In other words, it went exactly how we expected it to.
(CNN) – A stack of daily updates written by Obamacare contractors shows the October rollout hit more walls than previously known: In the first days, half of the calls to the phone center had problems, paper applications could not be processed and up to 40,000 people at a time were sitting in the waiting room of http://www.HealthCare.gov.
The 175 pages of internal updates during the sign-up chronicle the growing ailments and efforts to heal the system during October. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Republican Darrell Issa, obtained the documents from contractors involved and released them Wednesday.
“50% of the call center calls have issues,” reads an entry on day three of the sign-up. “Anecdotal evidence supports a widerspread problem (with the call centers),” the October 3 document says.
Phone trouble continued into the next week. “Our call center reps can’t see their screens,” wrote an unnamed consultant on October 7. “So we need to train them … with this issue.” The following day, another note: “Call Center – Working with them to help them triage their issues.”
At the same time, the paper applications starting to arrive were in limbo. “Serco still cannot process online the 500+ applications they have,” reads one line from October 8 war room notes. Serco is the company paid to handle all the paperwork involved with the Affordable Care Acts sign-ups. Website problems meant that Serco, like individual consumers themselves, could not file applications online.
This was the first week of deployment, and the Health and Human Services Department has maintained that problems at the call center and paper applications were fixed. HHS did not respond to CNN’s request for an on-record comment for this story, and CNN could not verify if the agency agreed with the contractors’ assessments.