Federal CIO, CTO defend progress fixing Obamacare website

Some top guns in federal information technology who assembled at a House oversight panel said they were encouraged by progress the multi-agency 24/7 team is making repairing the troubled healthcare.gov website, asserting that 17,000 users per hour can now log in to shop for health insurance.

White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, appearing earlier than he’d preferred after pressure from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said “the site is getting better week by week in performance and functionality. One metric is the system response time,” he added, which “just a few weeks ago was about 8 seconds and is now under one second.” Pressed by Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) on statements that the site could handle 60,000 visits simultaneously on day one -- a figure Chairman Issa said was in fact only 1,100 -- Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the Health and Human Services Department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the 1,100 figure was for a smaller unit within the site, and put the site’s current capacity at 20,000 to 25,000 simultaneous users. In prepared testimony, Chao added, “We expect that over the next few weeks, consumers will see improvements to the site each week and that the consumer experience using the federally facilitated marketplaces eligibility and enrollment system through HealthCare.gov will be greatly improved for the vast majority of users by Nov. 30.”