Officials Spent Just Two Weeks Testing HealthCare.gov Prior To Launching It

Contractors that helped develop the Obama Administration’s troubled online health insurance marketplace HealthCare.gov told lawmakers on Thursday they wish they’d had more time to test the site before launch but denied any ongoing problems with their portions of the site.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, which oversaw the building of HealthCare.gov, only performed two weeks of end-to-end testing before the site went live on Oct. 1, representatives from contractors CGI Federal and QSSI told the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

That’s significantly less testing time than major Web applications typically endure in government or the private sector, the contractors said.

“Ideally, integrated testing would have occurred well before that date,” said Andrew Slavitt, group executive vice president of Optum/QSSI, which built the data hub that manages information that passes through the HealthCare.gov system and a tool that manages user registration on the site.