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Obamacare contractors: Don’t blame us By: Jennifer Haberkorn and Jason Millman and Brett Norman October 23, 2013 05:19 PM EDT The Obamacare website contractors plan to tell Congress on Thursday that they are not to blame for the massive problems at HealthCare.gov and that they completed successful testing before the Oct. 1 launch. But, according to prepared testimony, the four contractors ran into unforeseen problems once open enrollment began. The testimony offers a slight glimpse into the problems that made the website all but unworkable — and warnings that the problems are far from over. Lawmakers are expected to press...

Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration’s showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors. As questions mount over the website’s failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government and not private...

Full Title: CNN: Blowing up HealthCare.Gov and starting over still looking like their best option, say more tech experts************************************************************* There’s a growing consensus on the mid- to late-November time frame by which the Obama administration really, really needs to have ObamaCare’s online portal running smoothly to avoid inducing more death-spiral risks and subsequent industry panic, and all of their plans for public outreach and directing people to call centers and whatnot is only going to get them so far.“Tech surge” or no tech surge, CNN reports that still more experts and computer engineers are piling on to the suggestion that...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican chairman of a key congressional oversight committee has asked Google, Microsoft and three other U.S. companies to provide details on their possible involvement in a "tech surge" aimed at fixing a website implementing President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made the request in a letter to Google, Microsoft, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Oracle and Expedia, committee spokeswoman Caitlin Carroll said. Issa, a relentless critic of the Obama administration, wants information on contacts the companies may have had with the White House about the Healthcare.gov website...

“My overall sense, right from day one, was it was created by people who had never created a commercial database application before," said FMS Software developer Luke Chung. Chung looked over the site and was stunned by the code and the cost - by some estimates, perhaps $200 million. Chung continued, “At $200 an hour, that would be a million man hours, 5,000 man years. I don't think they had time to use 5,000 man years. So I don't know where the money went. I don't know what these people were doing. There're not that many web pages. I don't...

".....In two of those cases, State Department officials said, the contract employees, who worked for Stanley Inc., a company based in Arlington, Va., that does computer work for the government, were fired. In one case, the employee was reprimanded and continues to be employed by the Analysis Corporation of McLean, Va. Mr. McCormack said Mr. McCain’s passport file was breached by the same employee who was reprimanded for breaching Mr. Obama’s file. "

".................The Canadian-owned company built the website, and in testimony from September 10, it told the skeptical House Energy and Commerce committee that things were going just great. To date, the FFM implementation has achieved all of its key milestones from the initial Architecture Review in October 2011 to Project Baseline Review in March 2012 and, most recently, the Operational Readiness Review in September 2013. Additionally, in April 2013, health insurers began submitting their plans to the system for review by CMS. Starting in August 2013, consumers were able to go into the system and register their accounts. At this time,...

CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government... CGI's contract was canceled in 2007 after a report by the Auditor General found that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was "significantly over budget" and that it had been plagued by delays. The Conservative government that took power in 2006 canceled CGI's gun registry contract, and eventually repealed the Canadian gun registry entirely. ... The failed gun registry was only one of CGI's many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts...

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said that President Obama is “frustrated” by snags in the Obamacare rollout. But how about American citizens who either are having trouble enrolling in Obamacare or are suffering from the shock of rising healthcare insurance premiums AND the size of their deductibles? The anecdotal stories of “sticker shock” are legion (for example, here is a story from New Jersey). And physicians in New York are howling as well. Of course, there are many winners in the Obamacare rollout. Some households will receive added benefits and healthcare benefits that they previously didn’t have. But the biggest winners...

The Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday it was bringing in outside help to resolve some of the technical woes that have beset the federally run insurance exchanges, which the agency acknowledged “has not lived up to the expectations of the American people.” “We are committed to doing better,” agency officials said in a blog post that also said that “our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve healthcare.gov.” Spokespeople for the agency didn’t immediately respond to questions seeking more...

