Unbelievable Incompetence Led to No-Bid Contract for Healthcare.gov
Photo Credit: American Thinker It appears that management of the rollout of healthcare.gov was delegated to the Keystone Kops, the famous symbols of comic incompetence created by Mack Sennett. A level of ineptitude that surely must be termed negligence has led to at least one no-bid contract as CMS leadership discovered at the last minute that they had forgotten one crucial piece of the project. Sharon Begley of Reuters reports:
Caught flat-footed by the challenges of building the financial-management and accounting parts of the U.S. government’s new online marketplace for health insurance, officials rushed to hire a familiar contractor without seeking competing bids, according to government procurement documents reviewed by Reuters.
The documents dated in August – less than two months before the opening of online marketplaces established by President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare law – showed the agency in charge had only “recently learned” that building the financial management functions was “beyond (its) currently available resources.”
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) documents shed more light on the problems facing the agency as it worked on the marketplaces established by the law commonly called Obamacare and on its revelation this week that at least 30 percent of the marketplace is still being built.
Those problems and others have been revealed by congressional oversight investigators who released emails and outside reports that paint an administration scrambling to meet the technological challenges of the marketplace – and usually failing to do so.
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