Contractors Claim Healthcare.gov Didn't Have Enough Time

The main contractors for Healthcare.gov were interrogated, scruntinzed, and criticized Thursday by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, days after the Obama Administration called in a “fix it” team amid growing public frustration with the site’s problems.

"Why were we told everything was OK just weeks before one of the biggest IT disasters in government history?" asked Pennsylvania Republican Joseph Pitts.

“The website should have been the easy part ... Taxpayers around the country really expected a user friendly system,” said committee chairman Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican.

“It’s 2013, there are thousands of websites that handle concurrent volumes larger than Healthcare.gov,” said Anna Eshoo, a Democrat representing much of Silicon Valley. The explanation that Healthcare.gov’s problem stemmed from large traffic: “I think that’s really kind of a lame excuse. Amazon and EBay don’t crash the week before Christmas,” Eshoo said.