House Republicans will probe botched launch of Obamacare

WASHINGTON — Republicans in the House of Representatives are making plans to investigate the disastrous Oct. 1 launch of the federal health insurance marketplace established under Obamacare.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has asked Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the federal contractors involved in the rollout to explain why things have gone so badly after their earlier testimony indicated that the marketplace information technology would run smoothly.

The federal marketplace, Healthcare.gov, was supposed to provide a one-stop site for users in 36 states to browse, compare and enroll in qualified health plans.

But millions of users and numerous software problems overwhelmed the site shortly after the enrollment period for 2014 coverage began. In subsequent days, the site was shut down temporarily for repairs, which have continued since the problems first surfaced.

Two weeks later, site navigation has improved but delays and malfunctions continue to dog the system, making it difficult for users to establish personal accounts and obtain federal subsidies to offset the cost of coverage.

Nearly 15 million people had visited the site as of last Friday, but the Department of Health and Human Services won’t release enrollment figures until November.

In a Sept. 10 subcommittee hearing, Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president at CGI Federal, which designed and developed the federal insurance marketplace, testified that her company was confident that qualified individuals “could begin enrolling in coverage when the initial enrollment period begins on October 1.”

Michael Finkel, an executive vice president of Quality Software Services Inc., the company that wrote the software code for the so-called data services hub, offered similar testimony at the hearing. The hub routes information from the marketplace to various federal databases.

Via: McClatchyDC

Continue Reading....

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/15/205461/house-republicans-will-probe-botched.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/15/205461/house-republicans-will-probe-botched.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/15/205461/house-republicans-will-probe-botched.html#storylink=cpy

Obama was looking for company with single-payer expertise

Was President Barack Obama aiming for a tech company well-versed in designing websites for a single-payer health system when he awarded the now glitch-riddled healthcare.gov contract to Canadian CGI?

Behind all the glitches, and at the heart of the utterly stalled healthcare.gov, that’s exactly what CGI is: the Canadian tech firm—Canada’s largest—that has provided to Canada’s single-payer health system.

Is that the dirty little secret hidden behind the public embarrassment that even after spending $93.7 million—a figure expected to double to correct—the Obama administration can’t get healthcare.gov up and running?

“CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary based in Fairfax, Va., was awarded a US$93.7-million contract over two years ago to help design and develop the federal insurance exchange.”

“The “CGI” in the parent company’s name stands for “Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique” in French, which roughly translates to “Information Systems and Management Consultants”.  However the firm offers another translation: “Consultants to Government and Industry”. (Washington Examiner, Oct. 4, 2013).

“The company is deeply embedded in Canada’s single-payer system.  CGI has provided IT services to the Canadian Ministries of Health in Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Saskatchewan, as well as the the national health provider, Health Canada.”

3

And that information has been available on CGI’s Canadian website all along.

Like ‘The Big Engine That Couldn’t’, healthcare.gov is wearing the ‘System Failure’ sign two weeks after its launch.

Those blankety-blank glitches that keep healthcare.gov in goof mode are not the fault of George W. Bush.  Now it’s Canada’s fault.  That’s the Obama administration’s story and they’re sticking to it.

Via: Canada Free Press

Continue Reading....

[VIDEO] Obama praised company that helped build Obamacare website on ’08 campaign trail

The federal contractor at the center of the Obamacare health-care exchange debacle, CGI Federal, received a hearty endorsement from Barack Obama while he was running for president back in 2008.

During a Sept. 9, 2008 speech to a crowd in Lebanon, Va., then-presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama praised CGI Federal’s ability to create new jobs for Americans as the result of investment in broadband Internet infrastructure.

“You know, I just had a wonderful meeting with a company called CGI that just opened up — Mark Warner talked about it talked about the company in his convention speech — which has located here 300 new jobs in high-tech industries. And part of the reason is is because the state of Virginia built out the broadband lines that allowed them to locate here.”

A financial relationship between CGI Federal — a subsidiary of the Montreal-based information technology company CGI Group — and the U.S. government had already existed even during President George W. Bush’s administration, but reports indicate that relationship improved tremendously since Obama took office.

The Washington Examiner reported on Sunday that the federal government reviewed only CGI Federal’s bid to build the health-care exchange.

CGI Federal did not return The Daily Caller’s request for comment by the time of publication.

The Daily Caller

Continue Reading....

We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.

The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose. The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the “single digits,” according to the Washington Post.

We, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

The reason for this nationwide headache apparently stems from poorly written code, which buckled under the heavy influx of traffic that its engineers and administrators should have seen coming. But the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

The exact cost to build Healthcare.gov, according to U.S. government records, appears to have been $634,320,919, which we paid to a company you probably never heard of: CGI Federal.  The company originally won the contract back in 2011, but at that time, the cost was expected to run “up to” $93.7 million – still a chunk of change, but nothing near where it ended up.

Via: DIgital Trends

Continue Reading.....