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Top Obama Donor Gets Paid To Fix Obamacare Website After Blowing It Up
The ironically-named Quality Software Services Inc (QSSI) allegedly responsible for the SNAFU that is the Obamacare website's data hub has, incredibly, been named the new general contractor in charge off repairing the glitch-plagued HealthCare.gov. As The NY Post reports, as if the $150 million so far paid to this UnitedHealth subsidiary for its farcically bad implementation was not enough, the executive vice president of the firm (Anthony Welters) and his wife were among Obama's largest personal campaign contributors during the 2008 election cycle (and the firm has spent millions "lobbying" for Obamacare). The cronyism runs deep as the Post also points out that visitor logs show at least a dozen visits between the two by the end of 2012, the most recent information available.
The man at the center of the "cronyism"... Anthony Welters
A tech firm linked to a campaign-donor crony of President Obama not only got the job to help build the federal health-insurance Web site — but also is getting paid to fix it.
Anthony Welters, a top campaign bundler for Obama and frequent White House guest, is the executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group, which owns the software company now at the center of the ObamaCare Web-site fiasco.
UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Quality Software Services Inc. (QSSI), which built the data hub for the ObamaCare system, has been named the new general contractor in charge of repairing the glitch-plagued HealthCare.gov.
Welters and his wife, Beatrice, have shoveled piles of cash into Obama’s campaign coffers and apparently reaped the rewards.
...
The couple have been frequent guests at the White House.
Visitors logs show at least a dozen visits between the two by the end of 2012, the most recent information available.
The entire Welters family has gotten into the donation game.
The Welters, along with their sons, Andrew and Bryant, have contributed more than $258,000 to mostly Democratic candidates and committees since 2007.
What’s more, UnitedHealth Group is one of the largest health-insurance companies in the country and spent millions lobbying for ObamaCare.
...
The insurance giant’s purchase of QSSI in 2012 raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill, but the tech firm nevertheless kept the job of building the data hub for the ObamaCare Web site where consumers buy the new mandatory health-insurance plans.
QSSI has been paid an estimated $150 million so far, but officials couldn’t say how much more the company might collect on the repair contract.
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Every time something like this comes to light, I laugh my fucking ass off at idiots who still think their vote counts. Dems and Repubs, all workin' for the same team. Simple proof of that is that absolutely nothing will EVER be done about fraud and incompetence.
Keep voting....
hahahahahahahahaha
Consent to the ass rape.
Ass rape with benefits....HAHAH AHAHA AHHA AAHA AHA AHAH A
does my up vote to your comment count?
...my fucking ass...
If that's what you are using your ass for then get in touch with AKAK, he seems to have a real thing for that kind of sex...not that there's anything wrong with that...I'm just saying
I thought Zero Hedge had a Racial Discrimination policy:
http://www.zerohedge.com/help/notice-racism
And here we have Zero Hedge basically BEGGING for racist comments. SHM.
Diversity is Our Strength! We can't have only a bunch of geeky whites and asians producing websites.
Now I'm gonna swipe my EBT, pull my pants down and get to work writing me some Java code!
this is great news. they can't possibly enforce this travesty with a dead website and a guy who can only make it worse.
and if this folly goes on long enough we might be able to wait out the Ocare administration, never to see his fascist dream come to life.
Ah, yes, it feels so nice--the breeze that has been let into the lobby of the building through the movement of the Revolving Doors...
Politicians gone wild. Thank god nothing the Washington D.C. globalist traitors do works.
The revolution is guaranteed success.
Washington D. C. is putting homosexuals in charge.
I mean I could understand putting them in charge of a Halloween party but a General of the military. A little too "fall of the Roman Empire" for me.
Just in case some foreigners try to take advantage of the situation with the revolution and all I'm making up Chinese and Russian flags for when they invade.
So who is this general that you are talking about?
We are ALL racists now.
Ya back on subject: If I ever see a man that looks like that one I'm a runnin for my gun. He ain't gonna get me.
Only in govt is success and staying on budget optional.
SSDD
$150 million for a website... yeah, that sounds about right. ROTFL!!
My younger brother here in Bangalore builds one for $27. He's really inspired after hearing of Messrs Obama's friend's website making company
Only in govt are success and staying on budget optional.
