White House, HHS Officials Warned Of ObamaCare Site Problems As Early As March
Driving the news this morning is a report from the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin and Sandhya Somashekhar. They report that consultants from the Washington-based firm McKinsey and Co. warned top HHS and White House officials, including Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, of the severe risks associated with launching healthcare.gov as early as late March.
The consulting firm presented a 14 slide presentation to the officials over multiple dates, warning them that sites of this magnitude needed to undergo “significant testing and revision” before launching.
The Post reports that many of McKinsey’s predictions prove “prescient” in light of the website’s chronic technical failures:
“One slide notes that the policy and requirements of a program are best defined at the outset, leaving sufficient time for testing and revision. By contrast, McKinsey noted, the federal marketplace’s design was marked by “evolving requirements” that shifted throughout the design phase, leaving scant time to test the system before its launch.
“It also warned that the federal government largely depended on contractors to construct the marketplace, and that it lacked an overall ‘end-to-end operational view’ of the system to ensure that its different parts worked well together.”
As we can now see, not only was the site ill-prepared for launching on October 1st, but the administration was warned repeatedly to that effect. Yet, for political reasons they decided to march forward.
Count on House Republicans to get answers from the White House as this disaster gets worse. We need your help to ensure that this isn’t swept under the rug.