No, the ObamaCare Website Fail is Not the Private Sector’s Fault

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I know this is the hottest new talking point out of Think Progress, but even a Media Matters moron ought to be able to see through that one.

 

1. The government designed the site and brought the contractors on board. The final responsibility is theirs. If insurance companies had been told to design a website to sell insurance and spent $600 million to produce a site that crashes when 2,000 people browse it, then Henry Waxman would be right.

It would be the private sector’s fault.

But when the government blows $600 million on a site that doesn’t work, then it’s the government’s fault even though the work was done for it  by private companies.

The companies may have contracted to do the work for the government, but the government “contracted” to do the work for us. Whatever the details of the screw up are, it’s still the government’s screw up.

As Harry Truman, a Democrat from the time when Democrats had hair on their chests and didn’t use teleprompters to blame everyone else for their screw ups once said, “The buck stops here.”

 

2. It’s CMS, the government, that was responsible for coordinating the implementation of the work of all the different contractors and testing the product.

Kathleen Sebelius did not need to take on that role. It would normally be assigned to the private sector. Instead CMS took responsibility for it.

That means the failure of the website is CMS’ fault.

It was CMS that was responsible for integration and testing. It was CMS that kept rewriting the specs and redesigning the website at the last minute.

It was CMS that ignored warnings from insurers that the website would be a disaster. It was CMS that failed to fully test account creation until a week before launch time.

None of that is private sector. The private sector companies did a poor job of making a rushed product at the last minute for an employer who didn’t know what she wanted. The private sector is quite clearly capable of building fully working health insurance websites. The problem here wasn’t the private sector, it was the government.

  • Softly Bob

    I could make an Obamacare website that would work properly and I could do it for less than $5,000. Seriously, I could, but I’d want payment for myself of course and I would like to employ a couple of staff to help me, so call it mmmm… let’s see, $200,000 and that’s with me being a bit greedy.

  • DogmaelJones1

    Double thumbs up, Daniel. Sebelius wanted to “own” the website. She owns it. Obama owns it. The IRS owns it. HHS owns it. CMS owns it. As I’ve noted in the past, there isn’t a thing that sits on any bureaucrat’s desk that wasn’t produced in the private sector. That includes desk blotters and pads of Post-its and pens and pencils and paper, all their underwear, just for starters. But, the government contracted private sector outfits to create Healthcare.gov, and kept diddling with it up to the last moment, without even giving it a credible test first. It failed, but it was the private sector’s fault. Really?Take a perfectly good Mercedes engine and “oil” it with molasses, and see what happens. That’s Sebelius’s achievement.

  • mmichlin

    It is a wrong answer to the wrong question! Of course a private sector company can fail, but it is never a problem because other private sector companies would succeed. The problem here is that the goverment took on itself a job of selecting a single no-matter-what-sector company and made it 1) a monopoly and 2) a single point of failure. Goverment definitely owns it!

  • Ron Lewenberg

    It the private sector’s fault that the government procurement process ended with a company that failed with the Canadian gun registry program to know create software for a more complex insurance program?

    Is this a liberal talking point or a parody thereof?

  • objectivefactsmatter

    Basically what the government did was opt out of hiring an architect to coordinate the construction. Maybe they bought some plans from an architect but directed the work as the client.

    Or it’s like hiring an orchestra to play from sheet music, but the client decides to direct it on performance night.

    So yeah, they f-ed it up, without question. They directed the integration. That’s what’s broken.

    If they do want to blame others as well, we’re going to need a comprehensive explanation that shows why everyone but they as integrator are somehow at fault.

    But suckers will buy it. That’s how these frauds get elected in the first place. They’re experts at bald-faced lies.

  • Watermelonbeast

    You are right on!! If the government chose to be prime integrator/project manager responsible for final integration and testing of the system, they own it. I spent 15 years in the systems integration business and another family member spent over 25 years in a Fortune 25 company with several of those years as Chief Systems Architect and CIO.