consumer advocate at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, said the rollout has been “very disappointing.” He says there’s still time to make fixes, but he faulted the White House for not offering up a tech expert on Oct. 1 to give the public a clear and complete account.

“You need to have someone honestly and forthrightly explain what the technical problems are and what it’s going to take to fix them,” Jost said. “The volume obviously is a factor. For the first day or two it worked — a week and a half later, it’s no longer an adequate explanation.”

John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, said the administration knew of problems in advance but barreled ahead because it felt locked into the long-promised launch date. There was already plenty of bad publicity for other delays and missed deadlines.

“In retrospect, they should have said to the public before Oct. 1: This is going to take a while; give us some time and wait,” he said, a complaint heard from many of the law’s supporters of late.

The longer it takes to open the valve and start enrolling people, the more pressure the system is going to have to handle and the less time it will have to handle it. That adds to the risk of more meltdowns related to high traffic. The administration is hoping for 7 million in exchange plans — plus an additional 8 million or 9 million who will get covered in Medicaid and the state Children’s Health Insurance Plan, some of whom will also access coverage through HealthCare.gov.

Joel Ario, former director of the exchange office at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and now a consultant, said the federal exchange has until early to mid-November to smooth things out. Much later than that and some who want coverage by Jan. 1 — and who are entitled to subsidies under the law — might not be able to sign up in time. That could lead to lawsuits.

A longer delay also narrows the window that people have to comply with the individual mandate and could push the administration to adjust how it is enforced next year.

Schuyler of Leavitt Partners said the system will have to work through the backlog of all the people who have started the enrollment process during the past 10 days. HHS hasn’t updated the traffic figures since last week, when it said 8.6 million people visited the site in three days after it opened Oct. 1. “

But not everyone agrees the situation is grave just yet.

October was never expected to see high enrollment numbers, said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and a strong supporter of the law. It was supposed to be a time for shopping and getting acquainted with the new system, with the actual enrollment coming a bit later. The delays are unfortunate but, Altman added, “I never met a technical problem that didn’t give everyone a migraine but wasn’t eventually solved.”

The solace for Obamacare advocates is that the dysfunctional early days will fade away like a bad dream if the troubles are fixed in time for people to enroll by Dec. 15 for coverage starting Jan. 1. The open enrollment period runs through March, although uninsured people must sign up by mid-February to avoid paying individual mandate penalties.

Many experts and advocates remain confident that the problems stopping people from at least shopping for plans can be solved fairly quickly — by early November. The pressure is on at CGI Federal, the prime contractor with a $94 million contract to design the site.

CGI has refused press inquiries, while Obamacare implementers have shown outward signs of frustration with the company. CGI is also building Hawaii’s exchange website, which has experienced the rockiest rollout of any of the 15 state-run exchanges in the country. The head of Hawaii’s exchange did little to hide her displeasure when asked Wednesday whether the exchange would seek reimbursement for the website’s poor performance.

“Contracts are obviously confidential,” said executive director Coral Andrews. “But what I can tell you is a good business practice is to ensure that a contract has the appropriate expectation laid out for milestones not being met, and we did our due diligence ensuring that we went through that process.”

A relatively small number of the lucky or most persistent people is trickling across the finish line, saying that they have enrolled, some with subsidies. But they are so few in number that no real pressure has been put on the later stages of the system yet.

MIT’s Jon Gruber, one of the architects of Gov. Mitt Romney’s health reform law in Massachusetts and a consultant on the federal law, said he expects the more difficult technical IT challenges like calculating subsidies to continue into next year — though he thinks the system should work for most who use it.

“The problem we all thought would be a problem will be a problem into 2014,” he said.