HealthCare.gov Delays Web Host Switch -- Update

By Louise Radnofsky and Stephanie Armour 

The federal government has shelved plans to transfer the HealthCare.gov insurance website to a new hosting service for the coming enrollment period, delaying a move that was supposed to fix reliability problems.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed a contract last year to replace Verizon Communications Inc. with Hewlett-Packard Co. as the host of HealthCare.gov, the site used by most people to obtain plans under the Affordable Care Act.

The Verizon platform had a series of outages last year that shut the site and affected the federal data hub on which all states rely to transmit information about enrollees' identity and income.

CMS planned to migrate the site to an H-P platform after the main sign-up period ended in March. But in July, the agency quietly moved to keep Verizon hosting most parts of the site for all of the next enrollment season, which starts Nov. 15 and ends Feb. 15.

In a federal contract document justifying the decision, the agency said it needed to stick with Verizon because it had run out of time to thoroughly test the H-P platform.

The decision raises new questions about whether HealthCare.gov will be ready to offer a better experience to millions of Americans this fall after its troubled debut last year. The move to a different host had been a key part of the site's overhaul, and the decision to stay with Verizon is an unexpected development for insurers and state officials.

The site could face heavier traffic this year due to a shorter enrollment period coupled with millions more expected users. Contractors continue to work on other parts of the site's revamp.

"It's going to be improved, but given all the challenges it will be far from perfect," said Joel Ario, a former Obama administration health official who left in 2011 and now is managing director at Manatt Health Solutions, which consults on implementation of the health law.

Aaron Albright, a CMS spokesman, said the decision represented "the best path forward to ensure a successful second open enrollment period. It was made to improve the consumer experience and have sufficient time for testing." Verizon and H-P declined to comment on the decision.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blamed Verizon for the outages when testifying last year before a congressional committee. "It is the Verizon server that failed, not HealthCare.gov," Mrs. Sebelius said.

Verizon has since upgraded its servers and brought in additional staff to better handle the load, people familiar with the situation said.

Additionally, Mr. Albright said, the agency was taking other steps to manage peak traffic, including transferring about 75% of newcomers to the site to a portion hosted by Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services. Those consumers will use a more streamlined system to create accounts, designed to reduce strain on the system.

Testing has suggested that the capacity for this portion of the site had grown significantly but still likely would be maxed out at certain points, forcing users to be held in virtual "waiting rooms," one person familiar with the matter said.

Verizon will host parts of the site serving up to five million returning enrollees, as well as about 25% of newcomers. H-P will host a few components of the site, including serving as a backup for the main system.

The federal contract document said Verizon was capable of supporting the site at its highest volume periods of 2014, which occurred in March, but that it would have to quickly upgrade its capacity for 2015. The decision to stay with Verizon was described as a "short-term bridge" in the document.

During the coming three-month enrollment period, up to 13 million people are expected to select plans through the exchanges, as penalties for not carrying coverage increase in the law's second year and supporters of the law try to extend its reach to more uninsured people. For 2014, about eight million people picked plans during a six-month window that ran from Oct. 1 through March.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at [e-mail] and Stephanie Armour at [e-mail]

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