This Is What Happens When You Ignore The Bidding Process

Back in the days of dinosaurs when America had a space program, one of the astronauts commented that he had mixed emotions about sitting on the launch pad knowing that every piece of the spaceship he was on was supplied by the lowest bidder. Having said that, the space program generally worked pretty well, and the bidding process was successful in finding the people who were able to do the job at the lowest cost. Contrast the success of NASA in sending astronauts into space with the rollout of the ObamaCare website.

The Washington Examiner reported on Sunday that the usual government bidding process was not followed in hiring the firm to design and implement the ObamaCare website.

The article reports:

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.

CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.

It gets even more interesting. Today the Washington Examiner reported on exactly who runs CGI.

That article reports:

Prior to the official award, senior CGI executives met with top White House officials and attended a number of invitation-only addresses by President Obama.

Two of the meetings attended by CGI executives were with Vivek Kundra, Obama’s chief information officer. Kundra was a key figure in Obama administration information technology initiatives across the government.

The article reports that the executives of CGI had close ties with the government and possible conflicts of interest.  John Loonsk was a former director for health information technology at HHS, which awarded the Obamacare web project. He is now CGI’s chief medical officer, as well as a member of the initiative.

This may be totally innocent, but it sure doesn’t look that way. The Obama Administration has a history of picking winners and losers, and it looks like that is what they did in awarding the information technology contract to implement ObamaCare. As a result of this, we have an electronic sign-up system that puts the people who sign up at risk for identity theft–assuming they can get far enough into the system to input their personal information.

The total failure of the ObamaCare website is one of a multitude of reasons the program should be delayed for at least a year. It would be better to scrap ObamaCare and start over, but if that is not possible, a one-year delay would give the government some time to at least try to fix the problems.

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