The Department of Health and Human Services has acknowledged technical glitches and problems with the main federal portal designed to onboard participants in the health insurance marketplace under the Affordable Care Act and pledged a "tech surge" to accelerate improvements.
HHS is "putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them," the White House said, adding, "We are also defining new test processes to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service and deploying fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis."
Over 50 contractors have reportedly had a hand in developing the estimated (by GAO) $400 million platform, the requirements for which evolved throughout the development cycle, partly reflecting the complexity of the law and fraught political context. However, even basic user account setup and login functionality failed early on. HHS responded by setting up a virtual waiting room – presumably to keep people engaged while working through technical issues – which further confused people.
The tech surge includes bringing in additional experts from both the private and public sector. The White House is hoping to fast track improvements but it has been reported that some consultants balked at compressed timeframe in which it hopes to get problems resolved – by early-December at the latest. By all accounts extensive work is required to get past the kind of bottlenecking that’s happening as users provide detailed information and the platform updates their applications while interacting with various other agency systems and data.
