CONCORD — The history of Atrium Health Cabarrus dates to the mid-1930s, when Charles A. Cannon and his associate, George A. Batte Jr., led an effort to pursue more accessible
That s why we ve launched a campaign called coverage is coming, which is going to be throughout the month of december. up to ted line, december 23rd when folks need to enroll to have coverage by january 1st. we re going to be going backing to folks and making sure they know the time is now to go ahead and enroll. that december 23rd date is the eight days later than december 15 the original. a little more time to incorporate all theicious they had. henry chow said 30% of the website has to be built. it s in the payment and accounts part of the site. how does that affect comustomer at this point? it s important to understand that the healthcare.gov is one way folks can enroll and one way we ve been seeing people enroll. they can call the hot line and find someone in person where they can go ahead and get help to go through the process. so again, that is one step and really the final process when someone has filled out an
Gotten erroneous information and that would have been much worse than not having it at all. reporter: but almost two weeks before launch day, a document obtained by cnn shows federal i.t. officials determined the window shopping tool tested successfully and that any remaining defects will not degrade consumer experience. a source close to the project tells cnn there were only minor problems with the shopping tool, all fixable by launch day, yet one day after the successful test, chow shelves anonymous shopper for what appears to be a different reason. in this internal e-mail obtained exclusively by cnn, chow wrote that mary wallace, who is the deputy director of communications for his agency, quote asked me and i said anonymous shopper really isn t needed and thus should be removed, and we agreed. that move puzzles experts. absolutely, this is something people expect when they visit any website, to not disclose any personal information until they are at a point where they want to m
reporter: republican critics are now accusing the administration of nixing the window shopping tool because it would have shown americans the full unsubsidized price of insurance plans, causing sticker shock and possibly deterring some from signing up. clearly was a political decision to make people see what they were getting for free before they could see what it was going to cost. reporter: chow s agency says it believes the documentation of the successful test was a mistake and today, the white house is standing by chow s testimony. you believe that it failed miserably? again, it had multiple defects. we stand by his testimony. reporter: after complaints that there wasn t a good way to shop before you sign up for an account, obama care officials launched a much more basic version of shopping function on october 10th but it doesn t tell you a lot of important things like anonymous shopper can. for instance, if a plan covers your prescription medications or
The obama care website envisioned, a shopping destination that would function like some of the top e-commerce sites online. you can compare insurance plans side by side the same way you would shop for a plane ticket on kayak or tv on amazon. reporter: a hallmark of those sites, the ability to window shop before you register for an account or provide detailed personal information. cnn has learned one of the best online design firms in the world with a team that included one of the lead designers of online shoe store zappos.com spent hours developing a window shopping tool for the health care website. federal health care officials endorse the $3 million model but it never made it on their site. in this case, it failed so miserably that we could not let people use it. reporter: henry chow, a top government i.t. official, told congress the reason the anonymous shopping feature was never added was that it was critically flawed. we allowed people to go through that, they would have
Were sounding internally about the failures being encountered. among those sending and receiving these newly disclosed e-mails were henry chow, the project manager for the healthcare.gov website for cms, that s the agency with oversight responsibility. and also todd park, the chief technologyat the white house. on one e-mail, september on september 26 of this year, and received by henry chow among other, an information services official at cms described how on the preceding day, quote, on wednesday, 9-25, the test finished with a lot of errors. he continued, the individual app race and ethnicity transactions were taking a long time and eventually the system reached a break point after which everything started failing, unquote. he went on, later in wednesday evening, we ran two more cycles of testing. neither was successful, up quotquot unquote. the next day, chow wrote to cms staff in all caps, i do not want
Glitches just as there are in any rollout. in this case, what they were referring to is the possibility of high traffic on healthcare.gov. that proves to be true, this official notes to me. that s a sign to them that there s high demand for the product. they still want to get it fixed and still think it s going to be turned around. the question is, if they knew there were numbers that were going to be big in the first week and the website wasn t working, why did they roll out? from the e-mail, it only suggests one person, todd park, suggested there was this fear inside the white house. we don t know if others shared that fear. we also don t know if henry chow at the cms agency, was exaggerating that quote/unquote todd park had. if you listen to the president s comments, he suggested the big problem was a surprise to them, and number two, he would not have gone forward if he knew it. the e-mail raises more questions about it.
I think that there are often things that pop up, but people are getting through every single day. a picture of health and human services kathleen sebelius in florida, working with a navigator there as the website went down as they tried to enroll someone while those reporters were following her. this as we received and obtained new documents tonight. ed henry reporting that these private e-mails have surfaced. top aides to president obama were nervous about healthcare.gov right before the launch, september 25th. here s from one of the e-mails from mr. chow. he is the henry chow, cms official. when todd mark and marilyn were here, one of the things todd conveyed is the fear the white house has about hc.gov being unavailable. he has a good point and i think we should have a more comprehensive answer as to how we will have better available.