house target date of november 30th for the vast majority of users to be able to use the website healthcare.gov. while it is still a source of health care heartburn, other parts of the program are showing some signs of life. justice health and human services secretary kathleen sebelius was touring an obama care signup center in florida this week and chatting with volunteers about healthcare.gov, the website crashed. screen saver, sorry, the system is temporarily down. that s okay. it will come back. you know, that happens every day. reporter: as it turns out, the struggling website is exactly the scenario administration officials quietly fear. as more e-mails released by house republicans reveal top hhs official henry chao was warning dozens of his colleagues the white house worried the site was not ready. one week before its october 1st launch. referring to whout chief technology officer todd park, chao wrote one of the things
Detailed text transcripts for TV channel - FOXNEWS - 20131121:00:01:00
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suggesting they were worried exactly what happened, us and others in the media looking at website not working. they were trying to find a better, more palatable way to tell people it is not working focusing on the pr there. cms officials pushed back on all this. in part they told me in a statement, we know now we underestimated the volume of users who would attempt to log on the system at the same time, and therefore our testing did not include performance testing at the volume we experienced at launch. what they re saying in the email traffic henry chao was saying the fear inside the white house there would be more users than they expected and they wouldn t be able to handle it. obviously that happened to some extent in addition to other glitches and stuff. the white house believes that shows there is demand for the product. if they ever think the website will be fixed they think the law will be good for the american people. bill: still to come, ed henry from the north lawn. martha? m
good morning there. you have your hands on the email that suggests that the white house knew more than it led on. reporter: right. this is a week before the october 1st launch, september 25th and henry chao, the sort of chief tech guy at cms, the key agency here is emailing on september 25th about a meeting the day before, exactly one week before the october 1st launch and refers to the chief technology officer of the white house, when quote, todd park, and marilyn tavenner, you remember her at r can ns, one of the things todd conveyed was this fear the white house has about hc.gov being unavailable. why that is at this time of course, that a fear inside the white house allegedly that it would not be available. remember the site, president, see him in the pictures, walking into the white house briefing room one week ago today telling us he was surprised by the magnitude of the problems. my critics call me a lot of things but one thing i m not is
president came into the briefing room for that news conference, said, a, he was surprised by these major problems that brought the web site down and, b be, he said, look, my critics call me a lot of things, but i m not stupid. if we had known that there were going to be these problems, we would have delayed it. we wouldn t have gone forward. so this is yet another piece of evidence that raises questions about why if there were at least some warnings here a week out they didn t stop and rethink all this, patti ann. patti ann: the e-mailรง also suggests that henry chao at cms was more worried about public relations than about getting consumers insurance? reporter: well, certainly in one piece of the e-mail it suggests they were worried about public relations. henry chao, in fairness to him, has been testifying on capitol hill and saying he s very concerned about how consumers are impacted by this new law, but in this one e-mail he attaches an image that shows you can t log on, he says
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