On their website today NPR is reporting the details of several internal memos that show no one in the Obama administration should have been surprised when healthcare.gov was a flop right out of the gate.
These emails were sent between Henry Chao, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services project manager in charge of healthcare.gov, and other officials. Among the pre-launch dire warnings discovered by House staff is this little gem:
"Three months before launch, only 10 developers from contractor CGI Federal were working on a crucial part of the site — the marketplace for choosing plans — and of those, only one was 'at a high enough skill level.'"
The NPR story also casually mentions a blockbuster piece by the Washington Examiner that was a gusher of new information.
Back on Oct. 10, the Examiner reported this:
"Canadian provincial health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obamacare health exchange websites, the Washington Examiner has learned.
"CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was officially terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s flagship online medical registry.
"The online registry was supposed to be up and running by June 2011.
"Officials at the U.S. government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded six technology contracts worth $87 million to CGI Federal for Obamacare website work, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. "
CMS officials refused to tell the newspaper if federal officials knew of the parent company’s IT failure in Canada when it awarded the six contracts.
In the end, the company forfeited $46 million when it was removed from the job.
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