Wednesday, November 20, 2013

GOP Blames Government for website problems, not Private Sector Contractor CGI.

The Journal Sentinel should be ashamed at what I would call an inaccurate commentary by blogger Christian Schneider. This time Schneider showcases the Affordable Care Act's website as another example government incompetence. Schneider is also quick to point out other government fumbles, including the GAB's website.

The governments fault? Seems to me a private contractor did all the work in both cases. I'd even go as far as saying government is only as good as their private contractors. Schneider should be happy for the privatization of the government. But of course he isn't, because he's still in the habit of blaming government for everything. Time to change the talking points Christian.

What becomes crystal clear is how confused Schneider is about what is private work and what is "government" work. Check out how he mixes the two together for his own political benefit, just so he can make his argument work (I've highlighted offending contradictions and conflations):
Just this week, we learned that back in March, the Obama administration was warned by a private contractor that Healthcare.gov was fraught with many of the problems that eventually came to fruition. Yet because the website is run by the government, failure simply means rewarding the project with more money, instead of extinction. The fact that the government was setting up the website should have been enough.

Beginning in 1999, the Elections Board spent millions trying to develop a website that allowed political candidates to report their fundraising electronically … But when campaigns began using the new GAB system, they found it to be incomprehensible ... In the end, the new GAB website cost taxpayers $2 million, an amount liberal blogger Dan Cody called a "fleecing" of the people of Wisconsin (The company who ended up getting the ... contract, PCC Technology Group, resided in Connecticut).
PCC Technology Group is a private contractor hired by the state. That would mean no public workers. Schneider also does what so many Republicans have done before; portray the private sector as infallible. They've never botched a website or had major technical problems? Hell, I can't tell you how many times Google's Blogger web hosting site has had major technical problems that spanned months before getting fixed. Oh, and speaking of Google:
The lesson here is that government creating functional high-volume websites is like a mouse trying to push a watermelon up a flight of stairs. If only there were a search engine to find competent private companies that could create high-traffic websites. Like Google maybe?
Here's a story from ABC News detailing how a private company screwed this up, not the government:

2 comments:

  1. It was the government that gave the contract to them. In fact it was a no bid contract because they were buddy buddy with Sibelius. Also, it was the government that designed the process that is used on the website. Lastly, it was the government that signed a law that no one knew what was contained within and then hashed out the particulars after the fact. It is really hard to develop a website with a shifting scope.

    So in this instance the blame is rightly attributed to the Government. Specifically the Liberals and HHS

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  2. Talk about six degrees of separation...from the government wow.

    The government gave them the contract, and that's open to criticism. But the site failure is the private sector contractors fault.

    The design is on the contractor, failing at making it work.

    The government and Democrats knew full well what they wrote into the law. What you and other Republican confuse intentionally were the rules and regulations instituted after passage to carry out the law, deal with unexpected surprises, and give the law flexibility (delay for businesses) for implementation.

    Perhaps we should have deep six'd Medicare Part D when it flopped, instead of changing rules and regulations after the fact? You think? The same for SS? I know you guys are perfect, so cut us normal people some slack, ok?

    Playing dumb doesn't give you a pass on this blog.

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