How long the repairs take could affect how many can actually enroll in the program. | REUTERS Obamacare site still broken

The Obamacare enrollment website remains badly broken despite two weeks of intensive round-the-clock efforts at repairs.

HHS isn’t making any predictions about how long it will take to fix it — or rebuild it. But advocates, lobbyists and industry officials are talking about it as a months-long repair effort.


How many months is an open question — and one with big consequences for the massive effort to enroll 7 million people in the new insurance exchanges and millions more in Medicaid by the end of March. People trying to switch from their current insurance into subsidized exchange plans could also face gaps.

A two-month delay, for instance, would be a different scenario than five or six months, particularly since people can face penalties if they don’t apply by mid-February.

( PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes)

In the meantime, few people can get through the enrollment process online. According to some analysts like Millward Brown Digital, thousands of consumers have stopped trying, at least for now.

At a summit of health care advocacy groups at the Newseum on Tuesday, the audience was asked how many had successfully made it through HealthCare.gov even far enough to browse the selection of health plans. Only two out of about 70 people raised their hands.

The administration hasn’t said much about the nature of the technical problems. Officials initially described them as the kind of “glitches” that inevitably occur in a tech launch, and attributed them to the high interest in new health coverage options that drove unexpectedly high traffic to HealthCare.gov.

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

They aren’t blaming “glitches” and “traffic” anymore. In fact, they haven’t said much at all in the past few days, while a string of leaked emails, memos and reports describe deeper hardware and software malfunctions. Today, again, featured a “No comment” from the administration.

The website itself talks about a crush of media questions — but doesn’t post any answers. People trying to sign on get a variety of error messages — including one that says fixes are expected “within 24 hours.”

President Barack Obama has gotten surprisingly few questions about the enrollment problems as the country — and Republican critics of the health law — focused on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling battle. Obama did say in a Tuesday interview with KCCI-TV, “The website that was supposed to do this all in a seamless way has had way more glitches than I think are acceptable.”

( Also on POLITICO: Pat Roberts: Kathleen Sebelius should resign)

A few Democrats are also calling for repairs to speed up. Rep. Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, told POLITICO, “Clearly, there are problems that need to be fixed and they’re under way but it has to be accelerated.”

HealthCare.gov has been taken down several times for maintenance, and officials describe a 24/7 push to revamp the system. The specific cause or causes of the problem is still a mystery to everyone but a tight circle of administration officials and contractors — if even they have figured it all out.

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said earlier in the week on CNBC that the system was developed so late that standard rounds of functionality testing are “happening on the fly.” And he warned of potential breakdowns in other parts of the system once the early problems are unraveled.

“There’s so much wrong, you just don’t know what’s broken until you get a lot more of it fixed,” he said. Bertolini predicted it could take three years to repair, but others in the health care industry are talking about a far shorter time frame, although they don’t want to be quoted by name even talking about “months” while HHS is being mum.

Web brokers that signed agreements with the administration to offer subsidized Obamacare plans on their websites have been unable to connect to the federal system. Federal health officials say they’re working to bring the e-brokers in, but the brokers say communication has been virtually nonexistent.

“[Fixing HealthCare.gov] is obviously a priority over getting their interface ready to go, but the Web brokers — like other stakeholders — aren’t really getting any info from HHS either,” said Venable attorney Chris Condeluci, who’s working with Web brokers.

Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Even as early as 2010, HealthCare.gov was bug-ridden, a harbinger of problems to come. But few read the tea leaves because the site had a small fraction of the traffic it would get in October 2013.

“The wheels were practically coming off the wagon at that point, which should have been a clue that anything more than this — a nicely branded site with a lot of information and not much interactivity — was going to be impossible,” the former official said.

Former Obama administration Medicare and Medicaid chief Don Berwick told POLITICO that the early implementation years were marked by a shortage of funds. “The total implementation budget for Obamacare in the first two years, as I recall, was something in the order of $1 billion. The resources were spread quite thin and it was not possible at that time to get more resources from Congress,” he said. “We really wished there were more. The money wasn’t there.”

Berwick called the problems “troublesome but expected” and predicted they would not matter so much in a few months, as Obamacare takes root.

“This isn’t a one-year, one-week, one-day trajectory. We’re trying to make health care a human right. I’m taking a longer view here,” he said. “I wish it had been better now, but I think this’ll soon be a memory.”

So far, most insurers have been keeping their frustrations with HealthCare.gov to themselves.

“The reality is there’s nothing you can say to a reporter in October that’s going to make CMS work that much harder to fix it,” said one insurer on condition of anonymity.

But the source warned that could change if tech problems start tarnishing insurers’ brands. They worry about someone with an insurance card getting denied at a doctor’s office in January because the back-end technology on the federal site isn’t working.

“At that point, the [customer] will blame the company, not HealthCare.gov,” the source said.

Lobbyists and health industry stakeholders are increasingly vocal about the meltdown, many of the states running their own enrollment system are faring better than the federal operation and the Obama administration’s cheerleaders aren’t waving their pom-poms so vigorously for now. Even some liberal commentators and White House allies who seemed willing to give the administration a long leash have been dismayed by reports of poorly written code, malfunctioning hardware and downright mismanagement.

For now, the failure has mostly been a PR nightmare for the administration. But it has the potential to cascade into a crisis for real people if challenges continue too long.

Some industry officials point to Nov. 1 as a potential test for the system. That’s the day when the federal exchange is due to transfer thousands of Medicaid applications to state agencies.

“If the marketplace isn’t working well by the first part of November, I think people are going to start raising major concerns,” said Bobby Peterson, executive director of the Madison-based ABC for Health.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker’s Obamacare plan will move about 90,000 Medicaid beneficiaries onto private, subsidized coverage through HealthCare.gov. Medicaid coverage for those people is set to expire Dec. 31, and advocates are worried about whether some won’t be able to make the coverage switch in time for Jan. 1.

In general, Americans have until the end of March to enroll in a 2014 Obamacare plan, but to avoid a tax penalty, they’ll have to sign up by mid-February. This quirk, unearthed by industry observers, appears to have gone previously unnoticed by the administration.

“The IRS didn’t know that,” said Jackson Hewitt Vice President Brian Haile, who recently brought the issue to the administration’s attention.

Haile says the administration could choose to relax enforcement of the individual mandate to get coverage, which is already viewed as weak in its first year — $95 or 1 percent of a person’s income, whichever is higher. Other changes could also come — but the administration isn’t talking much about what it’s going to change tomorrow, let alone a few months from now.

David Nather contributed to this report.