SSDD
Surprised? It's the way Illinois/Chicago politics runs all the time. Backroom deals and stealing money from taxpayers.Ghost pay-rollers. How many Illinois governors were sent to prison?
Not enough?
The American people should be out-raged.
Do you need anymore proof that your government is complete bullshit?
Government is an investment tool for thieves, criminals and assholes/dirtbags in general.
What a fucking joke this country has become............. fucking garbage, If Iran had enough money they could buy every seat in government off, thats how little integrity the system has left.
Out govt is up for bid.... you want a president in your pocket...few million dollars, guaranteed 200 million return in 4 years.... thats all it is... all these politicians are sell outs they are simply investment vehicles for the bottom of the barrel class of thieves and butchers.
Im not buying health insurance, id rather piss 200$ a month away on vitamins.
Mandatory health insurance my ass, go fuck yourself, hows that for mandatory?
Everyone should claim exempt, waive the health insurance and refuse to pay the "fine" as a form of protest you are protected by the right of free speech.... speak with your wallet, because the only language politicians understand is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Re; Everyone should claim exempt, waive the health insurance and refuse to pay the "fine" as a form of protest.
Good luck with that Wolf, go ahead and give the Revenue service the finger. Remember these are the folks who can legally take your home from you to pay off what they say is due. Garnishing your wages and seizing your bank accounts goes without saying.
We are living at the whim of the beast you wish to starve.
I think that what we saw yesterday in regards to the LAX shooting of government agents by a lone gunman as a sign of things to come. With the militarization of the police away from "peace officers" to "law enforcement" officers, where the agents of the state adapt their training to "paramilitary operations" wouldn't it be suitable to say that the people's of the various states also adapt their way of life to also include "paramilitary operations" against the state, ultimately leading to full scale DIME/ASCOPE operations in the USA AOR.
Here is a thought exercise:
If the IRS comes and takes everything away because "they" say so, and actually DO take everything then what would I/you/we also have to lose by hunting those very same folks down and giving to them what "they" deserve? This aforementioned is a theoretical pursuit and not meant as a actual warning.
But what if what we saw was THE BEGINNING?
>> We are living at the whim of the beast you wish to starve.<<
Forwardho, not so if you have it all in gold...
Ask Westley Snipes what the IRS tax collectors can do to you.
I have to say it..these fucking coons have upped their game...Jessie and Al should take notice!
They are just taking the path of least resistance and following the algorithm du jour: if what you are doing isn't working, give it more time (lots more time) and do it much harder. This is what I call the neo-liberal neo-adaptability paradigm..And if you can facilitate it for the tribe, you can damn well facilitate it for a brotha'.
1. Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of the rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
Nope, no free healthcare in Marx's tenets, but he would doubtlessly approve of that and all we have accomplished.
(LEAN) FORWARD COMRADES!
Well he deserves a second chance after all that money donated to the Thug in Chief. The brother has to be made whole dosent he?
"The ironically-named Quality Software Services Inc (QSSI) allegedly responsible for the SNAFU that is the Obamacare website's data hub has, incredibly, been named the new general contractor in charge off repairing the glitch-plagued HealthCare.gov."
Suprised? Who better to fix it than the peeps who broke it. It was designed to be fixed. Same ol' story, won't get fooled again !
It is difficult not to draw similarities between what the World has seen happen in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and what is happening in South Africa (which will no doubt be in for a "more suitable name change" sometime down the line).
As to the oft-repeated refrain that "The Whites had all the advantages / education" - the "Whites" WORKED for that education. Even so, there are numerous examples of Engineering greatness where the individual had very little "formal" education - for example Thomas Telford (who started his Engineering life as a stonemason).
Some work, others prefer to sit on their collective backsides and "harvest" the benefits of the ability and industry of others. In times of significant change, one group survives, the other perishes. "The Times they are a'Changin" right now, so the future will be very interesting.
I think it works just fine now. Leave it the way it is. If you can't use it then it's working great.
Um, it's making sense now: "With the old system there were losers, and those losers are now the winners" - Van Jones
for auto insurance I just throw a ten dollar bill out the window every ten miles. it's a lot easier that way. For health care I drive to the hospital every day and throw a $20 at the first doctor is see. It's cheaper than Obonercare. It's called "Fuck It Care".
