The administration was warned last spring that its website didn’t meet key requirements for a successful rollout, including relying too heavily on outside contractors, according to a copy of a “Red Team” report prepared for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and obtained by POLITICO.
The report, which was delivered at the end of March, identified six tests that the developing healthcare.gov website didn’t meet: Its needs were evolving, rather than clearly articulated; there was no clear definition of success; the program relied too heavily contractors and other outside parties; the design, build and test phases were stacked on top of each other rather than sequential, there wasn’t enough time allotted or a side enough scope for valid end-to-end testing of the system; and the site was expected to launch at full volume rather than phasing in over time.
The revelations of early warning signs, first reported by the Washington Post, are not the only ones to have been unearthed in the ongoing autopsy of the Obamacare rollout, but the previously undisclosed CMS “Red Team” report shows just how early and how specifically administration officials were notified about problems that ultimately plagued the website. In this case, the report, compiled by an outside consulting firm and provided by a source on Capitol Hill, pointed to issues that remained unresolved when the website launched six months later.
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