The Obama administration hasn’t answered many questions but Democrats are anxious. Congress turns to Obamacare

With the shutdown over and a default averted, Washington has another train wreck to sift through: the Obamacare rollout.

Republican critics have plenty to investigate, starting with the $400 million website that doesn’t work and the federal contractor that built it, while asking a more fundamental question: Will it be fixed in time for people to get health coverage early next year.


The Obama administration hasn’t answered many questions but Democrats are anxious, worried that it may take weeks, if not months to fix the bugs — while opponents say “I told you so.”

Republicans got so caught up with the shutdown — triggered by their effort to stop Obamacare — that they barely focused on the messy rollout. Now they’re set to have a field day with hearings.

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Here’s a look at the four key questions as a new blame game unfolds on Obamacare:

The “glitches”

That’s the polite term the administration has adopted for the website woes that have made Healthcare.gov essentially unusable for most Americans.

While some people have gotten all the way through and enrolled, most have been blocked by blank screens, error messages or account log-ins that won’t work at some point along the way. According to the administration, millions of people have visited the site — but officials won’t say how many have taken the first step of creating an account, or the final step of purchasing a health plan.

Republicans will try to ferret out who is to blame as they draw attention to the massive problems. Key GOP leaders, including Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the Government Oversight and Reform Committee, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), ranking member of the HELP Committee have fired off oversight letters to HHS and pledged to investigate.

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“HealthCare.gov is an unmitigated, $400 million disaster,” said Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.).” Deadlines have been repeatedly missed. The databases that store sensitive medical and financial information aren’t secure. Those attempting to enroll in health care exchanges have been unable to do so due to technical ‘glitches.’ Worse still, these same individuals will be slapped with a penalty tax for being uninsured. If the federal government is unable to manage this website, how can they possibly manage our country’s health care system?”

Also expect finger-pointing and demands for heads to roll. Some Republicans have already called for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to step down or be fired. But the White House is standing by her.

“The secretary does have the full confidence of the president,” press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday.

Democrats say they want to give Sebelius and HHS time to fix the mess. “Everything will be fine,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), one of the key authors of the law.

( Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO's guide to the Affordable Care Act)

The contractors

Republicans on the Hill have started demanding information from and about the contractors who received hundreds of millions to build the site that turned out to be way buggier than the “glitches” and “hiccups” the president and his health reform team had predicted.

The Government Accountability Office estimated in a June report that the feds had already committed $394 million to the project.

Virginia-based CGI Federal has a $94 million contract to build much of the Obamacare website. Maryland-based Quality Software Systems Inc. has a $68 million contract to build the data hub. Several other contractors have multi-million dollar contracts for other functions within the exchange.

Upton has already asked CGI and QSSI what went wrong. Once the shutdown is over, expect Congress to demand an explanation for how the companies could give all those calm assurances that the exchange development was on track. The same goes for administration officials.

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One complaint from insurers and outside technical experts is that the short development timetable, abbreviated by the tardy release of regulations spelling out precisely how the exchange should operate.

The exchange regulations were finished “way later than should have been tolerated,” said Gail Wilensky, a former director of Medicare and Medicaid under the first President Bush. “CMS and friends were making spec changes very late in the game and that really complicated the process beyond what it needed to be.”

Bob Laszewski, a health care consultant who works for insurers, said that the government’s own oversight report in June pointed out the missed deadlines and timetable problems.

“The GAO was being politically correct — it didn’t come out and say this thing is going to crash and burn, but if you go back and read it, it’s pretty obvious,” he said.

The report points out a number of delays at that point and major tasks still undone, including a significant share of the pre-launch testing, a rollout of the consumer assistance program, and the data sharing agreements among the agencies feeding the federal data hub that would spell out security protocols for all the sensitive information that the system would have to draw on to verify income, immigration status, and eligibility for subsidies.

Some testing was done with insurers in September. There were lots of errors, including problems in posting the correct plan and premium information that delayed insurers finalizing their contracts to participate in exchange until the middle of the month, two weeks before launch. Even now insurers are having problems getting accurate reports on enrollees — with only a trickle of accounts coming in, Laszewski said.

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), vice chairman of the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, said “the real question is can they fix it?” Can they put the genie back in the bottle on this one? I don’t think they can. I think the problems are too pervasive and too widespread. I think it may need going back to square one and rewriting the code.”

The traffic estimate

The rush of traffic when Obamacare opened for business Oct. 1 surprised exchange officials and insurers alike. Simulations and beta testing are limited in how well they can mimic the behavior of a flood of Web surfers. In the first days after launch, administration officials attributed the dysfunction to the good news-bad news problems of too much interest.

Last week, HHS reported that the site was designed to serve as many as 50,000 people in an hour. That’s been criticized by experts who note that there are about 50 million uninsured people in the country, and another 15 million who currently buy insurance on the individual market and will have to change, not to mention other people who forever reason wanted to get on the site and see how it worked.

Laszewski and others say the administration should not have been so secretive about the Obamacare design. The tech community has a natural peer review function that may have caught problems far earlier, had they been open.

”Who the hell came up with that 50,000 people an hour figure?” Laszweski asked. “If they had stood up in front of the health insurance industry and said they were building a system for 50,000 people an hour, the audience would have been throwing coffee cups at them, but instead, that number came out last week.”

Democrats have been mostly quiet so far - but they’ve complained that the GOP helped create the problem it’s now attacking. HHS wasn’t supposed to have had to build this huge national infrastructure in the first place — it stepped in on behalf of 36 states when conservative governors refused to build their own state exchanges. The 14 states and DC with their own are generally running more smoothly than the federal one.

Another piece of Democratic ammunition: Every time HHS asked Congress for more money to keep up with its enlarged exchange-building responsibilities, Congress said no.

Fraud fears

The Obamacare online application process — when it works — brings together all of an applicants’ personal information. That includes data feeding in from multiple federal agencies — from the INS to the IRS — as well as other identifying details and financial information provided by the person seeking health coverage.

The information is not collected or pooled on a single database, however, as some critics have claimed. The health law’s “federal data hub” is designed to pull data from five federal agencies needed to determine subsidy eligibility, and it uses high-security protocols also used at some commercial firms.They allow information to be brought together at the moment it is needed — without being recorded and stored in one place.

Medical records or past insurance claims are irrelevant and are not involved — although some critics of the law have claimed otherwise.

But that doesn’t silence Republican critics worried about hacking and fraud. If the most basic sign-up parts of the system doesn’t work as it’s supposed to, they note, how can people be sure the security pieces are doing their job?

Republican Reps. Diane Black (Tenn.) and Patrick Meehan (Pa.) have asked to see HHS’s “security control assessment” of the data hub. They’ve also demanded to know whether HHS followed “critical best practices” to probe for security weaknesses, and are seeking a variety of documents on access and security.

“It is widely understood that every information system can be hacked,” they wrote to the HHS inspector general.

And everything else

The tech problems aren’t the only thing catching Congress’s attention — or inviting a lot of GOP “We told you so’s.” Expect to hear a lot about people who were told “if you like your insurance you can keep it,” but who are finding out it’s not so simple — or affordable. These complaints have been theoretical for three years. Now there are people who can flesh them out. They’re already airing their grievances in the media. Expect to see them at a congressional hearing near you soon.