Answers in the first congressional hearing with the men and women who designed the online exchanges. Representatives from four of the largest contractors the government hired to bill the site defended their work. Do you know anyone else at the table thought or made a recommendation not to go forward on october 1 . Thats a correct statement. I refer back to my earlier answer. We did not make a recommendation. We simply made everyone aware of the risks we saw. Okay. No, we did not make a recommendation. We did not either. There are thousands of websites that carry far more traffic. Amazon and ebay dont crash the week before christmas. When was the integrated system tested . During the last two weeks in september. We didnt see the full kind of integrated endtoend system testing youre talking about. Why not . Until a couple days leading up to the launch. Shouldnt we have had that . Ideally, yes. We were testing up to the time that the system went live. Ideally, integrated testing would hav
0 liked to have had more testing. we made the government aware of our concerns. you saw in the lead-in, we would have preferred to have months, not days. nevertheless, krystal, this is a problem we see off and on with government contracting. they walked away, we found out today, with $375 million between all of them. they got paid. their work is subpar. for a job well done, luke. we don t know where the blame goes. this just goes back to the contracting we ve seen from the u.s. government over the years. we saw a lot of horrific contracting during the iraq war, horrific contracting before that. that s the big issue here. how come the government can never hold these contractors accountable or get it right? absolutely right. luke russert, much appreciated. take care. jonathan cohn is senior editor at the new republic. we re going to dig into the details of the health care exchange itself, but i wanted to start with the bigger picture question, the more philosophical question.