Health-care Web site’s lead contractor employs executives from troubled IT company

[FarCenter]

The lead contractor on the dysfunctional Web site for the Affordable Care Act is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, including a flawed effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, documents and interviews show.

CGI Federal, the main Web site developer, entered the U.S. government market a decade ago when its parent company purchased American Management Systems, a Fairfax County contractor that was coming off a series of troubled projects. CGI moved into AMS’s custom-made building off Interstate 66, changed the sign outside and kept the core of employees, who now populate the upper ranks of CGI Federal.

They include CGI Federal’s current and past presidents, the company’s chief technology officer, its vice president for federal health care and its health IT leader, according to company and other records. More than 100 former AMS employees are now senior executives or consultants working for CGI in the Washington area.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health-care-web-sites-lead-contractor-employs-executives-from-troubled-it-company/2013/11/15/6e107e2e-487a-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story.html

[alp227]

1. full page version of story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health-care-web-sites-lead-contractor-employs-executives-from-troubled-it-company/2013/11/15/6e107e2e-487a-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_singlePage.html

And a Thom Hartmann commentary on why contracting out Obamacare was wrong:

[philosslayer]

2. Right wing drivel

Every IT integrator has had bad projects. Every one. I'm not going to defend CGI, but this is just an effort to make my President and his administration look bad. If you reviewed any IT integrator in detail, you'd find the same problems.

[brentspeak]

3. Obvious you're in denial

The article is from the Washington Post, not Fox News. The IT firm behind healthcare.gov is incompetent and probably corrupt.

[philosslayer]

4. Sorry, I'm not buying it

All IT integrators have problems projects. ALL of them. Your insinuation that the Obama institution knowingly picked an "incompetent and corrupt" integrator to implement the most important public policy initiative in 50 years is insulting and nothing but a RW talking point.

Again, i'm not going to defend CGI. They clearly screwed the pooch on this one. But given the complexity of the project and the total lack of support from a brain dead congress, I'm not sure anyone could have done better.

[brentspeak]

5. It doesn't sound like you know what a "right wing talking point" actually is

There are Alex Jones supporters who are more grounded in reality than you.

Website developer's history:

A year before CGI Group acquired AMS in 2004, AMS settled a lawsuit brought by the head of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which had hired the company to upgrade the agency’s computer system. AMS had gone $60 million over budget and virtually all of the computer code it wrote turned out to be useless, according to a report by a U.S. Senate committee.

The thrift board work was only one in a series of troubled projects involving AMS at the federal level and in at least 12 states, according to government audit reports, interviews and press accounts. AMS-built computer systems sent Philadelphia school district paychecks to dead people, shipped military parts to the wrong places for the Defense Logistics Agency and made 380,000 programming errors for the Wisconsin revenue department, forcing counties to repay millions of dollars in incorrectly calculated sales taxes.

The report found that AMS had repeatedly missed its own deadlines, grossly overbilled travel expenses for its staff members and drafted far more software code than needed.

snip

At least four AMS employees now in senior roles at CGI worked on the thrift board project.


Lawrence Stiffler, who was director of automated systems for the thrift board at the time and a 25-year veteran of IT contracting for the federal government, said AMS was highly unreliable. “You couldn’t count on them to deliver anything,’’ he said.

[philosslayer]

7. You could find a random government official to badmouth any Federal integrator.

The RW talking point is that the Obama administration handed this contract to a corrupt, incompetent company who also happened to have one of Michelle Obama's old friends in a senior leadership position. Its crap. And you are giving it legs.

[FarCenter]

6. Selecting CGI was not the only bad decision

The memo that could have saved Obamacare

Have you read Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin's excellent look at how politics -- both inside and outside the White House -- undermined the launch of Obamacare? If not, you should. I'll wait.

Goldstein and Eilperin post a memo that David Cutler, a Harvard health economist and an advisor to President Obama's 2008 campaign, sent in 2010 arguing that the White House had the wrong team in charge of health reform and they needed to completely overhaul their implementation strategy. It's worth reading in full:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/04/the-memo-that-could-have-saved-obamacare/

1. A good deal of reform implementation needs to occur at the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (CMS). You were dealt a bad hand here. The agency is demoralized, the
best people have left, IT services are antiquated, and there are fewer employees than in 1981,
despite a much larger burden. Nevertheless, you have not improved the situation. The nominee
to head that agency, Don Berwick has never run a provider organization or insurance company,
or dealt with Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement. On basic issues such as the transition from
fee-for-service payment to value-based payment, Don knows relatively little. Further, he has
been ordered not to be involved in anything at the agency until he is confirmed, which will likely
be in the fall. Don has a wonderful vision, but there is no way he can carry it out in any
reasonable time without substantial help.

Unfortunately, the senior staff at CMS, which has been appointed, is not up to the task.
For example, I recently met with the senior CMS staff about how all the new demonstration and
pilot programs envisioned in the legislation might work. This is a crucial issue because the
current demonstration process takes about 7 to 10 years, and thus following this path would lead
to no serious cost containment for the next decade. When engaged about the speed of reform,
the staff expressed the view that: (a) their fear was going too fast instead of going too slow; (b)
we ought to add a layer of university review to the existing process, to be sure we are doing the
right thing; and (c) the natural place to start demonstrations is in end-of-life care (Death Panels
notwithstanding).

As a result, you have an agency where the philosophy of health system reform is not
widely shared, where there is no experience running a health care organization, and where the
desire to move rapidly is lacking. The result is that I have very little confidence that the
Administration will make the right decisions about the direction and pace of delivery system
reform.

[fadedrose]

8. You were right, it was very worth reading..

I wonder if the right people in the White House read it. I read all 4 pp.

Bedsides having some of the wrong people running the show because of inside fighting, it also shows that a new position is needed to implement White House Reforms:

Outside Overseer...over 3 branches of government.

That would be Howard Dean......

He may not have the gravitas of some of the heavy handed politicians on the Hill, but he does have a name and a following that won't give up on his coming back....

[fadedrose]

9. R'd - Be sure to read both of FarCenter's posts

[Hestia]

10. Did y'all not see this article:

Republican's Sabotaged Obamacare's Website
http://www.occupydemocrats.com/obamacare-website/

Uh, yeah, I too think that is was definitely on purpose.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/stevefriess/company-behind-troubled-obamacare-website-donated-heavily-to