The New York Times describes a high level meeting aimed at getting to the bottom of the disastrous failure of the Obamacare website. The mystery deepened when it emerged that none of the contractors was in the slightest degree response for its non-function.
Contractors that built President Obama’s health insurance marketplace point fingers at one another and at the government, but each insists that it is not responsible for the problems that infuriated millions of Americans trying to buy insurance on the Web site, according to testimony prepared for a Congressional hearing on Thursday. …
Cheryl R. Campbell, a senior vice president of CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI Group … said … he federal exchange, she said, is “not a standard consumer Web site,” but “a complex transaction processor” that must simultaneously help millions of Americans shop for insurance and enroll in health plans. It must communicate instantaneously with computer systems developed by other contractors and with databases of numerous federal agencies and more than 170 insurance carriers qualified to do business in the 36 states where the federal marketplace operates, she said.
The president was just as surprised as anyone else, as health secretary Kathleen Sebelius attested to CNN. She told the network when the chief executive received reports of unexpected problems with his flagship website only after it had been launched.
In an exclusive interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked when the President first learned about the considerable issues with the Obamacare website. Sebelius responded that it was in “the first couple of days” after the site went live October 1.
“But not before that?” Gupta followed up.
To which Sebelius replied, “No, sir.”
It just inexplicably went bad.
However as soon as the president learned of the site’s problems he swung into action, taking the opportunity to ask his many supporters for money to fix it. The Daily Caller writes
President Barack Obama is using the disastrous crash of his Obamacare website to extract cash and volunteer hours from his supporters.
“By now, you’ve probably heard that the website has not worked as smoothly as it was supposed to,” Obama told his supporters in an email sent out late Tuesday.
“That’s why I need your help,” he said, in a video pitch that links to an online fundraiser.
“The other side has already spent a whopping $400 million in anti-Obamacare TV ads,” says the language on the fundraiser site. “We don’t have to beat that, but we need to have the resources to fight back. Make a donation to support OFA today.”
With that solicited money the search for suspects can range further afield. The Center for American Progress Action Fund has its suspicions and it vowed to “expose the sabotage campaign in its many forms. Some methods of sabotage are obvious; other methods are more stealth. All of these methods, however, have one purpose: to make implementing Obamacare impossible, and thereby stop people from gaining access to better health coverage at more-affordable costs.”
They must suspect who the saboteurs are, though the Center for American progress has so far refused to name the malefactors. Meanwhile it emerged that persons unknown — perhaps the same miscreants — have may have implicated the administration in the wiretapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. USA Today reports that the German Foreign Minister summoned US ambassador John Emerson to explain whether and why her phone is bugged.
Emerson will be the second U.S. ambassador ordered to report to officials of a major EU country this week as a result of the ongoing fallout over the NSA files leaked by government contractor Edward Snowden.
Charles H. Rivkin was summoned to meet with French officials after a major French newspaper reported that the National Security Agency had collected tens of millions of communications from French citizens, and had spied on diplomats.
For those who’ve never heard the term, Foreign Policy describes what happens when an ambassador gets “summoned”.
what happens during a diplomatic summons, anyway? In short, a country’s ambassador gets an earful from a foreign ministry, in a kind of high-level, public show of disapproval….
Generally, a summons will include two to four diplomats on either side. But if an ambassador comes in to meet with a cabinet minister or a massive delegation, she knows she is in real diplomatic hot water.
Two US ambassadors summoned being summoned within days of each other by France and Germany signifies that they are not happy about something. If only Obama knew who was causing the trouble.
According to the BBC “President Obama had assured Chancellor Merkel when he visited in June that German citizens were not being spied upon”. This only proves that whoever did it, Obama hasn’t the foggiest notion who it is. However Obama is certain to leave no stone unturned in his effort to discover the root causes for these embarrassing failures.
“That’s him!”
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