Health website glitches persist

Two weeks after the federal healthinsurance exchange began, glitches still plague the website. One expert cites a huge volume of visitors as well as platform design and says Health and Human Services didn’t have enough time to test the system.

WASHINGTON — Two weeks into the launch of the federal health insurance exchange, the website is still plagued with problems, leading critics to wonder whether the problem is worse than it appears.

There are two key issues at the core of the problem, said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group founded and led by former Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. One is volume, which HHS estimates at 14.6 million unique visitors, and the second is the platform’s design.

The main problem, Schuyler said, could be “core fundamental design flow,” but it’s impossible to know because HHS is saying so little.

“Only the contractors and HHS know that,” he said.

They need to figure out the problem soon if the government is to meet its goal of 7 million new health customers signing up on the exchanges by March 31.

“That’s 39,000 enrolled a day, and we’re not seeing anywhere near that volume,” he said. “If they don’t get it fixed within two or three weeks, we’re going to have a backlog of consumers who won’t be able to enroll.”

HHS didn’t have enough time to test its system for “one of the most complex IT platforms undertaken by the feds or the states,” Schuyler said.

HHS did not respond to a request for information, and its website states that there are too many media requests now to answer all of them. However, at the end of the first two weeks, HHS issued a statement:

“We won’t stop improving HealthCare.gov until its doors are wide open and at the end of the six-month open enrollment, millions of Americans gain affordable coverage,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said.

President Barack Obama criticized the problems in an interview Tuesday with KCCI, a Des Moines, Iowa, TV station.

“I am the first to acknowledge that the website that was supposed to do this all in a seamless way has had way more glitches than I think are acceptable, and we’ve got people working around the clock to do that,” he said. “We’ve seen some significant progress, but until it’s 100 percent I’m not going to be satisfied.”

Schuyler described the system as analogous to building a house. The core is the foundation, and the ancillary pieces are the windows and deck. If the problem is the core, that would be similar to deciding that the ranch house the government already built needs a basement. If it’s ancillary, they’re just replacing single-pane windows with double-pane windows.

“This feels like a core issue,” he said, “but I think we’ll have a little bit more insight over the next two weeks.”