ACA Contractors To Testify, Pass Blame, Leave

On Thursday, private contractors responsible for building Obamacare’s website and associated systems will testify to Congress about the whole roll-out imbroglio. And lest you imagine that, as adults, they’ll take responsibility for their non-performance… no, don’t imagine that.

Here’s an example:

Cheryl Campbell, Vice President of CGI Federal (a major ACA contractor), blames some sort of inherent futility associated with building any software more complex than, say, something that adds 2 and 8:

“We acknowledge that issues arising in the federal exchange have made the process for selecting and enrolling in qualified insurance plans difficult to navigate for too many individuals,” Ms. Campbell said.

“Unfortunately, in systems this complex with so many concurrent users, it is not unusual to discover problems that need to be addressed once the software goes into a live production environment.”

It is, one would be compelled to admit, highly unusual for a contractor who was paid tens of millions of dollars to go ahead and deliver an awful product, and then blame the purpose-built product itself.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go for the second class of excuse; let’s blame someone else:

She blamed “another contractor” for problems that consumers have had creating secure password-protected accounts. She did not name the company, but government records show it is Quality Software Services Inc., a unit of the UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest insurers.

These problems “created a bottleneck that prevented the vast majority of users” from gaining access to the federal exchange, Ms. Campbell said.

But hold on; that doesn’t cover the excuse landscape completely, does it? No. Because we got paid a king’s ransom to do something that wasn’t patently simple, so that’s why we did it incompetently:

The federal exchange, she said, is “not a standard consumer Web site,” but “a complex transaction processor” that must simultaneously help millions of Americans shop for insurance and enroll in health plans.

It must communicate instantaneously with computer systems developed by other contractors and with databases of numerous federal agencies and more than 170 insurance carriers qualified to do business in the 36 states where the federal marketplace operates, she said.

Which, if true, constitutes the most brainless systems architecture ever designed by man or beast. Ever.

But here’s the funny part. Maybe these contractors just didn’t understand what the government wanted, because one day the government called on the phone and said “Hey, can you build something complex and hard to draw up, and we’ll pay you as you go, and just do the best you can.” According to Cheryl, that didn’t happen at all:

She said CGI had won the contract for the federal exchange through a two-step process of “full and open competition.”

Two steps? So maybe the first step was understanding what the government needed, and let’s get crazy here, maybe the second step was telling the government that you could do it, and how many millions of dollars that would require? Nah, I’m sure it wasn’t that.

There is more — much more — over at the New York Times. And more after that, we suspect, when Jon Stewart gets his claws into what will surely be a day of absurd, buck-passing nonsense.

By: rhb

Rob is a NYC-based Internet entrepreneur. He's also a businessman and job creator (wait: doesn't demand create jobs?) who understands the sense, and the eventual predominance, of the progressive agenda.