The federal government didn’t adequately review the past performance of contractors building healthcare.gov before hiring them, says an agency watchdog.
Nor did it put one “integrator” in charge of coordinating all the contractors’ efforts to make sure the launch of the federal health insurance marketplace went smoothly and as planned, according to a report by the Health and Human Services inspector general obtained by the Washington Examiner.
The report sheds more light on why and how the launch of healthcare.gov was so disastrous last year. Only a handful of people were able to enroll in the website’s first days, sending the Obama administration scrambling to fix the site as officials apologized for the situation.
“The complexity of the Federal Marketplace underscored the need for [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] to select the most qualified contractors,” the report says. “However, CMS did not perform thorough reviews of contractor past performance when awarding two key contracts.”
The agency said Tuesday it has already made reforms to its contracting practices, even before the report was issued. That includes ending a contract with CGI Federal–the group that built the website–and moving to a new type of contract with Accenture that rewards performance, said Health and Human Services spokeswoman Meaghan Smith.
“Our goal is to limit costs, to continue to identify areas where we can improve, and to be accountable for our progress,” Smith said.
CMS, which is part of HHS, was in charge of constructing healthcare.gov, where low and middle-income Americans can buy health insurance plans with the help of federal subsidies — a major component of President Obama’s 2010 healthcare law. The agency awarded dozens of contracts to 33 companies to build the site.
It was a huge task, which “underscored the need for CMS to select the most qualified contractors,” the report says. Yet the agency didn’t use all the tools at its disposal to ensure the launch went as intended, the inspector general concluded.
Last year, congressional panels hauled in some of the top contractors and key administration officials to drill them over what went wrong. But most of the hearings consisted of officials shifting the blame to each other.
Federal Market Place Contract Procurement Report
