Federal government officials confessed on Thursday, October 24 that the October 1 launch of the Health Insurance Marketplace, HealthCare.gov, was made available for the public too soon. They stated the system did not go through enough tests to ensure that it was functioning correctly. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is one of the Democrats who admitted that there was a serious glitch with the system that needed to be fixed fast. “I think the administration should have known how difficult it was going to be to have 35 million people to suddenly hook up to a place to go on the Internet,” Reid said.

Last Thursday was one of the first of three hearings to try and resolve the issues of HealthCare.gov. Website contractors were questioned at the hearing to explain themselves on why the insurance marketplace wasn’t completely tested “end-to-end” until two weeks before it was open to the public. One of the contractors, Cheryl Campbell, a senior vice-president of CGI Federal said, “We would have loved to have had months.”

Having months to prepare the website was an idealistic thought for the website contractors, who knew that a large volume of people sought to apply for health care coverage. Democratic Representative Anna Eshoo from California thought that blaming the website crashes on large numbers accessing it at the same time was a “lame excuse,” and said, “ProFlowers doesn’t crash on Valentine’s Day.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) spokeswoman, Julie Bataille, addressed that a lot must be done so that people can still sign up for coverage by December 15 and get coverage by January 1.

The federal government is running websites for 36 states, and the other 14 states are using a separate health insurance website. 700,000 people have started enrolling for health care, but the number is a combination from both the federal and state websites. President Obama has commissioned his top financial adviser, Jeff Zients in to work on the website.