A House panel is beginning to look into HealthCare.gov’s flawed rollout. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Contractors grilled on the Hill

Top Obamacare contractors said Thursday they never recommended that the Obama administration delay the Oct. 1 launch of HealthCare.gov — even though some of them harbored doubts about a website that would crash shortly after it went live.

Republicans pressed four contractors appearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on why they had told Congress in September that Obamacare’s online enrollment system was on track, only to go off the rails in October.


Republican lawmakers accused both the contractors and the administration of withholding information about the looming failure of the pivotal piece of President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

It was the first hearing into Obamacare since its launch — and the first since the government shutdown provoked by the GOP attempt to stop or delay the law. Republicans and Democrats sparred with the contractors and clashed with one another, as the Republicans shifted from their failed efforts to halt Obamacare to a new drive to illuminate the law’s flaws through their oversight powers.

( PHOTOS: House hearing on Obamacare)

Lawmakers of both parties are fuming for very different reasons. Democrats are upset that the $600 million-plus system isn’t working right after more than three years of preparation and a lot of political heat. Republicans — frustrated that the government shutdown had deflected attention from Obamacare rollout problems — are eager to prove the website problems are symbolic of everything that’s harmful about a health law that they see as too big, too expensive, too intrusive and too unworkable. Both sides expect the health law to feature in key 2014 Senate races.

Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said the central question was accountability.

“Over the months leading up to the Oct. 1 launch, top administration officials and lead contractors appeared before this committee, looked us in the eye and assured us repeatedly that everything was on track,” Upton said. “Except that it wasn’t, as we now know too well.”

Democrats, who acknowledged and critiqued the early technology challenges, tried to highlight the law’s health benefits and portrayed the GOP inquiry as an ideologically driven effort to derail Obamacare . Democrats also recalled that the Medicare drug benefit had a rocky start before eventually becoming popular.

( Also on POLITICO: Obamacare contractor: Enrollment will be OK by Dec. 15)

The hearing got testy at times. “I will not yield to this monkey court,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) declared of Republican colleagues’ efforts to steer the attention to online privacy fears.

The hours of testimony included previously undisclosed details about which components and pieces of the intricate system were and were not adequately tested, what the perceived vulnerabilities were and the level of White House involvement.

“The White House has not given us direct instructions,” testified Cheryl Campbell of CGI Federal, which built the federal exchange’s enrollment system and is considered the lead contractor. Asked directly if she’s aware of any political intervention in CGI’s work, she said, “I am not.”

The contractors all deflected the blame for a website that continues to perform below expectations, though the administration and contractors cite continuing improvements to the system. The blame, the contractors said, falls on CMS because they are the “systems integrator” responsible for pulling together the contractors’ work and assessing overall readiness.

( PHOTOS: HealthCare.gov: 10 quotes from Kathleen Sebelius)

“It was not our decision to go live,” Campbell said. “It was [CMS’s] decision.”

Republican requests for who exactly at CMS should be held accountable for the bungled rollout were mostly rebuffed. The contractors repeatedly said they couldn’t provide specific agency employees who made key decisions leading up the launch of a faulty website, though they eventually offered two names – Deputy CIO Henry Chao and COO Michelle Snyder .

Chao, now somewhat infamously, had warned an industry conference in March that he was hoping the federal exchange would offer something better than a “third-world experience.”

Committee Republicans also trained their fire on a last-minute CMS decision to turn off HealthCare.gov’s “window shopping” feature giving consumers the ability to view health plans before registering an account. They claim the CMS decision, which Campbell said was made two weeks before Oct. 1, was a politically calculated move to hide the cost of Obamacare coverage.

( WATCH: 7 quotes on Obamacare glitches)

The GOP questioning provided a preview for another round of high-profile hearings next week on the Affordable Care Act’s launch. CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner is due to testify at the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who declined an invite to Thursday’s hearing, will face the Energy and Commerce panel Wednesday.

Republicans at those hearings are likely to focus on the contractors’ admissions that the feds only started end-to-end testing of all the complex technical systems two weeks before Oct. 1.

Quality Software Services Inc.’s Andrew Slavitt and CGI’s Campbell both said their companies normally would have wanted months for comprehensive systems testing. Slavitt also said his company, which built the federal data hub, shared “all of the risks that we saw” with CMS ahead of the launch. “My understanding was that they understood those and were working on it,” he said.

Two other contractors, Equifax Workforce Solutions and Serco, said they did not anticipate problems and have not experienced any. Equifax is providing identity verification, while Serco is managing paper applications for coverage.

CGI maintained that the Obamacare enrollment website’s performance is improving each day and will be ready to enroll an expected rush of customers in time for Dec. 15 — the last day for people to sign up for coverage in time for Jan. 1, when benefits kick in.

“We anticipate that people will be able to enroll in the time frame allotted that’s necessary for them to have insurance for Jan. 1,” Campbell said.

The open enrollment season runs six months, through March 31, but some lawmakers have called to extend it because it’s been so hard to sign up in these first weeks. The administration hopes to enroll 7 million people in the exchanges — and more in Medicaid, many of whom will sign up through the federal website — by late March.

The website is the main vehicle for Americans to sign up for health coverage under Obama’s health care law in the 36 states not running their own exchanges. The administration has refused to project when the website will be fully functional and how that will affect Obamacare enrollment in 2014, the first crucial year.

While the Obama administration has recently emphasized alternative ways of enrolling, Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said the disastrous website threatens the success of the health care law.

“For the Affordable Care Act to work, these problems need to be fixed, and these problems need to be fixed fast,” she said.

Both Sebelius and Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, have said the White House was not prepared for problems of this magnitude.

“While we knew that there would be some glitches and said that we expected some problems, we did not know until the problems manifested themselves after the launch that they would be as significant as they turned out to be,” Carney said Wednesday.

The federal exchange underwent eight technical reviews before Oct. 1 and passed, CGI’s Campbell said Thursday. Sjhe said HealthCare.gov is much more complex than the typical website.

“Unfortunately, in systems this complex with so many concurrent users, it is not unusual to discover problems that need to be addressed once the software goes into a live production environment,” she said. “This is true regardless of the level of formal end-to-end performance testing — no amount of testing within reasonable time limits can adequately replicate a live environment of this nature.”

Jessica Meyers contributed to this report.