“Obamacare’s implementation in October 2013 came with the launch of HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance exchange.
Just six people successfully signed up for health insurance on HealthCare.gov on Oct. 1, 2013, because of massive glitches and failures with the site. In the months that followed the disastrous launch, the Republican-led House of Representatives held numerous hearings to determine why the Obama administration decided to launch the website.
The Department of Health and Human Services fired CGI Federal, which was originally tasked with building HealthCare.gov, after the website’s launch and signed a new contract with Accenture to rebuild the exchange.
Though the Obama administration hasn’t formally said how much HealthCare.gov cost the taxpayers, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said last May that the website cost $834 million. Similarly, a report from the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General put the cost of the exchange at $800 million.
An analysis by Bloomberg Government, though, put the total cost at $2.1 billion. Bloomberg Government took into account budgetary costs for the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies, as well as contracts reworked to pay for the website.” - In 5 Charts, How Obamacare Has Worked the Past 6 Years, daily signal.com, 03/23/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://dailysignal.com/2016/03/23/in-five-charts-how-obamacare-has-worked-past-six-years/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=saturday&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonu6rPdO%2FhmjTEU5z16u8pW6e%2Bhokz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMTcRhNL3YDBceEJhqyQJxPr3NLtQN191pRhLiDA%3D%3D
‘Amid the holiday season craziness, The Washington Post published an in-depth account of how a subsidiary of Canadian IT giant CGI Group won the contract to lead the design and testing of the HealthCare.gov website.
The article debunked rumors that cronyism motivated the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) September 2011 decision to award CGI Federal the $93.7 million contract. Instead, the Post found that the main culprit was CMS, which by its own admission “dropped the ball” on evaluating the company’s background.
Specifically, what CMS contracting officials overlooked and/or downplayed was that more than 100 of CGI’s employees came from Virginia-based IT company American Management Systems (AMS), which CGI acquired in 2004. According to the Post, AMS had mishandled at least 20 government IT projects, including one particularly well-publicized fiasco involving the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board’s $36 million overhaul of its recordkeeping system.
AMS’s questionable past performance on government contracts should have set off alarms in 2007, when CMS awarded CGI and 15 other companies an umbrella contract allowing them to bid on future CMS projects. In fact, a former CMS official told the Post that AMS’s track record “could well have knocked [CGI Federal] out of the competition, and probably should have.”’
‘The part of the Post story that really rankled the Project On Government Oversight is contained in this passage:
While it is unclear whether agency officials examined the AMS track record, former CMS officials said it probably would not have made much difference, because past performance has long been an overlooked component of federal contracting.’
- HealthCare.gov Debacle Reveals Flaws in Contractor Screening, pogo.org, 01/03/2013
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.pogo.org/blog/2014/01/healthcaregov-debacle-revelas-flaws-in-contractor-screening.html
H/T: Crony Chronicles
"When the realization of impending disaster finally hit government officials at the Aug. 27 meeting — just 34 days before the site went live — they threw out nearly 30 requirements, including the Spanish-language version of the site and a payment system for insurers to receive government subsidies for the policies they sold.
Even then, the system failed a test of only 500 simulated users in late September. Panicked, agency officials sent out an urgent order to almost double the system’s data capacity, technicians involved in the project have now confirmed. But the site was still down more than half the time in mid-October.
The acrimony between the Medicare agency and CGI had built steadily over the preceding months, the new interviews show. By late summer, teams of agency officials had parked themselves in CGI Federal’s headquarters in Herndon, Va., demanding on-the-spot reviews and demonstrations of new code that was never tested. Agency officials complained that CGI missed crucial deadlines and that it could not control other contractors, although the company said it had no power to do so.
CGI and other contractors complained of endlessly shifting requirements and a government decision-making process so cumbersome that it took weeks to resolve elementary questions, such as determining whether users should be required to provide Social Security numbers. Some CGI software engineers ultimately walked out, saying it was impossible to produce good work under such conditions.
“Cut corners, make date,” said one specialist, who like most of the people interviewed for this article would not allow his name to be used because the Obama administration has requested that all government officials and contractors involved keep their work confidential.” - Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash, NYT, 11/22/2013
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/tension-and-woes-before-health-website-crash.html?_r=0
'Republicans were relishing yet another Obamacare embarrassment Saturday after The Washington Post reported that the lead contractor for the federal health care website employs top executives from a troubled tech company responsible for massive failures on other government jobs.'
'HealthCare.gov has been plagued with glitches and technical problems, and new figures released by the Obama administration this week showed that only 27,000 Americans have made it all the way through the process to select insurance plans.
The Post reported that the parent of CGI Federal took over the troubled company, American Management Systems (AMS), but kept many of its executives, include the current and past presidents of CGI, its vice president for federal health care and its health IT leader.
AMS' technical failures included a tax system for Fairfax County, Va., and a project for the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which manages the 401(k) accounts of 4.6 million former and current federal employees, the newspaper reported. The company ended up paying $185 million to the state of Mississippi at one point after failing to deliver a new tax system.'
' "They did not provide us one working piece of software after almost six years,'' former Mississippi revenue commissioner Ed Buelow Jr. told the Post. "There were hundreds of errors. Nothing worked.'' ' - Report: HealthCare.gov contractor tied to troubled tech firm, USA Today, 11/16/2013
Link to entire article appears below:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/11/16/gop-obamacare-website-contractor/3614133/
