After cyber security experts testified in Congress yesterday, Republicans have released a report that was prepared in March of this year for the White House warning about Technical problems and potential delays. The fact that the White House was warned that there could be problems with the ACA website is being portrayed as a problem for the White House.
Bits and pieces have leaked out over the past few weeks about flaws in the site's development process. Monday night, however, Republican lawmakers who oppose Obamacare released a report and recommendations prepared by McKinsey & Co at the government's request in March 2013.
It cited, among other things, a rushed process that left insufficient time for testing and a focus by officials on getting people enrolled versus making the system work right.
The consequence, it said, could be system failures that could make enrollment slow or at times impossible for consumers, which is exactly what happened.
A rushed process? That left insufficient time? How did that happen?
A good part of the roll-out issues for HealthCare.gov can be directly attributed to the political opposition from Republicans: the refusal of dozens of Republican governors and legislatures to create their own exchanges; the refusal of the Republican House to provide the necessary funding; and the delays caused by legal challenges.
The obstructionism has become so blatant that even Chuck Todd of NBC was
forced to admit it on Meet The Press:
TODD: You could argue that there are some Republicans that are trying to sabotage the law, that they’re hoping to not get it off the ground and then they can suddenly make the case, see, we got to get rid of it. And they’ve got some state governors that are openly trying to sabotage it. You’ve got-- look what McConnell and Cornyn did to the sports leagues, that was a shakedown, that was a threatening letter by the two leaders of the Senate Republican who essentially said…
GREGORY: When the NFL was going to come out and…
TODD: …if you participate this, if you help them…
GREGORY: Yeah.
TODD: …try to enact this law of the land, be careful, there’s going to be political repercussions.
BROOKS: They would say-- the Republicans would say we’re sabotaging a Rube Goldberg device that wouldn’t work anyway. I mean, this is incredibly complex law so it’s not-- surely there is Republican opposition, but this is an incredibly complex law doing a lot of things, probably it shouldn’t do, we probably shouldn’t have an employer-- employer insurance at all.
("Some" Republicans ha ha ha). But it's okay to obstruct it because it's a bad website. Kind of circular wouldn't you say? This is the level the discourse on these Sunday blab shows has fallen to. But I digress.
And in the private sector (which Republicans love to point to as their preferred model for how government should be run), the first thing a corporation would do if faced with a tightened deadline is to devote mass quantities of resources towards solving the problem. But Republicans stepped on that solution too:
But efforts have been under way in several states to discourage people from signing up for them; Congress has repeatedly denied additional funding to help the Obama administration with implementation; 33 states have refused to set up exchanges, leaving the task up to the Department of Health and Human Services; House Republicans recently embarked on yet another effort to defund the law; and the GOP has stepped up its investigation of the navigators, saying the program is rife with fraud.
So your little report here, which you're 'revealing' to the American public shows not that the White House knowing about potential future issues is the problem, but rather that you prevented them from doing anything about them.