VANCOUVER – U.S. citizens fed up with the glitch-plagued government-subsidized health insurance website may point some of the blame north of the border.
The U.S. government contracted CGI Federal, the American subsidiary of Canada’s CGI Group Inc., to develop HealthCare.gov — the gateway to apply for affordable health care coverage.
CGI Federal was responsible for a significant portion of the work that went into the more than $400-million project. CGI’s chunk of that price tag reportedly amounted to almost $292 million.
CGI Federal Senior Vice President Cheryl Campbell will appear before a U.S. congressional committee on Thursday, along with the three other contractors involved in the bug-addled website, to defend the company’s work.
In her testimony, which was published in advance on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce website Wednesday afternoon, Campbell outlines the company’s successful IT history with the U.S. government — including the implementation of the websites federalreporting.gov and medicare.gov.
Although she acknowledged the site issues in the statement, she noted that the registration program “passed eight required technical reviews prior to going live on Oct. 1.”
CGI said it had only about a month to implement a new, and much maligned, feature that makes visitors (more than 19 million so far, according to the U.S. government) sign up for an account before they can browse the healthcare options.
That bottleneck in creating an account on HealthCare.gov has been a source of much frustration for visitors to the site and valuable fodder for opponents of President Barack Obama’s subsidized health care plan.
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HealthCare.gov went online amid the stalemate between Democrats and Republicans over the budget and debt ceiling, and Republican-led efforts to defund the 2010 Affordable Health Care Act — more commonly known as Obamacare.
The site not only jammed up with the influx of visits, but according to Reuters it also “worsened underlying flaws.”
“Unfortunately, in systems this complex with so many concurrent users, it is not unusual to discover problems that need to be addressed once the software goes into a live production environment,” Campbell said in the statement.
“This is true regardless of the level of formal end-to-end performance testing — no amount of testing within reasonable time limits can adequately replicate a live environment of this nature.”
Read Cheryl Campbell’s six-page testimony below
It’s not the first time CGI has had issues with health care projects either. CGI was involved in eHealth Ontario’s defunct plan to build a diabetes registry, Washington Post profile of the company revealed.
EHealth Ontario cancelled the $46.2-million agreement in September 2012, alleging CGI had regularly missed deadlines.
That also became a bit of a scandal for the health authority, which claimed it had not spent a dime on the cancelled contract but a December 2012 auditor general report revealed there had been $24.4 million spent on internal costs.
According to a New York Times article earlier this month, Henry Chao — Deputy Chief Information Officer and Deputy Director of the Office of Information Services for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — told insurance industry executives in March he wanted to “make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”
Republican members of Congress on Tuesday announced an investigation into the botched launch of the site.
Although the U.S. government said nearly 500,000 Americans had applied for coverage through HealthCare.gov by the end of last week, even Obama has vented his disappointment with the site’s performance.
“There’s no sugar coating – the website has been too slow, people have been getting stuck during the application process and I think it’s fair to say that nobody’s more frustrated by that than I am,” Obama said on Monday.
“Nobody’s madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s going to get fixed,” he said.
Written Testimony of Cheryl Campbell.pdf
*With files from The Canadian Press, The Associated Press, The Guardian and Reuters
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