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Mark Steyn notes some of the background of the Canadian company picked by Sebelius to design the healthcare site.
… CGI is not a creative free spirit from Jersey City with an impressive mastery of Twitter, but a Canadian corporate behemoth. Indeed, CGI is so Canadian, their name is French: Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique. Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion – or a thousand times more expensive.
Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some 2.5 million to 3 million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun – or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun registrations, Canada’s Auditor-General reported to Parliament that much of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic information such as names and addresses.
Sound familiar?
Also, there was a 1-800 number, but it wasn’t any use.
Sound familiar?
So it was decided that the sclerotic database needed to be improved.
Sound familiar?
But it proved impossible to “improve” CFIS (the Canadian Firearms Information System). So CGI was hired to create an entirely new CFIS II, which would operate alongside CFIS I until the old system could be scrapped. CFIS II was supposed to go operational on Jan. 9, 2003, but the January date got postponed to June, and 2003 to 2004, and $81 million was thrown at it before a new Conservative government scrapped the fiasco in 2007. Last year, the Government of Ontario canceled another CGI registry that never saw the light of day – just for one disease, diabetes, and costing a mere $46 million.
But there’s always America! “We continue to view U.S. Federal Government as a significant growth opportunity,” declared CGI’s chief exec, in what would also make a fine epitaph for the republic. …
Who’s at fault if the healthcare site crashes and burns? Asked and answered by Michael Barone.
… First, a president who is not much interested in how government works on the ground. As a community organizer he never did get all the asbestos removed from the Altgeld housing project.
Politico reports that his “universal heath care” promise was first made when his press secretary and speechwriter need a rousing ending to a 2007 campaign speech to a liberal group.
Second, lawmakers and administrators who assume that, in an Information Age, all you have to do was to assign a task to an IT team and they will perform it. Cross your fingers and it gets done.
Third, government IT procurement rules are kludgy. Apple didn’t bid on this. The IT work went to insider firms that specialize in jumping through the hoops and ladders of government procurement rules.
Unfortunately, the consequences of a meltdown are enormous when a system is supposed to be used by everybody. If a private firm’s software fails, it can go bankrupt. No one else much cares.
But if Obamacare’s software crashes, the consequences will be catastrophic — for the nation and for the Democratic Party.
Barone offers a reader’s comments on his column above.
Poor design choices and a compressed development timetable spelled disaster for Healthcare.gov…
A reader who says that he has done large software installations for one of the big accounting firms wrote the following in an email. It seems to validate the concerns discussed in my Washington Examiner column on the Obamacare IT mess.
“1. The integration aspect is most difficult. In this case, the integration of various Federal Systems to determine subsidies is proving a daunting task. You are dealing with legacy systems that don’t integrate very well. Also the integration with the insurers consisting of sending an insurance application to the insurance company, a much easier task, was also screwed up.
2. The software architecture used to build the website was all wrong. Using Java scripts for a heavy duty production website was a bad move from a software design point of view. Obama has liberal buddies in Silicon Valley like Eric Schmidt at Google who should have advised him on how to implement a website with the latest technology. …”
Turns out Kathleen Sebelius has a record of failure at government website projects. Of course! That’s why she’s at the highest levels of this administration. Daily Caller with the story.
Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ failure at designing websites to provide government services began during her term as governor of Kansas, long before the Obamacare website debacle, Kansas political insiders told The Daily Caller.
Sebelius oversaw numerous costly and disastrous government website projects during her six-year governorship (2003-2009), including a failed update of the Department of Labor’s program to provide unemployment pay and other services and similar updates pertaining to the Department of Administration and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) services.
The Department of Labor’s overhaul of its computer programs was a notable boondoggle, according to 14-year former Kansas state senator and former state Labor Secretary Karin Brownlee. …
Daily Caller also tells us an exec at CGI, the failed website designer is a class mate of Michelle’s.
First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.
Toni Townes-Whitley, Princetonclass of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company. …
And, The Daily Caller found out CGI has been put in charge of part of Hurricane Sandy relief. The country is in the best of hands.
CGI Federal Inc., the mastermind behind healthcare.gov, is assisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the distribution of $1.7 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy.
In a memo obtained by FreedomWorks titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.,” CGI Federal is tasked with implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they are asked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, an assistance program that had recently obtained $1.7 billion.
Item five of the meeting agenda reads:
Mr. Nelson presented that the State received a $1.7 billion allocation in CDBG Disaster Recovery aid from HUD to aid impacted businesses and residences. He stated that the State’s Action Plan was approved on April 26, 2013 and HTFC is currently in a phase of implementing the program. He stated that in this phase, the corporation needs to stand-up its recovery programs as soon as possible to deliver critical resources, and in order to do so, the corporation requires immediate access to consultant services to assist in policy and procedure development, training, surge capacity, and call center assistance, and stated that CGI Federal Inc. could provide such services.
The resolution was passed and scheduled to “take effect immediately.”
The Associated Press revealed Tuesday that a mere $700 million of the $60 billion federal aid package – 1.2 percent of the total funds – has been given to victims of super storm Sandy.
Nearly a year after the devastating storm, a majority of the 24,000 families that have requested monetary assistance have yet to receive a penny from the federal aid package.
Our look at the healthcare mess is summarized by John Fund’s column today in the National Review.
So we now have a date. “We’re confident by the end of November, Healthcare.gov will be smooth for a vast majority of users,” Jeff Zients, the point man in charge of the “tech surge” the White House is unleashing to fix the site’s problems, told reporters last week. “The Healthcare.gov site is fixable. It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed.”
But the commitments might hinge on what the word “fixable” really means. …
… The administration may also know less than it is claiming to know. It is astonishing that Zients, after only three days on the job, could make the assurances he did without having conducted a full technical review of the system, including requirements, architecture, design, and implementation. The scope of Healthcare.gov is staggering. Its 500 million lines of code dwarf the size of almost all known IT projects. According to CNN Money, it took just half a million lines of code to send the Curiosity rover to Mars. Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system has some 80 million lines of code. And a typical online-banking system might feature between 75 million and 100 million lines. …
… We are on the verge of seeing dark catch-phrases such as “Kafkaesque” and “Catch-22” recede in favor of a new one to describe bureaucratic nightmares: “Healthcare.gov.” A true Halloween horror story. …
… So we now have a choice. We can believe the Obama administration’s happy talk that the website will be “fixed” — whatever that means — in five weeks, or we can look to the general consensus of outside IT experts who are highly dubious. Given the administration’s track record and lack of transparency to date, it’s not even a close call as to who has the greater credibility.