Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
President Obama took responsibility last week for the troubled rollout of the online federal health insurance marketplace.
WASHINGTON — Senior Obama administration officials, including several in the White House, were warned by an outside management consultant early this year that the effort to build the HealthCare.gov site was falling behind and at risk of failure unless immediate steps were taken to correct the problems, according to documents released by House investigators.
The Times would like to hear from Americans who have begun to sign up for health care under the Affordable Care Act.
The report, by McKinsey & Company, which was prepared in late March at the request of the Department of Health and Human Services, said that management indecision and a "lack of transparency and alignment on critical issues" were threatening progress, despite the tight deadline.
The McKinsey report found that the effort was at risk because of issues including "significant dependency on external parties/contractors," as well as "insufficient time and scope of end-to-end testing," and "parallel stacking of all phases," all predictions that have turned out to be accurate. Briefings on the report were held in the spring at the White House and at the headquarters of the Health and Human Services Department and for leaders at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, congressional investigators said.
"The administration was on track — on track for a disaster — and yet officials refused to be transparent with the Congress and the American people," said Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which released the report. The McKinsey warnings were first reported online by The Washington Post.
The latest evidence detailing the troubled startup of the website came as Obama administration officials said that as of mid-November, the number of people who had selected a marketplace plan was more than 50,000 — up from 27,000 in the entire month of October. That is still a fraction of the number the administration once hoped for.
Despite the progress, specialists are worried about whether they can meet the administration's goal of enabling four in five users to enroll through the online federal exchange, HealthCare.gov, by the end of the month. One person familiar with the effort said a more realistic goal was that four out of five people "have a positive experience," which could include being redirected to customer service agents.
White House officials said on Monday that many of the remaining users would turn to call-in or counseling centers because their insurance situations were complicated. But specialists involved in the repair effort said technical issues may frustrate more users than administration officials suggest. And it is unclear how many fixes remain to be made, because the list keeps changing.
White House officials and some computer experts say much of the criticism is overblown, designed more to scare would-be enrollees away from the insurance exchanges. But the concern is bipartisan. At a closed-door meeting last week, two Democratic senators pressed administration officials on efforts by Chinese hackers to break into the site, according to a Democratic Senate official at the meeting.
"When consumers fill out their online marketplace applications, they can trust that the information that they are providing is protected by stringent security standards," said Patti Unruh, a spokeswoman for the health department's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is responsible for the federal exchange. "Security testing happens on an ongoing basis using industry best practices to appropriately safeguard consumers' personal information."
The running battle against the health care law has kept the White House and Democrats on their heels. As they work to respond to one set of problems, the law's opponents move onward. Republicans began with attacks on the website's functionality, shifted to millions of cancellation notices going to people whose insurance policies did not meet the law's coverage standards, and are now pressing the computer security case. On Friday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a field hearing in the politically sensitive state of North Carolina on yet another front: rate shocks that Republicans insist are coming.
Jonathan Weisman and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.
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