Obama/admin withheld, delayed info and didnt listen to advisers on ACA rollout

[tonymctones]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/11/03/on-sept-5-test-of-obamacares-website-cms-staffers-secretly-rooted-for-it-to-fail/?partner=yahootix


"Cutler also criticized the person tasked with setting up the insurance exchanges, because that person was ideologically hostile to the industry. “If you cannot find a way to work with hesitant states and insurers, reform will blow up. I have seen no indication that HHS even realizes this, let alone is acting on it.”"

Jeanne Lambrew, “the overall head of implementation inside HHS…is known for her knowledge of Congress, her commitment to the poor, and her mistrust of insurance companies. She is not known for operational ability, knowledge of delivery systems, or facilitating widespread change. Thus, it is not surprising that…exchange administration [is] receiving little attention. Further, the fact that Jeanne and people like her cannot get along with other people in the Administration means that…valuable problem solving time is wasted on internal fights…no one I interact with has confidence that your current personnel and configuration is up to the task.”

[tonymctones]

A running theme in the Goldstein-Eilperin piece is political paranoia, the degree to which the White House kept key details of Obamacare’s implementation secret—from its own allies—because they feared that even modest efforts at transparency would lead to criticism from Republicans.

“According to two former officials,” they write, “CMS staff members struggled at ‘multiple meetings’ during the spring of 2011 to persuade White House officials for permission to publish diagrams known as ‘concepts of operation,’ which they believed were necessary to show states what a federal exchange would look like. The two officials said the White House was reluctant because the diagrams were complex, and they feared that the Republicans might reprise a tactic from the 1990s of then Sen. Bob Dole (R., Kan.), who mockingly brandished intricate charts created by a task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton.”

[tonymctones]

The White House even refused to share key information with Democratic allies in Congress. Key Congressional leaders were only notified a half-hour before the public was that President Obama was to delay the law’s employer mandate by one year. (The employer mandate requires companies with more than 50 workers to provide health coverage to each full-time employee.) In a meeting with Democrats a week before the announcement, Jeanne Lambrew “gave no hint” that a delay was imminent.

Richard Foster, the former chief actuary at CMS, described these delays as a “singularly bad decision,” one that put “short-term political gain” ahead of the successful implementation of reform.

[tonymctones]

A number of people buried within the administration were concerned about a botched rollout, and tried to make their concerns known. “By late 2012,” Goldstein and Eilperin write, “some staffers were aware…that the work of building the federal exchange was lagging…a much earlier timeline than has been previously disclosed. Some employees in the main office involved with building the exchange repeatedly warned at meetings late last year and in early 2012 that so many things were behind schedule that there would be no time for adequate ‘end-to-end’ testing of how the moving parts worked together.”

[tonymctones]

“People were like, well…it’s a dynamic we can’t change,” a former HHS official told the reporters. “There wasn’t a way to push back or challenge it up the line. You had the policy people, largely at the White House, pushing the deadlines and tinkering with the policy, rather than the people who had to run the critical operating path design and program the system.”

On August 17, Shabnam Shahmohammad of CGI Federal—the main IT contractor for the exchange—sent an email to Tyrone Thompson of CMS, and several others, stating that they had only completed 55 percent of the tasks that they had been assigned.

[tonymctones]

the "most transparent admin in history" LMFAO

but his supporters will go on supporting b/c to them, the ends justify the means

[Soul Crusher]

Unreal.

[Soul Crusher]

Ends justify the means for communists like obama