The Obama administration said Wednesday night that it will give Americans who buy health insurance through the new online marketplaces an extra six weeks to obtain coverage before they incur a penalty. 
 
 The announcement means that those who buy coverage through the exchange will have until March 31 to sign up for a plan, according to an official with the Department of Health and Human Services. 
 
 Administration officials said that the rejiggered deadline is unrelated to the many technical problems that have emerged with the Web site, HealthCare.gov, in its first three weeks. Instead, they said, it is designed to clear up a timing confusion about the 2010 law, which for the first time requires most Americans to buy health coverage or face a penalty. 
 
 Under the law, health plans available through the new federal or state marketplaces will start Jan. 1, but the open enrollment period runs through the end of March. The law also says that people will be fined only if they do not have coverage for three months in a row. The question has been this: Do people need to be covered by March 31, or merely to have signed up by then, given that insurance policies have a brief lag before they take effect? 
 
 The administration made clear Wednesday night that people who buy coverage at any point during the open enrollment period will not pay a penalty. 
 
 An administration official named Jeff Zients has been tasked with fixing the issues with Obamacare's new website. But who is Jeff Zients? (The Washington Post) 
 
 It is the latest sign that the health-care law remains a moving target, even after the launch of the federal insurance marketplace, which has faced myriad problems that have frustrated many people trying to sign up for coverage. 
 
 Contractors and others have begun assigning blame for the Web site troubles, and the fault-finding will get its first extensive public airing Thursday, when four of the contractors involved in the project will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 
 
 In the written testimony submitted to the panel in advance, CGI Federal, the main contractor on the project, takes partial blame for the site’s shortcomings. But it also notes that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency within HHS, was the “ultimate responsible party for the end-to-end performance” of the site. And it blames a piece created by another contractor, Quality Software Services (QSSI), for creating the initial bottleneck. 
 
 QSSI built part of the online registration system that crashed shortly after the Oct. 1 launch and locked out many people for days. In a statement, the company counters that it was not the only one responsible for the registration system, which is now working. 
 
 “There are a number of other components to the registration system, all of which must work together seamlessly to ensure registration,” said Matt Stearns, a spokesman for UnitedHealth Group, the parent company for QSSI. “The [QSSI-built] tool has been working well for weeks.” 
 
 But both contractors are likely to be taken to task by Republican and Democratic committee members. They were among the vendors who testified at a Sept. 10 Energy and Commerce Committee hearing that their parts of the project were moving along well, and that the Web site would be ready Oct. 1. Those assurances are likely to be questioned Thursday. 
 
 The hearing is the first of many planned by Republicans, who are expected not only to question the contractors but also to examine the administration’s management of the project. Some Republicans have called for the ouster of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is scheduled to appear before the panel next Wednesday. 
 
 President Obama and his deputies have given no indication that they are considering replacing Sebelius. White House press secretary Jay Carney has consistently defended her, and officials have been focusing on fixing the site rather than assessing blame for its defects. 
 
 The administration, however, has sought to assure jittery business leaders and insurers that can fix the enrollment system. On Tuesday, Vice President Biden told business supporters in a conference call that the nation’s best technology minds were working on the site and urged them to “stick with us.” And on Wednesday, top Obama advisers met with insurance executives to discuss system repairs. 
 
 CMS had enormous responsibility, and was charged with ensuring that there would be a mechanism for millions of Americans to easily sign up for coverage in time for some of the law’s main benefits to begin Jan. 1. Officials have said ease of signing up is critical to the administration meeting its goal of getting 7 million uninsured people — many of them young and healthy — to sign up. 
 
 But the agency assumed an outsize role in the management of the project, coordinating the activities of 55 contractors rather than hiring a separate firm to serve as a systems integrator. That is likely to be a key issue during Thursday’s hearing. 
 
 People familiar with the project have said the time frame was too tight for adequate testing, which one source said would have highlighted the problems. 
 
