EHealth To Obama: We Can Run HealthCare.gov

Obama Administration response to online health insurance site is cool, but proposal reveals backup possibility. EHealth offers to help Covered California, too.

eHealth, which operates a leading online health insurance site, ehealthinsurance.com, has proposed that it temporarily take over the enrollment process for HealthCare.gov while government contractors try to fix the federally run insurance exchange, which has had multiple problems in signing people up for health insurance.

Gary Lauer, CEO of eHealth, announced the proposal in a press conference on Wednesday, just after Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius went on the hot seat defending HealthCare.gov before a congressional committee. Sebelius took responsibility for the website's deficiencies, which included an outage on Tuesday night, the second in the past few days.

In a letter to President Obama, Lauer wrote, "We are ready to help you get this program back on track promptly, with the cooperation of the federal exchange, if you allow us to take over the shopping and enrollment process in all 36 federal exchange states --without cost to the taxpayer. While your staff is working hard to repair healthcare.gov, with your support, we can be the stopgap that is needed."