By Louise Radnofsky and Stephanie Armour
The federal government has shelved plans to transfer the
HealthCare.gov insurance website to a new hosting service for the
coming enrollment period, delaying a move that was supposed to fix
reliability problems.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed a contract
last year to replace Verizon Communications Inc. with
Hewlett-Packard Co. as the host of HealthCare.gov, the site used by
most people to obtain plans under the Affordable Care Act.
The Verizon platform had a series of outages last year that shut
the site and affected the federal data hub on which all states rely
to transmit information about enrollees' identity and income.
CMS planned to migrate the site to an H-P platform after the
main sign-up period ended in March. But in July, the agency quietly
moved to keep Verizon hosting most parts of the site for all of the
next enrollment season, which starts Nov. 15 and ends Feb. 15.
In a federal contract document justifying the decision, the
agency said it needed to stick with Verizon because it had run out
of time to thoroughly test the H-P platform.
The decision raises new questions about whether HealthCare.gov
will be ready to offer a better experience to millions of Americans
this fall after its troubled debut last year. The move to a
different host had been a key part of the site's overhaul, and the
decision to stay with Verizon is an unexpected development for
insurers and state officials.
The site could face heavier traffic this year due to a shorter
enrollment period coupled with millions more expected users.
Contractors continue to work on other parts of the site's
revamp.
"It's going to be improved, but given all the challenges it will
be far from perfect," said Joel Ario, a former Obama administration
health official who left in 2011 and now is managing director at
Manatt Health Solutions, which consults on implementation of the
health law.
Aaron Albright, a CMS spokesman, said the decision represented
"the best path forward to ensure a successful second open
enrollment period. It was made to improve the consumer experience
and have sufficient time for testing." Verizon and H-P declined to
comment on the decision.
Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
blamed Verizon for the outages when testifying last year before a
congressional committee. "It is the Verizon server that failed, not
HealthCare.gov," Mrs. Sebelius said.
Verizon has since upgraded its servers and brought in additional
staff to better handle the load, people familiar with the situation
said.
Additionally, Mr. Albright said, the agency was taking other
steps to manage peak traffic, including transferring about 75% of
newcomers to the site to a portion hosted by Amazon.com Inc.'s
Amazon Web Services. Those consumers will use a more streamlined
system to create accounts, designed to reduce strain on the
system.
Testing has suggested that the capacity for this portion of the
site had grown significantly but still likely would be maxed out at
certain points, forcing users to be held in virtual "waiting
rooms," one person familiar with the matter said.
Verizon will host parts of the site serving up to five million
returning enrollees, as well as about 25% of newcomers. H-P will
host a few components of the site, including serving as a backup
for the main system.
The federal contract document said Verizon was capable of
supporting the site at its highest volume periods of 2014, which
occurred in March, but that it would have to quickly upgrade its
capacity for 2015. The decision to stay with Verizon was described
as a "short-term bridge" in the document.
During the coming three-month enrollment period, up to 13
million people are expected to select plans through the exchanges,
as penalties for not carrying coverage increase in the law's second
year and supporters of the law try to extend its reach to more
uninsured people. For 2014, about eight million people picked plans
during a six-month window that ran from Oct. 1 through March.
Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com and
Stephanie Armour at stephanie.armour@wsj.com
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