 There also have been inconsistencies about how and when the decision was made to scrap a key feature of the Web site, with QSSI telling congressional investigators that it did not know about the major change until the site’s launch. But in the written testimony the company plans to deliver Thursday, it says it found out shortly before the rollout date. 
 
 Republicans have been eager to learn more about how and when the decision was made to end that feature. The feature would have allowed people to browse plans and rates before signing up for an account. Technology experts have said the last-minute decision to stop it put too much pressure on a different tool that was set up to handle a small number of simultaneous users, crashing the site. 
 
 People familiar with the project give conflicting accounts of the reason for the move. The decision was made at a two-day meeting in late September to which CMS invited all its major contractors. According to one person familiar with the project, CGI gave a presentation that convinced CMS officials that the shopping feature was not ready. 
 
 Another person close to the project had a slightly different account, saying that CGI believed that the feature was, in fact, ready. 
 
 Republican lawmakers have alleged that the administration made the change to hide the cost of insurance plans from consumers. 
 
 “Evidence is mounting that political considerations motivated the decision,” said a letter sent to two administration officials Tuesday from members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, including Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). 
 
 Lena H. Sun, Ed O’Keefe and Tom Hamburger contributed to this report. ||||| When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project. 
 
 As new details emerged about early warning signs of serious deficiencies in HealthCare.gov, Obama on Monday gave a consumer-friendly defense of the health-care law, insisting that the problems many Americans have faced in trying to enroll in insurance plans will be fixed quickly. 
 
 “There’s no sugarcoating it: The Web site is too slow; people have been getting stuck during the application process,” he said at a White House event. 
 
 At the same time, he admonished Republican critics of the federal insurance exchange, saying that “it is time to stop rooting for its failure.” 
 
 The president’s remarks reflected rising anxiety within his administration over the widening problems with the online enrollment process. “There’s no excuse for the problems,” he added, “and they are being fixed.” 
 
 Obama said government officials are “doing everything we can possibly do” to repair the site, including 24-hour work from “some of the best IT talent in the country.” 
 
 “No one is madder about the Web site than I am, which means it’s going to get fixed,” he added. 
 
 White House officials said Monday that the problems have not caused the administration to consider delaying the law’s individual mandate, which requires that most Americans have health insurance next year or pay a fine. 
 
 (Read more about the rollout of the new health-care law.) 
 
 A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday shows that a majority of Americans, 56 percent, believe that the Web site’s flaws reflect larger problems with the health-care law, an alarming figure for the administration. But support for the law is growing despite the enrollment issues, with 46 percent of Americans saying they support it now, compared with 42 percent who said so last month. 
 
 Congressional Republicans have called for the firing of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius over the enrollment problems. House Republicans have been pressuring her to testify before the Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday to answer questions about the health-care rollout. Sebelius, who is scheduled to be in Phoenix that day, agreed Monday night to appear on Oct. 30 instead. 
 
 Several companies working on HealthCare.gov have confirmed that they will send representatives to the hearing. They include two of the main contractors, CGI Federal and Quality Software Services Inc. (QSSI), a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, as well as Serco, which is handling paper applications, and Equifax, which is dealing with some of the income verification. 
 
 “We are now entering week four of the botched health-care rollout, and with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent for a system that still does not work, Congress and the American people deserve answers,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), said in a statement. 
 
 “And as the administration continues to withhold important details and enrollment figures, I hope Secretary Sebelius is ready to give answers and finally live up to the president’s celebrated claims of transparency.” 
 
 Plenty of red flags 
 
 There were ample warning signs that the system was not working properly, according to people familiar with the project. 
 
 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency in charge of running the health insurance exchange in 36 states, invited about 10 insurers to give advice and help test the Web site. 
 
 About a month before the exchange opened, this testing group urged agency officials not to launch it nationwide because it was still riddled with problems, according to an insurance IT executive who was close to the rollout. 
 
 “We discussed . . . is there a way to do a pilot — by state, by geographic region?” the executive said. 
 
 It was clear at the time, the executive said, that the CMS was still dealing with the way the exchange handled enrollment, federal subsidies and the security of consumers’ personal information, such as income. 
 
