States retaliate against ObamaCare website developers, halt payments

Several states that paid millions to set up ObamaCare exchange websites but got error-plagued systems in return are starting to fight back, halting payments to the contractors and weighing legal options. 

The same contractor that shouldered a large part of the blame for botching the federal HealthCare.gov is also under fire at the state level, where the company had an array of contracts to set up local ObamaCare exchange sites. CGI Group is facing angry officials in Massachusetts and Vermont who are cutting off payments in retaliation for widespread website problems. 

Massachusetts -- whose government was one of the staunchest supporters of ObamaCare, and whose health plan arguably was the model for the law -- is refusing to pay any more until a working website is delivered. 

A spokesman for the Massachusetts exchange told FoxNews.com that CGI's system is "far from where it needs to be" and the state will apply "nonstop pressure" to fix the problems. 

Spokesman Jason Lefferts explained that while people who are not seeking subsidies can apply online, the system still can't properly calculate subsidies for those who are. The state, then, had to create an alternate system to send those individuals additional paperwork with information about subsidies and plans. Plus, the site continues to experience error messages and log-in issues, among other problems. 

Massachusetts has paid $11 million of its $69 million contract. 

Vermont, too, is withholding $5.1 million to CGI over its failure to meet deadlines, according to a report in the Boston Globe. 

Via: Fox News Politics

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ObamaCare Contractor Linked To 20 Troubled Government Projects

The lead contractor on the dysfunctional Obamacare website is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects — including a costly and troubled effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, The Washington Post reported Friday.

 

CGI Federal, the main Web site developer for HealthCare.gov, entered the U.S. government market a decade ago when its parent company purchased American Management Systems — and more than 100 ex-AMS employees are now senior executives or consultants for CGI Federal, the Post reported.

A year before CGI Group acquired AMS in 2004, AMS settled a lawsuit brought by the head of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which had hired the company to upgrade the agency’s computer system.

Via: Newsmax

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Government awards more contracts to company that created glitchy ObamaCare website

CGI Federal Inc, the company that created large parts of the error-plagued ObamaCare exchange website, which it says it is scrambling to fix, has recently been awarded several other government contracts.

Since the ObamaCare exchange website launched on Oct. 1, government officials have signed at least five different agreements with CGI totaling $7 million, according to USASpending.gov, a government website that lists government contracts. The contracts were for computer and software development at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

One contract, for instance, was signed Oct. 19 by Department of Commerce officials that gives CGI Federal $266,164 to provide "IT and Telecom Systems Development" for the Patent Office.

“From our perspective . . . the system is working."

- Cheryl Campbell, CGI Federal's senior vice president

The Commerce Department did not respond to inquiries from FoxNews.com about why they made the deal.

But CGI Federal defended that contract, saying the contract signing this month was essentially a technicality and an extension of an existing contract.

“CGI continues to deliver technology services and support under an existing contract agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Patent and Trademark Office,” Linda Odorisio, Vice President of Communications for CGI, told FoxNews.com.

Via: Fox News

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DEMOCRATS WANT REFUND FROM CONTRACTORS THAT BUILT OBAMACARE WEBSITE

Five Democrat representatives are asking the Obama administration to seek a refund from the company that built Healthcare.gov—"a website which has failed to work for most people trying to sign on for health insurance."

According to The Hill, Reps. Ron Barber (D-AZ), William Enyart (D-IL), Pete Gallego (D-TX), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and Filemon Vela (D-TX) made this request through a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

In the letter, they asked the administration to see if "CGI Federal and/or any other company involved in the construction of the website... violated the terms of its agreement or is in constructive breach of the contract." They say the administration "must hold the contractors accountable for their unsatisfactory work."

The letter was released for the public on October 28, one day before the House of Representatives begins hearings "on the failed Obamacare rollout." 

On October 29, the Ways and Means Committee "will meet with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner," and on October 30, the Energy and Commerce Committee "will hear from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius."

