Why Did Obama's HHS Officials Select
Canadian CGI that Botched Obamacare Launch?

By Kevin Fobbs | Examiner.com | October 21, 2013

The millions of Americans that have spent endless hours trying to work through the Obamacare maze, only to be utterly frustrated, can thank Canadian CGI Federal for it. This company has been entrusted with the construction of one of the largest if not the largest launches of a medical healthcare tracking system in the nation's history. The result by anyone's calculation is that it has not only failed miserably, but it calls into question the competency of the officials who approved the company to design the website. Was it because political objectives trumped operational effectiveness?

Was America short changed by CGI Federal when it was chosen to head up the continuing disaster? According to the Washington Post, CGI Federal has had a checkered past of previous failure in working on Canadian healthcare systems. The Post revealed that CGI's "Canadian performance on Ontario, Canada's health-care medical registry was so poor that officials ditched the $46.2 million contract after three years."

Shouldn't this have been a clue that if the company could under perform on a smaller medical healthcare contract with "missed deadlines" and other issues, Obama and HHS should not believe that the company could safely and securely handle millions of Americans' health care records?

Any of the seven million Americans whom the Obama administration is desperately recruiting to sign up for the Obamacare fiasco has to be wondering if their information is safe. Currently, tens of thousands of problems are occurring with incorrect information being assigned to medical health care records.

It does not get better. Since the launch, thousands of users across the nation have attempted to sign up for the CGI designed system. The "glitches" have created "multiple spouses, duplicate family members for accounts." These nightmarish incidents and problems still continue.

The real question to this is, how was the company selected and who did the vetting? As in the 1970's Watergate Congressional investigation, the central question was: What did the President know and when did he know it?

This cannot be passed off as a simple oversight, or a casual collection of innocent glitches. This healthcare reform piece was designed as Obama's signature legislation, and one would think that, he, the White House and HHS would not leave the building of the massive website to any firm that has a possible clouded past in handling healthcare websites.

Obama spoke on Monday about fixing the problem, because even he, with all of his partisan political speak, could not possibly blame the Republicans, Bush or the Tea Party for this avalanche of mediocrity in motion. Obama sounded as if he did not even believe his own indefensible spin. "He claimed that parts of the law have already helped the 13 people that joined him onstage in the Rose Garden," stated the Business Insider. He repeatedly said, "It's gonna get fixed." Hope and Change you should not believe in.

So Obama and CGI Federal can point to 13 people out of 7 million who are expected to sign up for Obamacare. If these 13 represent the entire universe of success for the president then it cost, America $7,153,846 per success story for the $93 million CGI contract. Quite an expensive victory one might claim.

The only way that this dismal failure is going to get repaired is to have Congress seriously address who gave the go ahead on selecting CGI Federal to land the website contract. Were other American companies ignored, bypassed or never considered to compete? Did CGI Federal go through the complete procurement process or did someone look the other way? It is imperative that Congressional hearings be slated for CGI Federal officials as quickly as possible.

Obamacare may be the law of the land for the moment, but it is no reason for millions of Americans to be stymied by a website and a system that is designed to seemingly fail before it even secures more than a few hundred to make it through the maze.

It is un-American, and as conservatives and Tea Party lawmakers have been saying ever since 2010, Congress should defund Obamacare. In the interim, next time find a firm that is American owned and American made.