STATEMENT OFKATHLEEN SEBELIUSSECRETARYU.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICESONAFFORDABLE CARE ACT IMPLEMENTATIONBEFORE THEU. S. HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ENERGY & COMMERCEOCTOBER 30, 2013
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Testimony of Kathleen SebeliusU.S. Department of Health and Human Serviceson Affordable Care Act ImplementationHouse Committee on Energy & CommerceOctober 30, 2013
Good morning, Chairman Upton, Ranking Member Waxman, and members of the Committee.On October 1
st
, we launched one of the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act
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the newHealth Insurance Marketplace, where people without health insurance, including those whocannot afford health insurance, and those who are not part of a group plan, can go to getaffordable coverage. Consumers can access the Marketplace in several ways
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through a callcenter, by filling out a paper application, with the help of in-person assistance, or by going onlineand filling out an application on HealthCare.gov.Over the past few weeks, millions of Americans have visited HealthCare.gov to look at their newhealth coverage options under the Affordable Care Act. In that time, nearly 700,000 applicationshave been submitted to the Federal and state marketplaces from across the Nation. Thistremendous interest
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with over 20 million unique visits to date to HealthCare.gov
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confirmsthat the American people are looking for quality, affordable health coverage. Unfortunately, theexperience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans. Some have had troublecreating accounts and logging in to the site, while others have received confusing error messages,or had to wait for slow page loads or forms that failed to respond in a timely fashion. The initialconsumer experience of HealthCare.gov has not lived up to the expectations of the American people and is not acceptable. We are committed to fixing these problems as soon as possible.
Improvements Already Made to HealthCare.gov
To build the Marketplace, CMS used private sector contractors, just as it does to administer aspects of Medicare. CMS has a track record of successfully overseeing the many contractors our programs depend on to function. Unfortunately, a subset of those contracts for HealthCare.govhave not met expectations. Among other issues, the initial wave of interest stressed the account
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service, resulting in many consumers experiencing difficulty signing up, while those who wereable to sign up sometimes had problems logging in.In response, we have made a number of improvements to the account service. We have updatedthe site several times with new code that includes bug fixes that have improved theHealthCare.gov experience. We continue to add more capacity in order to meet demand andexecute software fixes to address the sign up and log in issues, stabilizing those parts of the
service and allowing us to remove the virtual “waiting room.”
Today, more individuals aresuccessfully creating accounts, logging in, and moving on to apply for coverage and shop for plans. We are pleased with these quick improvements, but we know there is still significant,additional work to be done. We continue to conduct regular maintenance nearly every night toimprove the consumer experience.
Reinforcements
To address the technical challenges with HealthCare.gov, we are putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals areencountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and address them. Weare also working to prevent new issues from cropping up as we improve the overall service anddeploy fixes to the site during off-peak hours on a regular basis.To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve,our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we areencountering. We are bringing in people from both inside and outside government to scrub inwith the team and help improve HealthCare.gov. Specifically, we are bringing on boardmanagement expert and former CEO and Chairman of two publicly traded companies, Jeff Zients, to work in close cooperation with our HHS team to provide management advice andcounsel to the project. Mr. Zients has led
some of the country’s top mana
gement firms, providing private sector companies around the world with best practices in management, strategy, andoperations. He has a proven track record as Acting Director at the Office of Management andBudget and as the N
ation’s first
Chief Performance Officer. Working alongside our team and
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