Via: Breitbart

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Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998

George Schindler, the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract.

As reported by the Washington Examiner in early October, the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI’s bid for the Obamacare account. CGI was one of 16 companies qualified under the Bush administration to provide certain tech services to the federal government. A senior vice president for the company testified this week before The House Committee on Energy and Commerce that four companies submitted bids, but did not name those companies or explain why only CGI’s bid was considered.

On the government end, construction of the disastrous Healthcare.gov website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of longtime failed website-builder Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services.

Update: The Daily Caller repeatedly contacted CGI Federal for comment. After publication of this article, the company responded that there would be “nothing coming out of CGI for the record or otherwise today.” The company did however insist that The Daily Caller include a reference to vice president Cheryl Campbell’s House testimony. This has been included as a courtesy to the company.

Via: Daily Caller

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Company behind Obamacare website in charge of nearly $2 billion in Sandy relief

CGI Federal Inc., the mastermind behind healthcare.gov, is assisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the distribution of $1.7 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy.

In a memo obtained by FreedomWorks titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.,” CGI Federal is tasked with implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they are asked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, an assistance program that had recently obtained $1.7 billion.

Item five of the meeting agenda reads:

Mr. Nelson presented that the State received a $1.7 billion allocation in CDBG Disaster Recovery aid from HUD to aid impacted businesses and residences.  He stated that the State’s Action Plan was approved on April 26, 2013 and HTFC is currently in a phase of implementing the program.  He stated that in this phase, the corporation needs to stand-up its recovery programs as soon as possible to deliver critical resources, and in order to do so, the corporation requires immediate access to consultant services to assist in policy and procedure development, training, surge capacity, and call center assistance, and stated that CGI Federal Inc. could provide such services.

The resolution was passed and scheduled to “take effect immediately.”

The Associated Press revealed Tuesday that a mere $700 million of the $60 billion federal aid package – 1.2 percent of the total funds – has been given to victims of super storm Sandy.

Nearly a year after the devastating storm, a majority of the 24,000 families that have requested monetary assistance have yet to receive a penny from the federal aid package.

Via: Daily Caller

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Waxman: I Logged Onto Healthcare.gov on My iPad During Hearing So It’s All Good

The ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee downplayed the mounting concerns about the efficacy and integrity of the Healthcare.gov website because he was able to log on while fiddling around on his mobile device during today’s hearing.

Contractors including CGI Federal appeared before the committee today to answer questions about the failure of the Obamacare exchange website, but no administration officials testified.

“We are disappointed that the system is not in place and running the way we envisioned. But the contractors have given us assurances that they think everything will be every day better to the point where the deadline can be met for people to sign up, choose a health care plan in time for it to go into effect January 1. The absolute deadline for that to happen is December 15th,” the top Democrat on the committee, Henry Waxman (Calif.), told reporters.

“I think we need to keep in mind that many people already have been able to get their health care plan under the exchange — under the marketplace — under the federal and state marketplaces. And that many people are anxious to get health insurance. And we ought to make sure that it’s working, and not take the approach that some of my colleagues have taken: ‘If it’s not working now, we ought to abolish the whole system.’ Of course, they’ve been against it from the very first day, and wanted to abolish it, and even close out the government to try to eliminate the Affordable Health Care plan,” he continued.

“But we got to stay with it and make sure it’s done. And I was encouraged by the testimony that they feel that they can beat this deadline — absolutely deadline in December 15th — and that people can try now. Because many people are getting through.”

Waxman noted that he went on his iPad during the hearing “and I was able to access healthcare.gov.”

“And I told them I wanted to look at the different plans. They asked where I lived, and I said it was in California, so they referred me to Covered California. And I went on that. And in the course of 10 minutes, I was looking at the various health plans that were available to my constituents,” he said.

His experience was brought up by other Democrats in defense of the exchanges.

