Sebelius: Obamacare's Exchange Website Needed Six Years of Development, Not Two

For people who have been following the story closely, it’s been clear for months that Obamacare’s exchanges were not ready to go live on October 1, and that their implementation needed to be delayed. The Obama administration insisted otherwise, claiming that everything was hunky-dory, and that reports to the contrary were simply the work of partisan saboteurs. But earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted the truth. “We didn’t have enough testing…for a very complicated project,” she conceded to the Wall Street Journal. The exchanges needed five years of construction and one year of testing, and instead had only “two years [of construction] and almost no testing.” That leaves us with an obvious question: Why, then, did Sebelius insist on rolling out the exchanges four years ahead of time?

White House forced CMS to go forward despite concerns

The answer may be that she was under direct instructions from the White House. According to a letter sent to White House officials by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, CGI Federal—one of the key contractors involved in the project—said that officials with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the government agency tasked with running the exchanges, “constantly mentioned the ‘White House’ when discussing matters with CGI. For example, CGI officials told Committee staff that the ability to shop for health insurance without registering for an account—a central design feature of the health insurance exchange—was removed ‘in late August or early September.’”

Back in January, CGI representatives told the committee that they didn’t think that “the website would be operational before the October 1, 2013 deadline” because there was a “lack of coordination and an abundance of confusion between stakeholders involved in setting up the website,” and felt that they needed “more direction on ‘budgetary and project governance.’”

Testing of website only began 5 days before launch

Lena Sun and Scott Wilson of the Washington Post report that before the exchanges were set to launch, CMS invited a group of health insurers to knock the tires of the website. “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.”

Incredibly, by September 26—five days before the website was set to launch—there had not been a single test as to whether or not an individual could “complete the [enrollment] 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.”

They finally did test the website after September 26. “It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously.” This is a website, remember, that is supposed to eventually serve more than 15 million people.

Who made the call to launch on Oct. 1 despite the problems?

So, Kathleen Sebelius now says that the site needed a year of testing, but she only had five days. So what happened?

Congressional Republicans have been trying for quite some time to get Sebelius up to the Hill to respond to concerns that the exchanges weren’t ready. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) notes that, since August, he has asked Sebelius on four occasions—August 15, August 22, September 10, and October 22—to testify or provide information as to the exchanges’ progress. He has been rebuffed each time. “The American people have a right to know how HHS is spending their money,” says Ryan.

It does now appear that Marilyn Tavenner, head of CMS, will testify before the House Ways & Means Committee on October 29. Sebelius, it looks like, will do the same before the House Energy & Commerce Committee on October 30.

Here’s what Congress needs to know. Was it Sebelius’ decision to plow ahead, despite the fact that the site couldn’t handle the traffic? Or did she recommend a delay to the President, only to have President Obama demand that she launch the website on October 1 regardless of the problems? And why is Sebelius only now admitting that the website needed six years of development instead of two?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapot...eded-six-years-of-development-instead-of-two/

 

FIVE YEARS? WTF? Well, it is the government, but jesus, 5 years to build a website? All these f'n morons had to do was call in any one of a number of insurance companies and use theirs as a template. Fucking project shouldn't take a month, especially with a open ended bank account. OH wait, that just might be the problem. The bottomless money pit know as the government. Takes anyone else a month and a couple million bucks, will take Uncle Sugar 5 years and billions of dollars, all to end up with something a kid with an EBAY store would laugh at.

 

Not surprising given the perpetual incompetence of our federal bureaucrats.

I'm told the FAA has projects going that are a decade + behind schedule and Billions over budget. All they had to do was farm it out to the private sector.

 

This has become non stop entertainment. First, the humiliation Sebelius experienced on the Jon Stewart show. Next, it was reported that she couldn't testify in front of Congress, BUT she did have time for some Democratic boozefest in MA (with Chris Matthews to attend).

Now, it's some type of hail mary to keep her career from nosediving into the abyss. Each day another article emerges that basically says there isn't any reasonable way of fixing this system "on the fly". If they took it offline, it would still be several months...with this thing "up and running", forget about it.

The best part are all the batshit crazy comments by the apologists. Some of the more extreme idiots truly believe that the "teabaggers", as they call them, were busy hacking the site for a few weeks. I suppose that they will have to come up with some new pile of shit excuse for the next few months.

I suspect "raycism" will be tied into the next bundle of blame shifting.

 

Taking those projections at face value...with the site "online", they won't be able to finish the thing by 2015.

 

Would it have anything to do with the fact that the prez is a nitwit?

Since he's so married to this thing, you'd think he would have made SURE the right people were in control.

Hey, you voted for him....twice.

 

The prez is the leader of the "hopium" cartel, and business is good. The pitch is, this don't work worth a shit, but someday it might. Sells like candy to a 3 year old.

 

My guess is the exchanges will be scrapped in favor of some shit wherein people have to waste days waiting in some offices staffed with Black Democrat voters to get signed up.

Democrats need those Black votes like crack whores need rocks and johns, they will sense that this crisis is an opportunity to create some "jobs"... it will be pitched as temporary...

 

The circus continues...

Healthcare.gov Contractors Blame Obama Administration For Website Misery
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/h...blame-obama-administration-for-website-misery