The answer to the question posed in the headline, that is the commonalities between the ObamaCare website and Canada's failed gun registry, is software company CGI. The Conservatives under Canadian PM Stephen Harper dumped the gun registry last year deeming it ineffective and too costly. The Firearms Registry had been plagued by cost overruns from day one.
Sun News has more on other failures by CGI with regard to healthcare related databases in their report below.
Breitbart has more on these failures by CGI.
The failed gun registry was only one of CGI's many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts to build health care databases in the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick. Despite CGI's checkered record, the Obama administration awarded its U.S. subsidiary, CGI Federal, the $93.7 million contract to build healthcare.gov, part of $678 million in health care services contracts awarded to the company.The Washington Post has more on how CGI Federal, a wholly owned subsidiary of Canada's CGI Group, went about winning the contract for the ObamaCare website. In a significant omission, the Washington Post fails to mention the role of CGI in the failed Firearms Registry.
It is obvious to me that no one in the Department of Health and Human Services did any sort of due diligence on CGI or CGI Federal. It could be just a coincidence that CGI was involved in a gun registration scheme and was the firm selected by the most anti-gun administration in recent memory to handle their healthcare exchanges website. I know correlation is not causation but one does have to wonder.
But...but... They DONATED to BO's campaign... Doesn't that count???
ReplyDeleteFor sure that counts!
DeleteIt is obvious to me that no one in the Department of Health and Human Services did any sort of due diligence on CGI or CGI Federal.
ReplyDeleteErrrm, they run CMS.gov and Medicare.gov. I can personally attest that the latter site, while clunky, works fine in displaying claims and in Part D prescription drug plan selection.
I can go into much more detail, but the key things, and they just got fixed, were making CMS the integrator, "the client" (the White House on down to CMS) getting requirements to CGI et. al. very late (including a 3+ month freeze before the 2012 election), making constant requirements changes through the week before launch, CMS's performing its integration testing duty only 1, maybe 2 weeks before launch and ignoring that the tests failed, etc. etc.
Since then CMS panicked 3 days after launch and proposed to fire QSSI; instead, as of a very few days CMS has been "fired" as integrator and QSSI has a renegotiated contract to do that, and the fix-it czar is acknowledging reality, the top item on his punch list is to stop feeding garbage to the insurers.
Before the management change, there was absolutely no chance the system would work before political fixes would intervene. Now they've got a small chance to fix it enough in 7 weeks so that the millions who must get new policies through this system (which is responsible for subsidy calculations for all exchanges and insurers) just, might, possibly get them in time.
Not going to make any guesses about the probability of that! But it's what I'm following since after the people being fired or reduced to < 30 hours/week they're the first to get seriously screwed (absent a hefty subsidy they're going to be paying a lot more for the new gold plated Obamacare plan, old fashioned major medical ones soon to be illegal with very very few grandfathered, maybe 2 out of 19 million).
Disclaimers: programmer and student of "software engineering" and project success and failure since 1977-79, in 2004 briefly worked for AMS before the non-national security part of it was sold to CGI to become I gather the nucleus of CGI Federal (I was in the other part that was sold to the US firm CACI, although I declined to make that jump). Don't like Obamacare at all, but would like to see less damage to the innocent before it goes to the ash heap of history.