Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has repeatedly said he isn't set on just implementing his own agenda -- if other people have ideas, he wants to hear them. In fact, the day after the 2014 elections when Republicans expanded their majority in the House and took control of the Senate, the…
With the announcement Monday of a five-year, $563 million contract award to Accenture, the Healthcare.gov contractor that rescued the Obamacare marketplace after 2013's disastrous launch, the total cost of the site will well exceed $2.2 billion. The new award is on top of the $1.7 billion in…
In a 2011 blog post titled "There's a New Sheriff in Town," the White House announced that Vice President Joe Biden was spearheading a new "effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in the Federal Government" called the Campaign to Cut Waste. As if to emphasize the urgency…
On the heels of an Associated Press report over the weekend that the State Department's unclassified email system was taken offline due to a suspected hacking attack, the main State.gov website is down Monday morning. Multiple attempts to access the site have failed, and the…
Healthcare.gov continues to prepare for open enrollment beginning on November 15, hoping to avoid a repeat of the disastrous launch in 2013. Apparently the preparations include extra "scheduled" maintenance. Wednesday morning, the site displayed a message reading, "The system isn’t available right…
Hillary Clinton is widely considered, should she enter the 2016 presidential race, the Democratic front runner. But the former secretary of state is shrinking rather than building an already limited website presence.
Six health insurance executives testified on Capitol Hill today. And all six, each representing a different company, unanimously agreed: The Obamacare website is still not entirely fixed.
After shelling out $677 million to build the federal health care website, the government will spend an additional $121 million in 2014 to repair it—$30 million more than previously estimated—the Washington Times reported last night. This comes just as the Obama administration is starting the hunt…
The Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, is down and not allowing users (at least, this user) to create an account in order to register for health insurance through the federal exchange. Here's what the page looked like when I just tried to sign up:
For now, the "one-stop shopping" experience at Healthcare.gov repeatedly promised by President Obama is still at least one stop short of the goal. In early January, news reports revealed a glaring shortcoming at Healthcare.gov: no function existed to report "life events," such as the birth of a…
Less than a month after the exposure of a widespread vulnerability on government "open data" websites, another perhaps even more insidious opening for abuse of government websites has come to light. The problem is known as an "unvalidated redirect," and has been found on the websites of the…
Details of the Healthcare.gov rescue in the fall of 2013 continue to dribble out via months-old contracts and modifications posted online. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) exercised two contract modifications in quick succession in October/November to increase the cloud…
Six days into the new year and fourteen days after the extended December 23 deadline, the federal Obamacare website Healthcare.gov is still holding out hope of coverage beginning January 1 to some consumers. The notice, which first appeared on December 24, advises consumers who had "problems" with…
The Healthcare.gov website has been plagued with problems since the October 1 launch. As web programmers often do, the designers of the federal government's flagship health care website have a test version of the site, spa.healthcare.gov, to help work out the kinks before implementation on the…
With all the other problems experienced by consumers at Healthcare.gov, actually making payments for plans selected has gotten relatively little attention until recently. As the end of the year draws closer, however, the importance of making a payment to secure coverage by January 1 has increased.…
In an interview with Barbara Walters on Friday, President Obama again acknowledged problems with the roll out of the Obamacare website Healthcare.gov. At one point, the president referred to Healthcare.gov as "my website" (via CNN):
Vice President Joe Biden says that "God willing" the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, will be fixed. He made the remarks at the Port of Houston today.
When the Obama administration launched the Healthcare.gov website on October 1, the president and his officials focused on the coverage that would now be available to the uninsured as of January 1, 2014. However, with the recent flood of cancellations of those who were told they could "keep their…
Former press secretary Robert Gibbs again called for heads to roll in the government after the botched rollout of the Obamacare website. He made the remarks today on the Today Show:
WRTV in Indiana reports that a man has tried for 6 weeks to sign up for Obamacare, but is still unable to:
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reported last week that in 2011, the IRS paid out $3.6 billion in fraudulent refunds on tax returns filed by identity thieves. Even that amount was an improvement over the previous year when the total fraud was $5.2 billion. However,…
The launch of the health exchanges has produced diverse images of failure: blank screens, improperly released Social Security numbers; a White House official undermining congressional oversight on September 6, 2013, with a phony security certification; and political appointees blaming their…
The rallying cry among those who still believe in Obamacare, and that it will fundamentally transform health care in America, like to say of the program’s current problems, “It’s just a web site.” Implying that it can, like the transmission on your automobile, be fixed and you can then proceed to…
President Obama said that "I've been burned already with-- a website," before correcting himself and saying, "the American people have been burned by -- a website that has been dysfunctional." He made the comments in an interview with MSNBC host Chuck Todd.
At a hearing on Capitol Hill, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said that the Obamacare website has "never crashed."
Yesterday in the Rose Garden, President Obama touted the Obamacare hotline and recommended people call to sign up for Obamacare. "[T]he point is the call centers are available," Obama said, sounding as though he were in the middle of an infomercial. "You can talk to somebody directly and they can…
Sylvia Burwell, director of the Office of Management and Budget, refused to guarantee that the Obamacare website will be fixed by December 15:
CNN reported last night that HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius will make time to attend a gala in Boston, but is too busy to testify on Capitol Hill about Obamacare:
The launch of federal government's Obamacare insurance exchange, Healthcare.gov, has been plagued with delays, errors, and poor website design, even prompting USA Today to call it an "inexcusable mess" and a "nightmare". Now comes another example of why the website's reputation is in tatters.…
The headline on Richard Pollock's Washington Examiner piece is troubling, which is a high bar to clear, these days.
In 2009, the Obama administration made news with an $18 million, five year contract to redesign Recovery.gov, the website the government set up to allow taxpayers to track the stimulus spending enacted by the president and Congress soon after President Obama took office. On Wednesday, notice of…
Thursday morning, the White House announced a new website to answer questions from businesses about Obamacare. Valerie Jarrett wrote about the launch in a blog post titled, "A One-Stop-Shop on the Health Care Law for Businesses Big and Small." However, within two hours, the website had crashed,…
In an interview tonight with News Channel 8’s Keith Cate from Tampa, President Obama praised his administration's ability to "[use] the Internet more effectively" so that folks, "If they need a government service, they don’t have to navigate through 50 websites, they can go to one website so on…
Last week, the White House cleansed its photo captions of references to Jerusalem being in Israel. The most compelling defense of the Obama administration, offered by Adam Kredo, was that they were only cleansing their website so that they could be consistent with the Bush administration's policy.…
At 3:22 p.m., I posted this photo of Vice President Joe Biden and Shimon Peres, with an accompanying caption that indicated it had been taken last year in Jerusalem, Israel: