* White House chooses insider for Healthcare.gov problems
* Republicans open investigation on rollout
By David Morgan and John Whitesides
WASHINGTON, Oct 22 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama turned
to a trusted adviser on Tuesday to lead a “tech surge” aimed at
repairing the troubled launch of the government website at the
heart of his signature healthcare law.
Jeffrey Zients, a former official of the Office of
Management and Budget who will become head of the National
Economic Council in January, will provide short-term management
advice on the project, said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of
Health and Human Services (HHS).
She said a team of experts and specialists drawn from
government and industry, “including veterans of top Silicon
Valley companies,” also would work to diagnose and fix the
problems that have plagued the rollout of Healthcare.gov since
Oct. 1 and drawn criticism from Republicans opposed to the law.
The websites, which Obama compared to online shopping sites
such as Amazon.com, were meant to be the main vehicle for
consumers to check out prices and purchase the health insurance
offered under the law.
The HHS said at the weekend it was launching a “tech surge”
for the website, but neither the White House nor the health
department has provided details about the cause of the problems,
precisely what is being done to fix them and who exactly is
doing the fixing.
Leaders from the health insurance industry were expected to
attend a meeting at the White House on Wednesday, according to a
spokesman for the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans.
It was not clear with whom the executives would meet or what
they would discuss.
The Obama administration also scheduled a briefing for
Wednesday with Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives,
some of whom have expressed concern with the program’s troubles.
One Democrat, Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire,
called for an extension of the “open enrollment” date for those
purchasing insurance beyond the March 31 deadline because of
what she called the “incredibly frustrating and disappointing”
experience people are having as they try to enroll.
The announcement that Zients would be involved underlines
Obama’s determination to put the website controversy behind him.
Zients has 20 years of business experience as a CEO, management
consultant and entrepreneur.
He helped the Obama administration figure out a solution for
the “cash for clunkers” car exchange program’s website, which
crashed repeatedly when it opened early in Obama’s first term.
Republicans, long opposed to the 2010 Affordable Care Act
known as “Obamacare,” have seized on the information vacuum
about the website’s problems to start their own investigation in
Congress about the role of the White House.
CRITICISM OF DESIGN FEATURE
In a letter to two administration technology officers,
Republicans on the House of Representatives Oversight and
Government Reform Committee said their investigation already
points to significant White House involvement in discussions
between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and
the website contractor, CGI Federal.
CGI officials have also told committee staff the widely
criticized design feature requiring visitors to create accounts
before shopping for insurance was implemented in late August or
early September, barely a month before the Oct. 1 start of open
enrollment.
The requirement contributed to a traffic bottleneck that
worsened underlying flaws in a system intended to serve millions
of Americans without healthcare insurance. The technology
problems have frustrated attempts by many to sign on and allowed
only a trickle of enrollments.
“We are concerned that the administration required
contractors to change course late in the implementation process
to conceal Obamacare’s effect on increasing health insurance
premiums,” said the letter authored by panel chairman Darrell
Issa and four Republican subcommittee chairmen.
The committee probe, the second House Republican
investigation into Obamacare, follows the latest attempt by the
party to derail the law during a 16-day government shutdown in
October.
Republicans, who view the law as an unwarranted expansion of
the federal government, eventually dropped demands for delays or
changes to the healthcare law before they would support a
federal funding bill and allowed the government to reopen.
Obama said on Monday he was frustrated by the website’s
problems. A prolonged delay in getting
Healthcare.gov to work could jeopardize White House efforts to
sign up as many as 7 million people in 2014, the first full year
it takes effect.
CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS
The White House declined to directly address the Oct. 21
letter to U.S. Chief Information Officer Steve VanRoekel and
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park.
“It’s not about, you know, who’s to blame for glitches in a
website. What we need to focus on is fixing those problems,
making the information that the American people want available
to them in an efficient way. And that’s what we’re doing,” White
House spokesman Jay Carney said.
Under Issa’s leadership, the House oversight committee has
investigated the Obama administration on several issues since
Republicans took control of the chamber in the 2010 elections.
Last year, Issa accused Obama or his aides of obstructing an
investigation into the botched “Fast and Furious” gun-running
probe on the Arizona border with Mexico. He also spearheaded the
House investigation of a 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic
mission in Benghazi, Libya, and another into the Internal
Revenue Service’s handling of conservative non-profit groups
seeking tax-exempt status.
Issa’s committee is asking VanRoekel and Park to provide all
documents and communications that describe the federal system’s
architecture and design, CMS’ role as system integrator,
problems relayed to the White House and the decision to require
account creation as a prerequisite to seeing insurance plans.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has started its own
investigation and is scheduled to question Sebelius and several
contractors at separate hearings within the next eight days.
Polls show that a narrow majority of Americans oppose the
healthcare law, and the flap over the launch of the insurance
exchanges has done little to change public opinion.
A Reuters/Ipsos online poll on Tuesday showed 54 percent of
Americans opposed the law and 46 percent favored it. A poll from
a month ago found similar percentages divided over the law.
