A story published Tuesday evening claims that the Obama administration received “stark warnings” that Healthcare.gov was not going to be ready for launch. CNN’s report is based on a progress report sent from the main contractor, CGI Federal, to CMS.
The document reportedly says that the developers warned there was “not adequate to complete full functional, system, and integration testing activities.” The report also notes “CGI does not have access to necessary tools to manage envs in test, imp,and prod. Specifically (1) we don’t have access to central logcollection / view (2) we don’t have access to monitoring tools. We haverepeatedly asked CMS and URS but haven ot been granted this access.”
Despite these warnings just weeks before launch, a CMS spokesperson told CNN the report was just a “list of things to do.” He went on to insinuate that CNN was cherry picking, saying “It is misleading to cherry pick a few lines.”
Given the current state of the roll out–with the situation so dire that the administration handed control to an outside company who promised a fix by the end of November–it is self-evident that the problems listed in the progress report were not resolved. Last week it seemed the administration was trying to get ahead of the problem by acknowledging it rather than minimizing the obvious results. The response to CNN seems like a step backward.
CNN says the confidential progress report was delivered to CMS on September 6th, less than a month before the go live date. According to congressional testimony last week, final testing on the site did not begin until about mid-September.