BTW United Healthcare is a national fraud posing as an insurance company and are one of the worst companies in the industry to try to deal with. It would be nice if someone could pull their numbers and see their legal budget... I would be willing to bet they pay as much for lawyers as for claims... since they almost never pay claims without legal pressure.. and their reimbursement rates are among the worst in the industry. In fact, of the 12 or 15 hospitals that I am familiar with, none take United Healthcare insurance.. there is a reason for this.
What did you expect?
He's reaching for his, SNAP card!
Yes indeed, now you have the other side. I look at the technical side and if you have not seen the post about Darrel Issa, look at is as I believe he might get to the bottom of the technologies used. United bought QSSI two weeks after the contract was awarded. Steve Larsen, former HHS who left about a year ago, now a big VP at the United Healthcare Optum division...just kind of smells..
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/10/congressman-issa-issues-subpoena-...
For about a couple years now I have been saying insurers are following the ways of the banks, becoming too big to fail and this company sure has all the characteristics building. I was just looking at the CMS spec on what technologies were used in this and I see where MarkLogic was used as the search/data base core and see where it also uses what is called a "bus" to connect to ERP software, some Oracle. If you a tech head then one would know that MarkLogic Xquery doesn't have a lot of libraries and programmers have to write code versus the JSON queries to where there are tons of libraries (code already written) and this saves time to not have to invent the wheel as not as much support out there for the XML which is what MarkLogic uses to bring all platforms together. You have what is called the 834 mappings which is the data format that is used to send the information from the applicant to the insurer. One interesting story there is CMS opted to use their own plan and scuffed 2 years worth of work done by a committee to create data standards here...a question there as well and maybe the MarkLogic folks told them not to worry since their XML based based platform would do the work...I don't know for sure and that's a guess
The MarkLogic CEO said himself that running big Oracle ERPs was perhaps not the best use for their product and he came to the company from Oracle about 1 year and a half ago, so knows their system well too. He was at the Oracle Open World Conference a couple weeks ago, you know when the America's Cup race was going on at the same time. So a question here is that did India, where QSSI is listed as a domicile on the United Healthcare SEC statement write a lot of proprietary code when Oracle had in 2011 a turnkey state exchange software platform available, with all the 834 insurer specs and other goodies like Fusion Middle ware available?
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/10/india-technology-to-fix-us.html
Oracle now has a no SQL data base which I don't think was there when the contract was awarded but I could be wrong and noSQL is the new data base technology used along with "in memory" capabilities. Now what is interesting is over at CMS, they are used a Cray computer appliance and I assume this is fairly recent to suck all the data in on payments and claims with insurers and look for patterns of fraud. This appliance too uses a noSQL data base to do it's work and has 512 TB of in memory capacity.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/11/cray-computers-making-big-comebac...
Kind of wild you have all this going on in a good way over there and then you come back to QSSI and the website for the other end of the spectrum. I think the verbiage being used out there with the Federal Hub in not "collecting data" is the "in memory" functionality and IBM, Oracle and many others have that as well.
Yes so as you noted, we have the political side of all of this alive and well. I read somewhere too that when United bought QSSI Sebelius ran all over like crazy demanding a firewall be put up to keep United out and she reported the sale to the SEC. Once again as I keep saying having figureheads with no tech background is a real danger. United had it over her again and didn't need to initially report the acquisition as the SEC rules calls only for "substantial operations" be be reported...so when she demanded they list it with the SEC that's what they told her, not substantial. See what I mean about being no contest for the extreme math and business models that are run by insurers today, they got everything they wanted ang Gov got duped and looks like there's still some going on, my opinion.
Use that 2nd link if you want as I went in to a a bit of the huge number of subsidiaries United owns...15 pages of them at the SEC and there's a link and a few of my comments on a couple of the subs. Insurance is not just about policies and claims anymore. United also has a few of those "Netherlands" companies listed which are known for having the potential of being a tax haven. I don't know but Apple and Google have the tax shelters there too and the Netherlands is a very popular place for those for companies with IP properties.
