6 tech hurdles for fixing Obamacare

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius described an Obamacare website pushed out too early and still wading through technical problems, even as she defended the site’s security and vowed to fix the mishaps.

The website never crashed, she said, and it has undergone significant improvement since its Oct. 1 launch. People no longer receive blank screens when they log on, thanks to double the number of servers and nonstop work rewriting code. Here’s what the hearing revealed about what went wrong with the technology and hurdles ahead:

1. Testing: Responding to a barrage of lawmaker questions, Sec Sebelius confirmed that HHS failed to conduct enough testing to ensure the entire system would work and revealed that parts of the website did not get “loaded” until the third week of September.
2. Security: Sec Sebelius assured lawmakers that consumer information on the website is safe and dismissed accusations of a HealthCare.gov “breach.” But a “sort of skilled hacker” did find a means to access certain personal information from the website, she said, adding it was “a theoretical problem that was immediately fixed.”
3. Privacy: The Administration is working with contractor CGI to change “boilerplate language” on HealthCare.gov that suggests Americans should not have a total expectation of privacy, Sec Sebelius said. “It’s an error that needs to be taken down and we should be held accountable for protecting privacy.”
4. Window browsing: Sec Sebelius said officials turned off the browsing feature two weeks before the website’s launch to ensure HealthCare.gov would work. But its removal, which forced people to register first before reviewing options, appears to have helped cause the traffic overload.
5. Outages/Verizon: Verizon Terremark’s data center went down and affects the federal data hub that determines eligibility information for state-run and federal exchanges.
6. Cost: The Administration has spent about $118 million on the HealthCare.gov website itself and about $56 million on additional IT to support it, Sec Sebelius said.