October 28, 2013

The Real Scapegoat for the Obamacare Failure


The October 1 launch date for Obamacare has come and gone, and even liberals are now starting to acknowledge that the Obamacare rollout is a massive failure. And if the signature “achievement” of President Obama’s presidency — and his legacy — is at risk, this can only mean one thing: FIND A SCAPEGOAT!


Now, in the real world — that is, the private sector — when a project fails, responsibility lies at the feet of the person in charge of managing it. They call these people, surprisingly enough, “project managers.” Obamacare is brought to you by the good people at Health and Human Services (HHS), and that’s headed up by one Kathleen Sebelius. She isn’t expected to know how to code a website, but weekly status meetings aren’t too much to ask. As for Obama, call me crazy, but if my name is on something, I’m testing it a million times before it goes to the public. And certainly before I reassure the public it’s ready five days before go-live.


But somehow Sebelius and Obama aren’t accountable. This means the blame must be pinned on someone else. Most likely culprits? Republicans and/or the contractors hired to build the website.

Already we’re starting to see HHS head honcho Sebelius blame the GOP for somehow weaving the website’s woes. She said, “[Republican-led] House was determined to stop this anyway they possibly could … was not an ideal atmosphere.” Nowhere does Sebelius say exactly how the GOP’s magical determination could stop Obamacare with a Democrat-led Senate and Mr Obamacare himself in the White House. Apparently, Republicans are so powerful that just their ill-wishing about something thwarts it. The Party of Science believes the GOP can sabotage laws with voodoo dolls and mean thoughts.
Nevermind that Democrats wrote Obamacare. Democrats passed Obamacare. Democrats implemented Obamacare. And yet Republicans must share the blame for the failed rollout of Obamacare.  Logic!

What about the contractors? There are rumblings that Michelle Obama went to school with someone who runs CGI, the company that got over half-billion dollars and a no-bid contract to build HealthCare.gov. But there’s no evidence that they palled around the way, say, Obama did with Bill Ayers.  So the result is that my president spent $600 million, but all we got was a crappy website.

Let’s say that there is some connection between CGI and the White House. This may slow down the blame game for it to go there. But eventually, it may. And someone will need to explain how, after three years to set up a website, it can’t even allow user registration.
In defense of CGI and other contractors, it may not have been their fault. The White House didn’t publish rules and regulations needed to give directions to projects like the website until after the election.
Federal agencies are sitting on a pile of major health, environmental, and financial regulations that lobbyists, congressional staffers, and former administration officials say are being held back to avoid providing ammunition to Mitt Romney and other Republican critics.
So, instead of moving forward and meeting the October 1, 2013 deadline that was in the law, the Obama White House played politics with Obamacare and sandbagged Romney — and the ACA contractors — until after the voting public had gone to the polling booths. They’d rather hide the rules from political opponents than get the Obamacare exchanges and website set up on time. Priorities!

This means that the White House gave contractors less than a year to complete a project that required years to accomplish successfully. So when looking for a scapegoat for the Obamacare website, Obama need look no farther than the man they named this failure after.

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