The Obamacare Debacle: It’s Everyone Else’s Fault

As the Congressional hearing, to apportion blame for the farce that Obamacare has already become, gathers steam the overwhelming theme from the four witnesses is "it's not our fault," and as much as the Congressmen dive deeply into the process, the more it is clear that the left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing in yet another government-funded SNAFU. The entire discussion can be summed up by CGI's comments that "our portion of the application worked as designed." Indeed, all of the contractors point the finger back at the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid as responsible for "end to end testing," and ultimately the #fail.

Live Coverage via C-SPAN (click image for link)

Written statements from the 4 contractors:

Via WSJ,

According to prepared testimony, CGI Federal, the lead contractor for HealthCare.gov, will say the federal agency in charge of the project was "the ultimate responsible party for the end-to-end performance of the overall" health exchange.

…

CGI also said its system passed eight technical reviews before going live and that problems came instead from a system designed by another contractor, UnitedHealth Group Inc 's Optum unit, which verifies users' identities. That "created a bottleneck that prevented the vast majority of users from accessing" the exchange, according to testimony of Cheryl Campbell, a senior vice president at CGI Federal.

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Committee Chairman Fred Upton of Michigan asks the contractors if they knew the site would have “crippling problems.” CGI’s Campbell says that “our portion of the application worked as designed” and repeated that “end-to-end testing was the responsibility of the (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid).”

“We anticipate that people will be able to enroll in the time that is allotted,” said CGI’s Campbell (which is Dec. 15 if you want insurance on Jan. 1). “As painful as it sounds, I know it’s a difficult system, but the system is working.”

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In summation, it seems that the following sums it up all too poerfectly…

“If there was a silver bullet to answer that question, I would give it to you,” says CGI’s Campbell. “It’s the end-to-end aspect that is a challenge.”

In other words, whoever was running the overall project was asleep at the wheel…