Hearing On Obamacare Website Debacle
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So then, you know, we heard from Andrew Slavitt who said that, you know, he spoke a little bit about the complexity of the site and about what they called the data hub. So, you know, essentially, when you go in and you're putting your information in there, they ping the IRS and the IRS comes back with your information. That's all the data hub and he says that was working very well. Then he got into what a lot of folks seem to be talking about, that account registration. Even then, carol, he said there were also many other folks working on this not just that and that's where it seems a lot of the problems were lying. As you said before, he went to say that this was a last minute decision to have them -- you know, have people sign in through this account in order to go in, in order to look at those insurance plans. And then you heard from other folks who were also saying, well, we had nothing to do with this. So it sounds like a giant blame game from what I'm hearing.</s>CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Well, it sounds like everybody is throwing everybody under the bus right at the moment. So Laurie, you stick around. I'm going to reset the hour because some viewers are just joining us so I'm going to say good morning to all of you. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me. Right now, on Capitol Hill lawmakers get their first chance to grill the developers of Obamacare's botched website. Companies are being pressed to explain the crippling problems that plagued the enrollment process and overshadowed the roll out of Obama's signature health reforms. What testimony getting underway just minutes ago, it's no surprise that blame will ricochet in all different directions, in fact, it already has. Joe Johns is monitoring this hearing from our Washington Bureau. Reset this hearing for us -- Joe.</s>JOE JOHNS, CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Carol, that's Congressman Henry Waxman of California testifying right now, the ranking Democrat on the committee. They've just gotten into it. This testimony has been just about as predictable as it gets especially with a complex I.T. start up like this, and this maybe the mother of all recent government funded I.T. start-ups. Finger pointing right off the bat, the first witness with the contractor known as CGI -- that's Carol Campbell testifying -- that there was a problem with a function that serves as the entry portal to the website, but that function was the responsibility of another contractor known as Optum/QSSI. The executive from Optum testified that a bottleneck on the site may have been the result of a last- minute change by the government, apparently requiring registration before consumers could browse the site. The other two witnesses with Equifax and Serco essentially saying they haven't had any problems. So now, they're really getting into the nuts and bolts as the questions are being asked and answered, Carol.</s>COSTELLO: OK, so you mentioned nuts and bolts. Let's get right to the nuts and bolts right now and listen to testimony. The woman that's talking right now is Sheryl Campbell. She's the senior vice president of CGI Federal, the company mainly responsible for setting up healthcare.gov. She is being questioned by the ranking member of this committee, Henry Waxman. Let's listen.</s>REPRESENTATIVE HENRY WAXMAN (D), CALIFORNIA: Does CGI have to rewrite 5 million lines of code to fix the problems we've seen thus far?</s>CHERYL CAMPBELL, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CGI FEDERAL: No, sir. I can tell you that 300 plus employees that I have back in the office would -- I think they would all walk out if I told them they had to rewrite that many lines of code.</s>WAXMAN: Do you believe it's going to be necessary to scrap the entire healthcare.gov system and start from scratch?</s>CAMPBELL: I do not, sir.</s>WAXMAN: So you think the web site will be fixed in time to ensure Americans who want coverage by next year that it will be available to them?</s>CAMPBELL: I do, sir.</s>WAXMAN: Why are you so confident? Can you explain that that these problems will be fixed in time?</s>CAMPBELL: Because as I said, we're seeing improvements day by day. We're continuing to run queries against our database. We're reviewing system logs. We're fine tuning our servers. We are analyzing the code for anomalies. Every day we're seeing where we're finding challenges in the system, in making those corrections, as you would with any system that will go live. When a system goes into production, these are the things that you would typically find after production. Maybe not to the level of detail that's happened in this experience, but when a system goes live, these are the things that you typically do. You continue to provide system builds and put performance into fine tuning to the application to make sure it continues to improve time over time.</s>WAXMAN: Mr. Slavitt, your company has been deeply involved in troubling and fixing the problems on healthcare.gov. Do you have any reason to believe problems that are being experienced at this launch will prevent Americans from getting insurance for the coming year?</s>ANDREW SLAVITT, GROUP EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, OPTUM/QSSI: Congressman, I'm confident that the data services hub that QSSI developed and the EIDM registration tool are working well today and will continue to work well.</s>WAXMAN: You had problems with your part early on, but you fixed them, didn't you?</s>SLAVITT: For the first seven days, correct.</s>WAXMAN: So problems can be fixed?</s>SLAVITT: We doubled the capacity of that registration tool within seven days.</s>WAXMAN: Miss Campbell, did CGI system pass its test before the system went live?</s>CAMPBELL: Yes, it did.