Obama Administration Rejects Delays to Get Time to Repair Problems at Health Site

Page of Obamacare website which has been temporarily closed down for maintenance. The has had problems since going online in October 2013., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

November 6, 2013

Sebelius Rejects Delays to Get Time to Repair Problems at Health Site

By ROBERT PEAR
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said Wednesday that the government needed to fix hundreds of problems with the website for the federal health insurance marketplace, but she categorically rejected bipartisan calls to delay parts of the new health care law.

She made her comments at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee hours after the Obama administration disclosed that the chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would retire. His office supervised the creation of the troubled website.

The official, Tony Trenkle, will step down on Nov. 15 “to take a position in the private sector,” according to an email circulated among agency employees. He has supervised the spending of $2 billion a year on information technology products and services, including the development of the website.

Mr. Trenkle, reached by telephone on Wednesday, declined to discuss his plans. “I can’t speak with you,” he said.

His retirement is part of a management shake-up announced by Michelle Snyder, the chief operating officer of the Medicare agency, who was herself deeply involved in major decisions about the insurance marketplace.

Even as Ms. Sebelius testified about progress in repairing the website, HealthCare.gov, agency officials were reporting new problems on Wednesday.

“The site is performing slowly,” said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Some users have difficulty logging in and receive error messages.”

Ms. Bataille said it was hard to pinpoint the cause because different consumers had experienced different problems. Some people who have created password-protected accounts have said that they cannot get into their accounts to shop for insurance. Under the new health care law, most Americans will be required to have coverage next year.

The online marketplace, or exchange, has been plagued with problems since it opened on Oct. 1.

Ms. Sebelius said officials had a list of “a couple of hundred functional fixes” that had to be made so the website, HealthCare.gov, would work smoothly for most users by Nov. 30, a deadline set by the administration.

“We’re not where we need to be,” Ms. Sebelius said. “It’s a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list by the end of November.”

With many people unable to obtain coverage through the website, lawmakers in both parties have suggested extending the open enrollment period or delaying the financial penalties for people who go without insurance. But Ms. Sebelius refused to consider those proposals.

“Delaying the Affordable Care Act would not delay people’s cancer or diabetes or Parkinson’s disease,” she said. “It would not delay the need for mental health services or cholesterol screenings or prenatal care.”

“For millions of Americans, delay is not an option,” Ms. Sebelius said. “People’s lives depend on this.”

Ms. Sebelius said she was accountable for what she described as “a miserable five weeks” and the “excruciatingly awful” debut of the insurance website.

But she said: “There is an even higher level of accountability — accountability to the sick, the vulnerable, the struggling Americans who deserve better health care. The impact on the lives of everyday people is getting lost.”

The chief architect of the health care law, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, urged Ms. Sebelius to speed up repairs to the website.

At a hearing in April, Mr. Baucus told Ms. Sebelius that he foresaw “a huge train wreck” because the administration had done little to educate consumers or employers. He asked for periodic updates, and he said Wednesday that the administration’s responses had been “totally unsatisfactory.”

Mr. Baucus asked if it would be feasible to shut down HealthCare.gov and make all the necessary fixes at once. “Why just keep limping along?” he asked.

Ms. Sebelius said it was better to make the fixes “on an ongoing basis,” while the system was running, or in the middle of the night, when it was scheduled to be down for repairs.

She said that the first official enrollment numbers, to be released next week, were “likely to be quite low, given the struggles that people have had getting access to the site and getting information.”

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan, said he had issued a subpoena to the Medicare agency to get information on the number of people enrolled.

In late September, Ms. Snyder and Mr. Trenkle, the information officer who is retiring, signed an internal memo acknowledging that security controls for the federal website had not been fully tested. They endorsed a six-month plan to reduce the risk that personal information might be inappropriately disclosed.

One of Mr. Trenkle’s deputies, Henry Chao, was the chief digital architect for the website and is leading efforts to repair it.

Ms. Snyder announced that Tim Love, a career civil servant, would become her deputy and that David Nelson, another agency employee, would serve as acting chief information officer. If she steps aside, Mr. Love would be a strong candidate to replace her, agency employees said.

Mr. Love has been working on Medicare policy and operations, as the No. 2 official at the Center for Medicare. He has close ties to the White House. For seven months in 2010, he was a senior policy director in the White House Office of Health Reform, leading efforts to carry out many provisions of the Affordable Care Act.