BTW, if I remember correctly, United Healthcare is one of the largest Medicaid HMOs... so to find senior people from HHS sitting in top positions of United Healthcare would just be another revolving door between government and the industries that feed off big government contracts and tax-payer money. No real surprise here. The only surprise is how there is no outrage by the American public at how fascist, crony-capitalist the United Banana Republic has become.
You and your limp dick brethren have the 'fascist' shits. Fascist this and fascist that...you wouldn't know fascism from your wife dictating your life.
Obamacare was written by the industry for the GOP.
The template for the Affordable Care Act was the Heritage Foundation’s 1992 report for expanding the health insurance marketplace. Their plan had tax credits, while Obamacare has income-based subsidies paid directly to insurers to make it affordable to the poor, working class and middle class. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich points out, this was the Republican’s and insurance industry’s plan, not the Democrats, who wanted to expand existing government programs. Its reliance on the private sector was flawed from the start and is at the core of its current troubles.
Just curious, why then did all Demoncrats vote for it and no Republiturds?
Hey, free candy! He looks legit. WTF.
http://vegasxau.blogspot.com
Obama's goal in life: Turn Washington into Detroit.
Isn't this a picture of some dictator from some banana republic in sub-Sahara Africa?!
Idi Amin is now involved in healthcare? Wow there was a time when his subjects needed plenty.
A real intelligent and well thought out comment. You are a douche.
Having a big donor involved is a good thing.
If he's a big donor then it stands to reason he will be extra-incentivised to make the project a success.
Get it fools?
If a Ted (goofball) Cruz big donor and an Obama Donor are both given the same critical job to do, whose gonna be the one who wants it to turn out well?
Big IT projects are crap shoots. No one at the highest levels can make much difference in how quickly and reliably the result is turned out. 90% of the IT types hired off the street are hacks with little or no special talent.
Even monster companies like Microsoft and Apple rarely get their crap out on time, bug free even with all the talent they are able to muster. Suck it up, a year from now Obamacare will be performing as it was supposed to and then the focus can get back to ridding it of the crap features the GOP insisted it have...and maybe add some death panel features to use on teabaggers who can't stop whining.
The guys that drove it into the ditch are now going to get it out of the ditch? Why would they do that? If they get paid extra to fix their own mess, they will stretch out this gravy train forever - no incentive to actually make it work.
I would be far more concerned if they had competent people on it and the Obamacare web site actually worked. These clowns can't do a web site, so it should be obvious to most voters that they sure can't do a nationalized single payer health care system.
Lots of people are waking up to the reality - "I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was going to have to pay for it".
Federal contracting 101.... Given enought money, anyone can do anything! We need moar money!
It's not in the ditch. It's the typical huge IT project that started out with an unrealistic deadline. Spent my entire working career in IT. Never saw it otherwise. Sometimes a task expected to take a few dozen hours takes hundreds. Other times something expected to take hundreds takes far less.
Sometimes one or two hard to find program bugs can throw any timeline into a tailspin. Higher management seldom hears about things like that. Every incessant project meeting the people involved continually put the most optimistic spin on things. By the time bullshit works its way to the top it sounds like fertilizer to them, something that makes things healthy and grow faster.
Big IT projects or any other "big" project is only a crapshoot with crap management.
Your post is indicative of both ignorance and inexperience - "No one at the highest levels can make much difference in how quickly and reliably the result is turned out."
Perhgaps this Welters goon will be assigned the 'job' of designing Obumbo's legacy presidential foundation and manages to FUBAR that too.
(One can hope....)
SNAFU is military slang for "situation normal, all f-ed up!"
FUBAR is similar "F-ed up beyond all recognition!" Got to love it.
Now regarding the issue: what is this, affirmative action for 0bozo's cronies?
This is what happens when you hire (or elect) people based on skin color rather than ability.
Probably should let NSA handle it. They have many big buildings full of computers and lots of really smart people working there. Just need a couple of electricians, and we're good-to-go.
You guys are so racist it ain't even funny. You're having a field day with this (which is of course corrupt) because the guy is black. There are countless other examples where millions of gov't money is wasted by private contractors who are corrupt/incompetent and the vast majority of the beneficiaries are white. But you rarely see them and if you do you never bring race into the picture.