Surprise!
HealthCare.gov will be out of service for two and a half days beginning on Feb. 15 — the last day people can sign up to obtain coverage that begins on March 1.
The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services announced in a blog post on Monday that the ObamaCare website would be lacking some enrollment functionalities so the Social Security Administration can conduct its annual systems maintenance activities…
Those seeking coverage by March 1 must have signed up online by Feb. 15, but with the website maintenance, those registering at the last minute won’t be able to find out what plans or subsidies they qualify for.
Well, why would they want to do that anyway? Relax, everything’s fine.
Isn’t that right, Jerry Markon and Alice Crites at WaPo?
Accenture, the contractor urgently tapped to help fix the federal health-insurance Web site, is a favorite of corporate America but has a record that includes troubled projects and allegations of ethical lapses, a review of the consulting giant’s history shows.
At the University of Michigan, students and faculty members are protesting the school’s use of Accenture to help cut costs, citing a report by a committee of alumni and graduate students that said the firm has “a disturbing pattern of problematic past performance.” In North Carolina, glitches in an Accenture-configured computer system contributed to massive backlogs for food-stamp recipients, leading the Obama administration last month to threaten to withdraw the state’s food-stamp funding.
Federal officials have also on occasion criticized the company’s integrity. The U.S. Postal Service Inspector General’s Office wrote in June that Accenture had “demonstrated an absence of business ethics” and said that the agency should consider terminating the firm’s more than $200 million in contracts.
Well then, the whole thing is in good hands. Splendid.
Top-down, authoritarian government doesn’t work, and a lot of people are going to die needlessly before their survivors realize that.
And yes, I just gave you the entire history of civilization. We were fools to think we’d be any different. The Founders did their best, but even the most ingenious anti-tyrannical system ever invented is only as good as the people we put in charge of implementing it. And as you may have noticed, these people are not good.
After all, what’s their incentive to be?
(Hat tip: Rick Moran)