Via: PJ Media

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Report: Final Cost of Obamacare Website Tops $1 Billion

BACK UP THE BRINKS TRUCK!!!

The principal contractors responsible for the federal government's troubled health insurance website say the Obama administration shares much of the responsibility for snags that have crippled the system.

Executives of CGI Federal, which built the federal HealthCare.gov website serving 36 states, and QSSI, which designed the part that verifies applicants' income and other personal details, testified Thursday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Meanwhile, figures released Thursday say the total cost of the deeply flawed website and healthcare exchange has topped $1 billion, according to a devastating new report by a widely respected government analyst.

Editor's Note: 22 Hidden Taxes and Fees Set to Hit You With Obamacare. Read the Guide to Protect Yourself. 

How? A surge in government spending on the Obamacare exchanges before they went live pushed the price paid to top government contractors over the $1 billion mark, The Hill reported, quoting the new study.

The report released Thursday by Bloomberg Government analyst Peter Gosselin says that federal spending ramped up in the months leading up to Oct. 1, with $352 million of the $1 billion in federal contracts to the top 10 Obamacare contractors awarded during this time.

"In a typical IT project, spending ramps up to a peak, then trails off during the final phase," Gosselin wrote.

This is a huge increase from the price tag usually associated the Affordable Care Act rollout: $394 million. That came from a Government Accountability Office report.

But Gosselin argues that the GAO study was too narrowly focused. He expanded his search of a federal contractor databases to include all awards where the acronym "ACA" or other related words and phrases appeared.

Via: Newsmax

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Healthcare.gov Hearings … Final Testing Not Done Till Last Two Weeks In September.. Cannot Tell Congress How Many Users Have Accessed Site Due To Contract With CMS

11:35am – Henry Chow from CMS made decision to force citizens to register in order to see plan prices.

11:31am – Schakowsky accuses Republicans of “Congressional Malpractice”

11:18am – CGI Federal cannot provide information on how many users have accessed the website because their contract with CMS prohibits them.

11:10am – Ms Degette – “Privacy concerns about website are a specter, privacy doesn’t matter since no HIPA information is passed to the website”

11:03am – End-to-end testing (the complete website) did not occur till the last two weeks in September ….

11:01am – It appears that CMS has privacy agreements with contractors to not disclose portions of the process, data and source code?

11:00am – Ms Campbell: More problems have come up, working on fixes

10:54am – Mr Slavitt: We will take complete accountability for any and all failures of Healthcare.gov which result from our products.

10:53am – Ms Campbell: The failures of healthcare.gov are more than just CGI federal’s problem.  Multiple components failed.

10:51am – Website locked up and crashed after 2,000 users simultaneously connected to it to apply.

10:48am – Engel: Even if a program gets off to a rocky start it does not mean we have to jump to conclusions about it’s long-term success; compares ACA failures to early failures of Medicare Part-D expansion.

Via: Weasel Zippers

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Contractor behind HealthCare.gov to testify extra testing could not have saved site

A top executive with CGI Federal, one of the contractors paid millions to create the ObamaCare website, says “no amount of testing” could have prevented the site’s problem-plagued start.

Senior Vice President Cheryl Campbell’s remarks are part of prepared testimony she will give before a Republican-led House hearing Thursday on the insurance-marketplace site. They also appear to challenge new claims by the administration that a lack of adequate testing was part of the problem.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing is the first since the site’s disastrous Oct. 1  launch -- marked by crashes, slow response times and its inability to let customers make purchases.

Several contractors are set to testify Thursday, and will likely face tough questioning from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, though prepared testimony indicates the witnesses may try to spread the blame around -- including to government officials overseeing the project. 

Prepared testimony from contractor Optum/QSSI blamed in part a "late decision" to require customers to register before browsing for insurance, which could have helped overwhelm the registration system.