 One key problem, according to a person close to the project, was that the agency assumed the role of managing the 55 contractors involved and had not ensured that all the pieces were working together. 
 
 Some key testing of the system did not take place until the week before launch, according to this person. As late as Sept. 26, there had been no tests to determine whether a consumer could complete the process from beginning to end: create an account, determine eligibility for federal subsidies and sign up for a health insurance plan, according to two sources familiar with the project. 
 
 People working on the project knew that Oct. 1 was set in stone as a launch date. “We named it the tyranny of the October 1 date,” said a person close to the project. 
 
 “We are working around the clock to identify issues with the site, diagnose them and fix them,” said Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for Health and Human Services. “We know the site is working significantly better than it was on day one, with more people able to get through the process and enroll everyday, but we still have more work to do. We have to get this right so that everyone who wants coverage can get it, and we are committed to doing so.” 
 
 Initial problems centered on account registration, a function that takes place early in the process and was in part a responsibility of contractor QSSI. While that function has improved, it is not fixed, according to the person close to the project. 
 
 QSSI said that a critical component that involves identity management is “successfully handling current volumes,” said Matt Stearns, a spokesman for UnitedHealth Group, the parent company. He said the “entire federal marketplace” was overwhelmed by consumer interest at launch. 
 
 The administration had asked CGI to come up with a solution to replace the identity-management piece provided by QSSI, according to documents given to a House panel. But work on that solution has stopped, according to a person familiar with the project. 
 
 Additional problems are now showing up in the shopping and enrollment parts of the process, applications that are largely the responsibility of CGI, the person said. Those issues would have shown up earlier if testing had been done sooner, the person said. 
 
 CGI built the shopping and enrollment applications to accommodate 60,000 users at the same time. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park has said that the government expected HealthCare.gov to draw 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users but that the site was overwhelmed by up to five times as many users in the first week. 
 
 In a statement, CGI said its teams, along with the CMS and its other contractors, “are working around the clock toward the improvement of HealthCare.gov, a system that is complex, ambitious and unprecedented. We remain confident in our ability to deliver continuous improvement in system performance and a more positive user experience.” 
 
 Delay the mandate? 
 
 White House officials said Monday that it was premature to talk about delaying the individual mandate for those who did not obtain insurance because of enrollment problems. Press secretary Jay Carney said the law already provides a way of removing the tax penalty for those who could not sign up for coverage. 
 
 “The issue is, do you have access to affordable health insurance? And the individual responsibility provision is there for those individuals who, even though they have access to affordable health insurance, do not purchase it and therefore are held responsible for that,” he said. “The law addresses that as written.” 
 
 Juliet Eilperin, Amy Goldstein, Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar contributed to this report.
– Good news for procrastinators: Americans will now have an extra month and a half to get health insurance before facing a penalty under ObamaCare, meaning they won't face a fine if they sign up for a plan by March 31. The six-week delay (a change of tune for the White House) isn't because of website difficulties, but because people weren't certain when the penalty came into effect, officials tell the Washington Post. It hadn't been clear whether Americans simply had to sign up for a plan before the penalty took effect, or whether their coverage itself had to begin by that date, the Post and MarketWatch explain. Because of the way health insurance is processed, Americans would have needed to apply by Feb. 15 for coverage to kick in March 31; now, people won't be penalized as long as they've signed up by March 31, in which case their coverage would start May 1. Meanwhile, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is preparing for hearings on website issues beginning today. Four contractors will testify; Kathleen Sebelius will do the same next Wednesday. CGI Federal handled the lion's share of the project, and has already acknowledged some responsibility for the problems in a letter to lawmakers—but it asserted that the health department agency Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was ultimately responsible for the site's "end-to-end performance"; it also points the finger at contractor Quality Software Services for registration problems that have now been fixed. QSS says it's not the only one to blame. An insurance industry source tells CNN that "top health insurers" knew full well about the website's flaws before it launched.