OBAMACARE TECH FIRM TRIED, FAILED TO BUILD GUN REGISTRY IN CANADA

CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government, Breitbart News has learned. 

CGI's contract was canceled in 2007 after a report by the Auditor General found that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was "significantly over budget" and that it had been plagued by delays.

The Conservative government that took power in 2006 canceled CGI's gun registry contract, and eventually repealed the Canadian gun registry entirely. 

In another parallel to the Obamacare controversy in the United States, the gun registry had been passed in 1993 over vehement Conservative objections, and was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000, before finally being repealed in most of the country in 2012.

The failed gun registry was only one of CGI's many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts to build health care databases in the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick. Despite CGI's checkered record, the Obama administration awarded its U.S. subsidiary, CGI Federal, the $93.7 million contract to build healthcare.gov, part of $678 million in health care services contracts awarded to the company. 

Brian Lilley of Canada's Sun News reported Monday on CGI's history of failures, cost overruns, and conflicts of interest, including the gun registry: 

CGI was hired to make sure that the then-Liberal government's gun control program was efficient and high-tech. It never worked the way it should have. Was it bad programming or bad government decisions? The truth is, we don't know--we just got stuck with the bill.

The Canadian government spent $10 million to cancel the contract, on top of $81 million already spent--close to $100 million in U.S. dollars at the time. 

The U.S. does not have a gun registry, but one would be required, according to Breitbart News' AWR Hawkins, to implement the universal background checks that Democrats and the Obama administration tried to push through Congress earlier this year.

Via: Breitbart.com

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HealthCare.Gov Needs Five Million Code Lines Rewritten

Obamacare’s online exchanges have been riddled with problems since they came online three weeks ago, and those issues may continue for at least the next few weeks. Contractors said fixing the problems by the November 1 deadline set by the administration would be “unrealistic,” according to the New York Times.

From the sluggish websites to garbled enrollment information, the flaws require the extensive rewriting of code: “One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly,” theTimes reports — that’s out of a total of approximately 500 million lines of code, according to another expert. 

Others experts warned that some of the website’s problems are yet to come. One technical specialist involved in the repair effort said, “The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later.” 

Via: NRO

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Video Montage: HHS Chief Kathleen Sebelius Repeatedly Vows Obamacare Website Will Be Working On October 1st…

Via: Washington Examiner

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Obamacare website shows improvement, new problems emerge

(Reuters) - The Obama administration has made headway against an online bottleneck that jammed enrollment for the president's healthcare reform, but new technical problems greeted users on Monday, showing how difficult it will be to get consumers registered in time for insurance coverage to start January 1.

Three weeks after the launch of new health insurance plans under Obamacare, users were able to create accounts for themselves and begin the process of enrolling through the Healthcare.gov insurance marketplace, according to people aiding the sign-up effort.

But further into the process, error messages and other difficulties were apparent, leading to fresh frustrations for health insurers and nonprofit groups who want to help millions of uninsured Americans sign up for benefits as promised under President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law.

"We have seen progress every day," said Nasim Zahran of Miami's Borinquen Medical Health Care Centers, where hundreds of people are waiting to enroll in coverage.

"Today was the first day that we got all the way to the last screen. But then an error screen popped up saying the site would be down for 72 hours," Zahran said.

Healthcare.gov saw 14.6 million unique visits in its first 10 days, a larger-than-expected public response that raised hopes Obamacare would meet with strong enough demand in its first year.

But the site's limited ability to enroll consumers is becoming an increasing focus of Obamacare's Republican foes, who say the government was not ready to implement the law and should have delayed it.

Experts say the administration has until mid-November to iron out the problems or risk jeopardizing its goal of signing up 7 million people in the first year of the Obamacare marketplaces. The number includes 2.7 million healthy young adults whose participation will help offset the higher cost of insuring sicker and older beneficiaries.

Via: Reuters

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NYT and WaPo Unleash Devastating Takedowns of Obamacare: "These Are Not Glitches"

In March, Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace, told industry executives that he was deeply worried about the Web site’s debut. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” he told them.