A top Democratic senator said Sunday that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius will testify before Congress about the problem-plagued ObamaCare website, amid a growing call for her to accept requests to testify. “Ultimately, Secretary Sebelius will testify,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, told “Fox News Sunday.”

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said that President Obama is “frustrated” by snags in the Obamacare rollout. But how about American citizens who either are having trouble enrolling in Obamacare or are suffering from the shock of rising healthcare insurance premiums AND the size of their deductibles? The anecdotal stories of “sticker shock” are legion (for example, here is a story from New Jersey). And physicians in New York are howling as well. Of course, there are many winners in the Obamacare rollout. Some households will receive added benefits and healthcare benefits that they previously didn’t have. But the biggest winners...

Confirming our fears from a few days ago, the early numbers are in for Obamacare... and they are not good. Of course, listening to "bloggers" an be bad for your health, but it seems, very few of the million of "uninsured" have decided that it is as crucial as the "leader" has exclaimed. As Millard Brown Digital reports, fewer than 1% of those trying to register for health insurance under Obamacare have completed the enrollment process. The following inverted pyramid highlights the dismal reality of the Affordable Car Act so far...   

A fitting tribute to Obama and Sebelius, who helped wreck the Healthcare.gov site because hiding stuff was more important to them than getting it to work properly. Between this and the devastating USA Today piece calling for “total overhaul,” the official Hot Air pool on when O will announce he’s delaying ObamaCare is open for business. Having hundreds of thousands of people tearing their hair out in frustration at using his crappy site won’t shame him into pulling the plug, but the political embarrassment of his allies starting to back away from his big “achievement” might.

CGI Federal is the Canadian IT contractor responsible for creating most of the ObamaCare website. Tuesday, after describing the site as a "complete train wreck," the Washington Post took an in-depth look at the company -- its origins, track record, and how it landed the ObamaCare contract. It is all worth a read, but one staffer told the Post that the working environment at CGI is so awful today that "People are getting sick, fainting in conference calls." The healthcare.gov debacle has taken its toll on the working environment at CGI Federal's 10-story complex in Fairfax, Va., according to a...

It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the ( befuddled beast) that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress. The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary...

What the president heralds as his signature accomplishment is not only creating great domestic upheaval as a political and policy failure, it is also an immense American technological failure on display for the world to see. The American brand has been dealt some sharp blows under this administration. We are suffering from a weak economy, reeling from the recent embarrassing debacle over Syria’s chemical weapons, and we still haven’t brought anyone to justice over what happened in Benghazi. The world watched as our enemies protected junior nobody Edward Snowden when he handed over our secrets, and now the world is...

The Obamacare online exchanges have been met with several concerns since they launched at the beginning of the month, but a recent discovery may raise further fears about privacy under the health-care law. The Weekly Standard’s Jeryl Bier reports that during the process of creating an account, the website asks users if they accept the “Terms & Conditions,” which prohibit unauthorized attempts to upload information or change the site. But the website’s source code, which is not visible to users on the standard “Terms & Conditions” page, includes a warning that users should have “no reasonable expectation of privacy”:

The Spanish language website for the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, won't be available for online enrollment until the week of Oct. 21, officials said. Spanish speaking members of the community have been directed to the website Cuidadodesalud.gov as the Spanish language alternative to HealthCare.gov to enroll for insurance coverage. However, the website is not yet equipped with online enrollment tools, officials said. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services officials said the enrollment tools will launch when they celebrate a national Hispanic Week of Action during the week of Oct. 21 in order to ensure that Latinos in the...

… then Barack Obama’s hometown newspaper has news for you. The initial shock of the premium increases and the incompetent use of $94 million [see update] to create the world’s biggest 404 exchange are just the starting shocks of ObamaCare. Wait until people have to actually start using their new insurance, and perhaps the biggest surprise of all will be waiting: Adam Weldzius, a nurse practitioner, considers himself better informed than most when it comes to the inner workings of health insurance. But even he wasn’t prepared for the pocketbook hit he’ll face next year under President Barack Obama’s health...