Thursday, October 24, 2013

Obamacare website hearing takeaways: Missing word was 'sorry'


http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/obamacare-website-hearing-takeaways-98815.html?hp=t1_3

So now we know the contractors’ side of the  website debacle: They did a great job, the bad decisions weren’t their fault, and they’re fixing it.
Thursday’s standing-room-only hearing on the snakebit federal Obamacare enrollment website, HealthCare.gov, saw a parade of witnesses who weren’t about to take responsibility for the disaster. We just do what the client asks, they said — and in this case, the client was the Obama administration.
Buck-passing bureaucrats
The main value of the hearing was to give the public a sense of who these contractors were. And what they saw was a group of self-praising, unapologetic corporate officials who talked in bureaucratic terms, passed the buck on the breakdowns — and said the website is getting better all the time.
Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president at CGI Federal, the main contractor that designed the website, said it wasn’t her place to tell the Obama administration to delay the launch. That decision was up to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that oversees Obamacare, she said.
And why, she was asked, didn’t she warn the committee when she testified in mid-September that there hadn’t been any “end-to-end testing” of the entire website and all other systems that work with it? “It was not our area of responsibility to do end-to-end testing,” she said.
Campbell had a bit of trouble rising above technical and public relations talk. When asked why CGI didn’t warn Congress in September that there were going to be problems, she replied: ”We were not part of the end-to-end visibility throughout the system.”
understand covering your own butt, but when you are hired for your expertise then you no longer have the client to fall back on as the reason your work is sub par, that only works it they present a non workable plan you know will not float but when it's you they rely on as the professional then you either are that person or a fraud.
claiming not your place to advise those that rely on your knowledge which everyone knows it is your responsibility to point out potential for failure, these guys must all be right wing advocates not just because they were derelict in duty at least or intentional saboteurs at worse, but they are trying to sweep the dirt of their malfeasance on the Pres.'s admin which is really saying it's his fault they did what they did. 
No apologies
One word never uttered by any of the contractors: “Sorry.”
The most any of them would say was that they’re working hard to fix the problems with the $600 million-plus website — and that they’re not proud of how the different parts of the website came together.
“We’re not excited, nor are we pleased, by the product that we delivered on Oct. 1, but in principle it worked” because some people have been able to use it to sign up, Campbell said.
another right wing example of not taking responsibility for your actions, like the republicans closed the gov't and then tried to say it was Pres. and Harry Reid that closed it because they refused to kill American health care, the parallels are to familiar for this to be coincidence at least in my opinion.
then the schmooze is similar to right wing saying "if he the Pres. would just sit down and talk to us", 
“We do accept that there are challenges. There’s no question that there are problems, and we’re working together to solve those problems,” she said.
are you hearing repetition that just smacks of twin excuses for not succeeding in your endeavor because "it was the Obama admin and Obama himself that just totally caused your lost of professionalism" mighty right wing of them both.  don't know if it's true i voiced concern in earlier post about the potential of republican clandestine intervention, and i'm not a political CSI.