The government contract for the company that built the glitch-prone website for Obamacare has ballooned to three times its original cost, and some Republicans are demanding the resignation of the cabinet secretary who oversees it.Read the rest here.
Since its launch, on Oct. 1, the site has been plagued by crashes as Americans to try log on and enroll for health insurance. The Obama administration has conceded that the launch has been rockier than it had hoped.
The U.S. arm of a Canadian company, CGI, had the biggest role of the many contractors that worked on the rollout. It won the contract in October 2011. At the time, it had an estimated cost of up to $94 million. By May of this year, that cost ceiling had swelled to $292 million.
If the GOP had not gone off on their Thelma and Louise road trip they could have had a field day with stuff like this. They strike me as a party determined to always and everywhere seek new ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In the meantime, instead of wall to wall coverage of the train wreck that is Obamacare, all we are getting is endless discussion of how much the general public now loathes the GOP because of their idiotic efforts to hold the country, and to some degree the world, hostage to their political agenda.
2 comments:
Of course, this article gives a false impression of the actual cost. If I recall correctly, the CGI contract was just one of a slew of contracts awarded to build healthcare.gov which originally totalled over $600m. I would guess that this $200m overrun would be on top of that total.
The Shutdown happened because Obama refused to negotiate. The Republicans wanted to negotiate some mitigations of the Obama train wreck. Obama succeeded in not giving an inch on Obamacare, but now the train wreck that is Obamacare is undeniable. I am not so sure that the Republicans are going to be blamed in the next election cycle for pushing so hard to try to mitigate Obamacare, and the Democrats, by not budging, own that train wreck 100%. This train wreck is not going to be a one or two week story.... it is going to become the story of the next couple of years until and unless some major changes are made to it, and so far, the Dems have shown very little willingness to make anything but cosmetic changes. Even delaying the individual mandate -- while sparing people a fine, will not spare people from continuing to lose the insurance that they had because of the new burdens that Obamacare has placed on those policies. My wife and I, for example, do not need coverage for in vitro fertilization, but we are now paying for it. All these new bells and whistles may sound good, if you believe that they are just free additions to your insurance, but in the real world, nothing is free, and all of these things add to your costs... so when your rates double, or you have a $5,000.00 deductible as a result of all these new burdens, or you simply get a notice that your policy has been terminated, you see what "free" costs.
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