</s>WAXMAN: And my understanding is that you felt the system was ready to go on October 1. Is that right?</s>CAMPBELL: That is correct.</s>WAXMAN: Neither you nor anyone else at the table thought or made a recommendation not to go forward on October 1 because you didn't think the system was ready, is that a correct statement?</s>CAMPBELL: That's a correct statement.</s>WAXMAN: Mr. Slavitt?</s>SLAVITT: I refer back to my earlier answer. We did not make a recommendation. We simply made everyone aware of the risks that we saw.</s>WAXMAN: Ms. Pellecy (ph)?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, we did not make recommendations.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We did not either.</s>WAXMAN: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We recognize the vice chair of whole committee, Ms. Blackburn from Tennessee.</s>REPRESENTATIVE MARSHA BLACKBURN (R), TENNESSEE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for your testimony. I would like each of you to submit in writing for me how much you have been paid to date and then how much you're being paid on retainer or either to clear up. So, if you will submit that to us for the record, that would be wonderful. HIPAA compliance, were you all trained in HIPAA compliance prior to beginning your contract? I'll just go right down the line, Ms. Campbell.</s>CAMPBELL: Yes.</s>BLACKBURN: Mr. Slavitt?</s>SLAVITT: Yes, we do extensive HIPAA training.</s>BLACKBURN: Ms. Pellecy (ph)?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.</s>BLACKBURN: Mr. Lau (ph)?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.</s>BLACKBURN: Did your companies meet as a group with HHS before you started the process? Anyone, did your companies meet together with HHS to discuss the integration? Mr. Lau (ph), go ahead.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. The security people from CMS and Serco and others have coordinated the security.</s>MARSHA: OK, all right, let me ask each of you a question. How many people in each of your companies have physical access to the database servers storing the enrolling information?</s>CAMPBELL: Zero from</s>CGI. BLACKBURN: Pardon me?</s>CAMPBELL: We have zero access to the database.</s>BLACKBURN: Zero, OK.</s>SLAVITT: I believe the answer is also zero for</s>QSSI. BLACKBURN: Ms. Pellecy (ph)?</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have no access to the servers.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: About 2,000 people.</s>BLACKBURN: Two thousand people have access to the database?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Through the key entry of the applications.</s>BLACKBURN: OK. Under HIPAA regs, no one is expected to have direct access to that database. Under the current technology infrastructure, how many separate servers or virtual servers in the Cloud are being used to host and store data for healthcare.gov? Ms. Campbell, Mr. Slavitt, I think that's primarily to you.</s>CAMPBELL: I don't have the exact number.</s>COSTELLO: All right, we're going to jump away and sort of analyze what's been going on in this hearing. Our tech expert, Laurie Segall has been doing a fabulous job with this. Laurie, we heard CGI, the senior vice president say the problems will be fixed and the system will be OK. Do you believe her?</s>LAURIE SEGALL, CNNMONEY CORRESPONDENT: You know, I will say when I'm -- I'm very excited they asked about that 5 million lines of code needing to be rewritten. They asked about that and said do we need 5 million lines of code to be rewritten in order for this to work? Let me put this in context for you, Carol, it takes about a day to write 100 lines of code for one software engineer. What Cheryl Campbell said is if I told my 300 employees they had to rewrite that much code, they would walk out. So maybe those estimates, maybe those were inflated estimates. So that could be a good sign, but I think what we can take away here. From looking at everybody kind of deflecting a little bit is the disjointed nature of trying to build something that was such a huge political agenda, such a complicated website. But the idea that there were so many cooks in the kitchen that in order to build a very good technology site, in order to build something that's going to work, A, you have to test it. B, you have to have a lot of folks in-house, on board communicating. What we're seeing here is that there are simple failures of communication to a point where some of these folks are saying, I don't know if we're really ready to go. A lot of folks knew that this wasn't really going to work. Yet it was still pushed out. That's why we had so many people saying we get in and what's happening, and that's why this has kind of turned into such a big debacle -- Carol.</s>COSTELLO: I know I wrote these numbers down somewhere. I was looking for it while you were talking, but you talk about cooks in the kitchen, 55 contractors were involved, five government agencies, 300 different insurers and a dozen states. You're right. Lots of cooks in the kitchen, how could that possibly work?</s>SEGALL: You know, at this point, we're seeing that it hasn't worked. It's safe to say, as we see folks kind of deflecting a little that it really didn't work. That one person was working on one technology, but they weren't communicating with another contractor working on another technology and some people realized that the coding was off. So they told another contractor who was in charge of telling someone else. This is why you -- I mean, from a Silicon Valley perspective, successful web site happens in a successful company -- even Google in those beginning phases, when you're in this lean phase, identify it, take it to the top and get it fixed. Here it sounds as if that simply didn't happen and now we're seeing the outcome.</s>COSTELLO: Laurie Segall, stick around. I have to take another break. We'll be back with much more in the NEWSROOM.