HHS Internal Emails Show Impending Healthcare.gov Disaster

WASHINGTON – A series of July emails between HHS officials and CGI Federal, one of the contractors responsible for building Healthcare.gov, reveals concerns about development, testing and functionality of the site, intended for use by millions of Americans beginning Oct. 1 as a federal health insurance exchange.

The emails show federal contractors and HHS scrambling to reset development schedules amid concerns from developers about lack of needed staff and resources.

“We just got off an extended set of development planning meetings with OIS,” writes Jeffrey Grant, of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight in a July 8 internal email. “Suffice it to say, the upshot is the FM build appears to be way off track and getting worse.”

“We also finally were told that there were only 10 developers total working on the FM build for all functionality,” he writes to Sharon Arnold, director of payment policy and financial management group at CMS. “Only one of these developers is at a high enough skill level to handle complex issue resolution, which now appears to be required for all aspects of our build.”