Sunday, October 27, 2013

It turns out that the biggest threat to Obamacare is the administration’s own incompetence.

ObamaCare: A Big-Gov Botch-Job Of Epic Proportions - AJ Strata

Truth be told, the industry leaders who worked pieces of ObamaCare were 100% right and forthcoming when they testified. They do NOT deserve blame for this fiasco. This mess is ALL on the government organization responsible for developing and launching Healthcare.gov.

NASA has the technical resources to perform these kinds of missions on a 3 year development cadence for the same amount of money HHS had to spend on ObamaCare. And NASA does this on many fronts.... So how is it we in the NASA world can build a satellite, its control center and its science data processing systems in three years (plus the website for the public to visit and see all the cool results) and HHS couldn’t launch a little website in the same time with the same money?

...This is not something you read in a book and then do.

HHS (and CMS specifically) failed because they tried to be something they were not.

They pretended to be a technology program Systems Engineer, Systems Integrator, Systems Test and Systems Operator. Where CMS got the idea they could do all this is beyond me.

And let’s be clear here – ObamaCare is NOT a large complex problem. It is not as complex as a dam, or a nuclear sub, or a fighter jet, or a suspension bridge, or a nuclear power plant, or a chemical processing plant, or a hospital, or an airport, or the power grid or… You get the point. It was a simple SW system with a web front end....

I read somewhere the orders to change direction in the last month regarding when applicants had to fill in their information and sign up was supposedly sent to a tester in one of the companies via some word of mouth.

Technically, this is ILLEGAL. The only change to federal development contracts must be through the contracting change process. The government has to issue a Change Request, the company has to bid the impact, the government has to authorize the change through a contract action. No industry engineer can take direction from ANYONE in the government of this magnitude without due process.

I guess CMS just gave the nation a glaring example of why this is the law of federal contracting. So dip-stick decisions like we saw here don’t blow 100′s of millions of taxpayer money because someone panics.
Apparently when CMS testifies next week, someone is going find themselves in deep trouble. Because whoever directed this is in trouble. And if there is no paper trail for the change, a company is going to get a black eye. I am betting there is a paper trail.