ObamaCare website won’t be fixed for a month

WASHINGTON — The White House is handing over the job of overseeing repairs on the botched ObamaCare Web site to a federal contractor — and a top administration official predicted the work would be finished next month.

“By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” promised Jeffrey Zients, former head of the Office of Management and Budget and the official brought in to ensure the job is finished without further hitches.

“The HealthCare.gov site is fixable. It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed,” Zients told reporters Friday.

The private reinforcements were sent in after the federal Centers for Medicare Services, which had been assigned overall oversight of the program, badly botched it.

Contractors testified that they didn’t conduct full testing until just a few weeks before the Oct. 1 launch, leaving thousands of frustrated applicants around the country unable to sign in.

In some states, such as Oregon, not a single uninsured person has signed up for coverage to date.

QSSI Inc., which officials said did a good job in building the site’s data hub, was named the new “general contractor” overseeing the fixes.

The firm has already been paid $85 million.

The White House has refused to say what other companies have joined President Obama’s “tech surge,” saying only that “new eyes” are looking at the problems.

At a congressional hearing this week, Andrew Slavitt, a vice president of QSSI, said the company had warned government officials that more time was needed to get out the kinks and was ignored.

“We made everyone aware of the risks that we saw,” Slavitt testified,

According to its Web site, the firm has done work for federal agencies ranging from the postal service to Homeland Security.

On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters in Texas, where she watched people struggle to sign up, that she was caught off guard by the turn of events.

“I didn’t realize it wouldn’t be operating optimally before the launch. We knew if we had another six months, we’d probably test further,” she said.

Earlier this week, Sebelius said Obama also didn’t know about the problems in advance.

The head of the Centers for Medicare Services, Marilyn Tavenner, got bipartisan rave reviews during her Senate confirmation hearing this spring.

She revealed on her financial disclosure forms that she is getting a $163,000 annual pension for life from her former company, Hospital Corp. of America, a firm whose profits have gone through the roof under ObamaCare.

The news about the Web site comes amid growing signs of political nervousness among Democrats. Ten Senate Democrats have signed on to a letter urging the administration to extend the enrollment deadline because of the snafus.



http://nypost.com/2013/10/26/pledge-to-fix-obamacare-site-in-a-month/

Why wasn't obama on top of this? He must have taken it for granted that somebody else was going to "make it happen". This is a program named after obama. obamacare is obama's legacy. It will be remembered. Yup! Remembered as the big failure it is and for obama shutting down our government for THIS??!

Could he be getting a kickback from somebody too? O-the big failure.

fshnski wrote:"...Why wasn't obama on top of this...?"

Dunno...

 

The Medicare program only took weeks to set up—using postcards!

A data center critical for allowing uninsured Americans to buy health coverage under President Barack Obama's healthcare law went down on Sunday, the U.S. government said, in the latest problem for the "Obamacare'' rollout.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Connecticut officials about the outage and gave no indication of when the data services hub would be functioning again, said a spokeswoman for Access Health CT, the Connecticut exchange.

This might be called schadenfreude.

 

This might be called schadenfreude.


Isn't that from the Sound of Music?

It's too bad the Republican governors were too stubborn to let their states set up exchanges:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/how-kentucky-built-the-country-s-best-obamacare-website

States like Kentucky will get Obamacare over the top! When citizens in Tea Party states see how well it is working in Kentucky they'll pressure their own governors to follow suit!

Now it's all the State's fault. Who are the Democrats going to blame next? Counties?

News Buzzard wrote:It's too bad the Republican governors were too stubborn to let their states set up exchanges:

Republican Governors know how to manage—Democrat Governors know how to demagogue.