Via: Fox News

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Red Flags? Company behind ObamaCare site has checkered past

While the company behind the dysfunctional HealthCare.gov was virtually unknown to the American public until this month, critics say the Obama administration should have known this multi-billion-dollar firm had a checkered history with other government contracts.

In projects stretching from Canada to Hawaii, parent company CGI Group and its subsidiaries ran into complaints about its performance. And this was while, and in some cases before, CGI Federal was paid millions, along with other contractors, to create the ObamaCare website. 

"The morning I heard CGI was behind [Healthcare.gov], I said, my God, no wonder that thing doesn't work," said James Bagnola, a Texas-based corporate consultant who was hired by the Hawaii Department of Taxation (DOTAX) in 2008. 

CGI Technologies and Solutions, Inc., another subsidiary, had been responsible for overhauling the IT systems for the Hawaii tax department, and then, developing its new delinquent tax collection services. Not only was the software and implementation problematic, but the second contract, signed in 2009, paid CGI millions for work it did not complete, according to a state audit completed in 2010 on the matter. 

Via: Fox News

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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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Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two; Update: Wasn’t tested until days before launch?

Via Lachlan Markay and Ace, who calls it “Nixonian.” This is the rare Hot Air item that might actually make liberals angrier at the White House than conservatives. If you’d staked your party’s credibility on realizing the utopian dream of universal health care only to have Obama deliver this fartburger, you’d be furious. Why anyone on either side still wants Sebelius in charge, I have no idea.

Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Very important to understand: Between this and the fact that HHS deliberately hid the price of insurance behind a reg wall on Healthcare.gov to reduce “rate shock,” the grand takeaway about the website’s failure is that O and his team made it much worse than it needed to be because they were terrified of transparency. And the reason they were terrified of transparency, both in the case of hiding the cost of the premiums from web users and hiding the site’s architectural problems from contractors who might be hauled before Congress, is because they know they’ve delivered a bad product. Put the premiums on the front page and the public, expecting “affordable care,” would recoil at the truth. Put the contractors at the witness table before Issa’s committee and the public, expecting that the government would “fix” health care, would recoil upon discovering that they can’t even build a website with three years’ lead time.

I don’t know what’s more amazing, that they’d place their own political comfort above creating a smoother user experience for the uninsured or that they somehow didn’t realize that a botched rollout on October 1 would be far more embarrassing than contractors talking to Republicans under oath. Or … would it? What was HHS so worried that outside contractors would tell the GOP that they preferred to risk total chaos on the exchanges during launch month instead?

Via: Hot Air

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As Obamacare Tech Woes Mounted, Contractor Payments Soared

As U.S. officials warned that the technology behind Obamacare might not be ready to launch on Oct. 1, the administration was pouring tens of millions of dollars more than it had planned into the federal website meant to enroll Americans in the biggest new social program since the 1960s.


A Reuters review of government documents shows that the contract to build the federal Healthcare.gov online insurance website - key to President Barack Obama's signature healthcare reform - tripled in potential total value to nearly $292 million as new money was assigned to the work beginning in April this year.

The increase coincided with warnings from federal and state officials that the information technology underlying the online marketplaces, or exchanges, where people could buy Obamacare health insurance was in trouble.

In March, Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the lead Obamacare agency, said at an insurance-industry meeting that he was "pretty nervous" about the exchanges being ready by Oct. 1, adding, "let's just make sure it's not a third-world experience." 

At the same event, his colleague Gary Cohen said, "Everyone recognizes that day one will not be perfect."

The contract to build Healthcare.gov, issued to the CGI Federal unit of Montreal-based CGI Group, has come under scrutiny after the site, offering new subsidized health insurance in 36 states, stalled within minutes of its Oct. 1 launch, leaving millions of Americans unable to create accounts or shop for plans.

In its third week of operations, the website continues to experience problems, which government officials say they are working day and night to repair. Even allies of the Obama administration have been highly critical, with former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs calling it "excruciatingly embarrassing" and calling for "some people" to be fired.

Via: Newsmax

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