http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/10/sebelius_admits_she_needed_four_year_delay.htmlOctober 22, 2013
Sebelius Admits She Needed Four Year Delay
Karin McQuillan
In my column yesterday I explain that the Obamacare fail was baked in for political reasons, foremost among them, the need to keep the public from learning that the Tea Party critics were right. Obama knew he couldn't be re-elected if people learned what Obamacare was. He also knew it was not ready to be launched. The White House tactic was to keep the Obamacare regs and prices secret from the public, which meant the website could not be constructed properly. Each day brings more news proving the administration's political motivations that made failure inevitable and acceptable to them.
Over the weekend HHS Sect. Kathleen Sebelius admitted in an interview: "The online insurance marketplace needed five years of construction and a year of testing, she said. "We had two years and almost no testing."
Sebelius is saying she needed a delay of four years to get the system up and running.
A delay of four years is an admission of complete failure. The Administration chose to launch a chaotic mess. Their actions have thrown millions of Americans out of their health care plans and their jobs, and could potentially bankrupt the insurance industry (says angry Obamacare advocate and New York Times reporter Ross Douthat).
Obamacare's empowering a federal bureaucracy to centrally plan a new health care system for America was very much like one of Stalin's Five-Year-Plans or Mao's Great Leap Forward.
Note to Sebelius: four more years wouldn't have done it. These plans never work, unless you count starving 45,000,000 Chinese peasants to death as working.
This Politico article quotes an inside source:
"Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said."
In other words, Obama didn't want the public to learn about what Sebelius and cooked up in her 10,000 pages of implementation regulations so he kept the management of the IT design inside the administration, although it was not capable of doing the work.
Bloomberg columnist and former IT employee Megan McArdle explains why this 'do-it-yourself" WH decision was a disaster:
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services inexplicably decided to take on the role of central project manager itself, assuming responsibility for integrating all the various software pieces they'd subcontracted, rather than assigning that role to a lead contractor. CMS is not known to maintain a pool of crack programming talent with extensive project management experience that can be deployed to this sort of task.
...Federal contracting codes, so far as I am aware, do not emit intoxicating gases that might have caused senior HHS officials to decide that it was a good idea to take on the role of lead contractor -- a decision equivalent to someone who has never even hung a picture deciding that they should become their own general contractor and build a house.
It will be interesting to see how passive the public is by the February deadline for extending our budgetless federal spending. They may be clamoring for Ted Cruz to come back and call for defunding.
