Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash

An article from The New York Times reviewing the vents leading up to the crash begins:

On a sultry day in late August, a dozen staff members of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gathered at the agency’s Baltimore headquarters with managers from the major contractors building HealthCare.gov to review numerous problems with President’s Obama’s online health insurance initiative. The mood was grim.   

The prime contractor, CGI Federal, had long before concluded that the administration was blindly enamored of an unrealistic goal: creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. Knowing how long it would take to complete and test the software, the company’s officials and other vendors believed that it was impossible to open a fully functioning exchange on Oct. 1.
      

Government officials, on the other hand, insisted that Oct. 1 was not negotiable. And they were fed up with what they saw as CGI’s pattern of excuses for missed deadlines. Michelle Snyder, the agency’s chief operating officer, was telling colleagues outright, “If we could fire them, we would.”

      

Interviews with current and former Obama administration officials and specialists involved in the project, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of government and contractor documents, offer new details into how tensions between the government and its contractors, questionable decisions and weak leadership within the Medicare agency turned the rollout of the president’s signature program into a major humiliation.
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A story in The Washington Post in an article entitled "HealthCare.gov contractor had high confidence but low success," notes:

During the past two months, it has become evident that no single reason explains why HealthCare.gov, a top administration priority, was not ready 3¹/₂ years after President Obama signed a sprawling law designed to reshape the U.S. health-care system. Work to build the online marketplace was hindered, in part, by White House micromanagement and political sensitivities that delayed policy and regulatory decisions, fierce Republican opposition to the law, and the fact that no one at the CMS or elsewhere at Department of Health and Human Services, of which the agency is a part, had the job of managing the project full time.

But the documents and interviews make clear that CGI, by far the most central of about four dozen companies with contracts to help build the exchange, made repeated missteps. The government’s contract with CGI was $197 million as of August.

The Obama administration has set a Nov. 30 deadline — next Saturday — by which officials have promised that HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for about four out of five consumers who attempt to use it to sign up for health plans. Even now, the official familiar with the project said, CGI’s work on the repairs is not always going well; roughly one-third to half the new computer code the company is writing cannot be used because it is revealing flaws when it is fully examined by a group of outside testers, including some insurance companies.