Report Reveals Important Lessons From HealthCare.gov Debacle
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Internal emails the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform dug up for its report on the rollout of Healthcare.gov reveal internal panic once CMS realized the launch was flawed.
HIStalk reviewed Behind the Curtain of the HealthCare.gov Rollout – a report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform – and found an unflattering view of the communication breakdown that took place before and after the HealthCare.gov launch.
According to HIStalk, the report contains “details of the internal panic once CMS realized they were in way over their heads right after Healthcare.gov went live and failed. It concludes that infighting between CMS and HHS forced the development team to work through US CTO Todd Park, with CMS attempting to hide security exposure, keep HHS in the dark, and insist on a full site launch instead of a phased approach.”
Here are just a few of the emails excerpted from the report:
HHS CIO Frank Baitman to Tony Trenkle, CMS CIO and Henry Chao, Trenkle’s deputy: [g]iven the importance of this project to the Secretary and the White House, it’ll continue to receive very high level attention; thus, we need to ensure that emerging issues – which are inevitable – are effectively understood and analyzed at the appropriate level.”
Chao to Trenkle on Baitman email: “If you can’t recognize a burning house and its implications, what good is it to have a bunch of firemen tell you there’s a burning house if you’re not going to do anything about it…? If they want to play an active role then they really have to roll up their sleeves, otherwise it’ll be just time wasted trying to convey issues and options to a body that is not in position to make the proper calls.”
Here’s an HHS official: “I grow weary of the (expletive deleted) passive/aggressiveness of Henry [Chao], or rather his lack of engagement to the point that we can only speculate that it is passive/aggressiveness. … The other way to do this is through a complete covert ops mission to unseat the CMS FFE rules engine.”
HHS CTO Bryan Sivak, two days after the launch: “This is a (expletive deleted) disaster. It’s 1am and they don’t even know what the problem is, for sure. Basic testing should have been done hours ago that hasn’t been done.” (responding to US CTO Todd Park’s claim that the site’s problems were tied to traffic despite officials knowledge that wasn’t the case)
HHS CTO Bryan Sivak, responding to an email in which CMS admitted that the site could not handle more than 500 concurrent users: “Anyone who has any software experience at all would read that and immediately ask what the (expletive deleted) you were thinking by launching?”
HHS CTO Bryan Sivak: “1. Bad architecture. 2. Not enough testing. Pretty simple really.”