Two weeks after the rollout, few would say his hopes were realized.

For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low.

“These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.’ ”

Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles.

Politics made things worse. To avoid giving ammunition to Republicans opposed to the project, the administration put off issuing several major rules until after last November’s elections. The Republican-controlled House blocked funds. More than 30 states refused to set up their own exchanges, requiring the federal government to vastly expand its project in unexpected ways.

Via: NYT

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OBAMACARE TECHNICAL PROBLEMS WORSEN

The Washington Post reports that the ObamaCare site problems are even worse than originally believed. It is not just the buyer-end of the ObamaCare website that is unworkable, so is the back end that is supposed to tell insurance providers who their new customers are. This might also explain why the White House is refusing to release to the media the number of ObamaCare enrollees: they just don't know.

The problems stem from a feature of the online marketplace’s computer system that is designed to send each insurer a daily report listing people who have just enrolled. According to several insurance industry officials, the reports are sometimes confusing and duplicative. In some cases, they show — correctly or not — that the same person enrolled and canceled several times on a single day.

The ability of consumers to sign up for a health plan, and the ability of the insurers to know who they are covering, is key to the success of the federal law that will for the first time require most Americans to have health insurance starting Jan. 1.

The only possible silver lining in this for the administration might be that the sporadic reports of the shockingly low number of enrollees are incorrect. More people might be signing up that what those reports suggest. Unfortunately for them, their insurance providers just don't know it.

What is especially unjust about all of this is that every American now lives under a government mandate to purchase health insurance or pay a hefty fine. The sign-up window to avoid the fine lasts only six months and already two weeks have been burnt up by a site that doesn't work (and reportedly cost $634 million). Still, the president is refusing to give the American people the same one-year delay he gave big business.

In the early days of the ObamaCare launch debacle, the Administration did its best to spin America by explaining that the sites were crashing due to the "luxury problem" of demand. Millions were hungering for ObamaCare and the sites couldn’t handle the traffic! Now that nearly two weeks have passed and the problems persist, not even a sympathetic media is buying it.

Via: Breitbart

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Healthcare.gov Links To Subsidy Calculator Made By DNC-Ally UPDATE: Calculations Are Based On Out Of Date Info?

Healthcare.gov, the website our federal government spent half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds in developing openly and transparently – evidently links to a private not-for-profit business to calculate insurance subsidies.

The page in question resides here and links to The Kaiser Family Foundation.  The interesting part of all of this is that the data culled from Kaiser Family Foundation is actually publicly available data.  So why didn’t Healthcare.gov just do this themselves?  Were they trying to save us tenth of a nickel?

Absolutely bizarre.

UPDATE:

A left of center blogger claims that the calculations made by this subsidy calculator aren’t even correct.  According to the author, they’re in fact tremendously outdated.

Via: Weasel Zippers

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Software, Design Defects Cripple Health-Care Website

Six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government acknowledged for the first time Sunday it needed to fix design and software problems that have kept customers from applying online for coverage.

The Obama administration said last week that an unanticipated surge of Web traffic caused most of the problems and was a sign of high demand by people seeking to buy coverage under the new law.

But federal officials said Sunday the online marketplace needed design changes, as well as more server capacity to improve efficiency on the federally run exchange that serves 36 states.

"We can do better and we are working around the clock to do so," said Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services. The government is making software and hardware changes to smooth the process of creating accounts needed to gain access to the marketplace, federal officials said.

The federal government acknowledged for the first time it needed to fix design and software problems that have kept customers from applying online for health-care coverage. Christopher Weaver reports on digits. Photo: Getty Images.

The website is troubled by coding problems and flaws in the architecture of the system, according to insurance-industry advisers, technical experts and people close to the development of the marketplace.

Among the technical problems thwarting consumers, according to some of those people, is the system to confirm the identities of enrollees. Troubles in the system are causing crashes as users try to create accounts, the first step before they can apply for coverage.

Via: Wall Street Journal

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