Health What?

Canadian Company Receives Only Bid for ObamaCare Website

  

Bubba Atkinson | On 15, Oct 2013

Whether you love or lament ObamaCare, it’s clear that the execution of it has been lackluster to say the least. Consistent reports of Americans having a difficult time signing up on Healthcare.gov have poured in, and even major news media outlets that were attempting to create accounts failed miserably before morphing the story into a ‘Let’s see how long this thing will really take’ type of feature, just like CNN recently did.

But why has the government struggled so much with the implementation and execution of Obama’s beloved signature legislation?

Here’s an idea for starters: According to a senior watchdog reporter at the Washington Examiner, federal officials only considered one firm to design the ObamaCare exchange website instead of putting the task up for competitive bidding.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance…

Both USAspending.gov, which tracks federal spending, and the FFATA Subaward Reporting System, which specifically tracks contracts, refer to CGI as the lone bidder for the Obamacare website design award.

But don’t pin this just on Obama’s administration just yet; CGI was qualified in 2007 by HHS during George W. Bush’s presidency to “deliver, without public competition, a variety of hardware, software and communication products and services.”

This isn’t Republican or Democrat – it’s just stupid. If you own a business and need some contract work done for you, you go out and find the best value. But instead of doing that, our government just goes to the first company it sees and hands them a contract worth an estimated $634 million.

This is nothing more than ineptitude on the part of the government. Anything less than a full investigation into how and why this happened is not sufficient. It’s time that our leaders are held accountable by reasonable and rational standards.

CNN was even critical of Healthcare.gov, publishing an article by Steven Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, who stated that “the federal government has never had a fantastic track record in dealing with technology products.”

The contractors building HealthCare.gov couldn’t control the budget or the timing for the regulations; those were the product of Washington politics. While there are apparent programming and design errors, it’s quite likely that most are the result of requirement changes rather than incompetence.

Say what you will about ObamaCare – there are both stories of success and failure – in this instance, the government as a whole just looks dumb. So many issues seem so very simple, but Washington’s ‘leaders’ continue to botch what is ultimately achievable. If they were a business, they would not even be taken seriously with the way they make decisions.

Which leads me to my strongest point: Should the size and scope of government really be expanding if they can’t even prove to effectively implement …a website?

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