Health Website Official Tells of White House Briefings

The official, Henry Chao, said he had provided “status briefings” to the White House on the development of certain features of the website, envisioned as the main vehicle for people to compare and buy insurance plans under the new health care law.

Jeanne M. Lambrew, the president’s health policy coordinator, generally attended and often led the meetings, Mr. Chao said at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The committee, investigating the rollout of the new health care law, has requested testimony from Ms. Lambrew and from Nancy-Ann DeParle, who was director of the White House Office of Health Reform from 2009 to 2011 and then deputy chief of staff for Mr. Obama until early this year.

Kathryn H. Ruemmler, the president’s chief lawyer, rebuffed the panel’s request. In a letter to the committee on Tuesday, she said the testimony of Ms. Lambrew and Ms. DeParle was not needed “in light of the extraordinary information that has been provided to the Congress to date.” Moreover, Ms. Ruemmler complained that Republicans on the committee were seeking testimony on a “broad and amorphous range of issues” not tied to any “legitimate oversight interest.”

The panel is trying to find out how much the White House knew about defects in the website, HealthCare.gov, and whether politics contributed to some of the underlying problems.

Committee Republicans said they still wanted to hear from Mr. Lambrew and Ms. DeParle. “They are the people we need” because they were “the political people in charge,” said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio.

At the hearing on Wednesday, federal officials working on the project were unable to tell committee members how much it would cost to fix the site, on which the government has already spent more than $600 million.

Neither Mr. Chao nor Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the White House, nor Steven VanRoekel, the chief information officer for the federal government, could answer questions about the cost of repairing the site, which has been plagued with software and hardware problems since it went live on Oct. 1.

Even while testimony was underway before the oversight committee, a separate House panel questioned other administration officials about the security of the website and the protection of personal information that consumers provide when applying for health insurance and federal subsidies.

Roberta Stempfley, an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said there had been at least 16 reported attempts to infiltrate the system. In addition, she said, there has been at least one effort to delay or shut down the site, by an outside party trying to orchestrate a “denial of service” attack involving repeated queries meant to overload the system.

Ms. Stempfley, testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security, did not provide details of the incidents, which she said were being investigated. After the hearing, a Homeland Security Department official said none of the attempts appeared to have been successful or to have resulted in the unauthorized release of personal information. On an average day, the official said, 620 similar reports come in to the department.

The security of the health care website had not been fully tested when it opened to the public last month, according to federal officials and documents from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Many questions at the oversight committee hearing focused on website procedures that required consumers to create password-protected accounts before they could see the exact cost of health plans for which they were eligible.

Mr. Chao rejected Republican suggestions that the administration had blocked an “anonymous shopping” feature because it feared that consumers would be shocked if they saw the full unsubsidized prices of insurance policies.

In fact, Mr. Chao said, federal officials excluded the feature because it had failed to perform properly during testing. “It failed so miserably that we could not conscionably let people use it,” he said.

However, the chairman of the oversight committee, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, pointed to a government document indicating that the anonymous shopper feature had been tested successfully in September and was to be “turned off” for unspecified reasons.

Mr. Issa tried repeatedly to determine who in the administration had decided to go forward with the website on Oct. 1 despite indications that it was not ready.

“This was a monumental mistake to go live and effectively explode on the launch pad,” Mr. Issa said.

He added, “We have discovered and will undoubtedly continue to discover that efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines at the end.”

David A. Powner, director of information technology issues at the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said, “Clearly, knowing what we know now, a delay in the rollout would have made sense.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 16, 2013

A picture caption on Thursday with an article about testimony by Obama administration officials before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about the federal health insurance marketplace misidentified the state represented by the committee’s chairman, Representative Darrell Issa. As the article correctly noted, it is California, not Ohio.