Media coverup of key healthcare.gov issues
If one wonders why Republicans in Congress are viewed so unfavorably by the general American public (according to polls),
one must begin with the unjustifiably negative coverage of them by the MSM.
Take as Exhibit A the following opinion piece by the Washington Post’s master of mockery, Dana Milbank:
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post, 2013-11-13
“The American people do not want to see a kangaroo court here,” Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, said midway through Wednesday’s four-hour prosecution of Obama administration technology experts by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) hopped to attention. “ ‘Kangaroo court’ is quite an accusation,” he said, “and I hope the gentleman from Tennessee, when he uses the term kangaroo court in the future, will think better of making an accusation.”
Sorry, Mr. Chairman, but the pouch fits. It was indeed a kangaroo court, and Issa was the main marsupial.
No human makes leaps quite like Darrell Issa. He leaps to conclusions. He makes huge leaps of logic. He leaps before he looks. And he invariably leaps right into the White House, alleging high-level political misbehavior and administration corruption for just about everything that goes wrong.
On Wednesday, the topic was Obamacare, but the California Republican followed the script he used when investigating “Fast and Furious” gun-running, the Benghazi attack, and IRS targeting: make inflammatory allegations of high-level skullduggery, release selective information that appears to support the case while withholding exculpatory details, then use his chairman’s privileges to turn hearings into episodes of “The Darrell Issa Show.”
He went well beyond his own five minutes of questioning time Wednesday without halting, then cut off the ranking Democrat on the panel when he tried to do the same. Issa proceeded to interrupt no fewer than 12 members of the panel — Republicans and Democrats alike — to make additional speeches and ask further questions.
“Would the gentleman yield?”
“Would the gentlelady yield?”
“Could you yield for just 10 seconds?”
“Point of privilege!”
“I want to make a statement.”
He certainly did. And, as usual, Issa’s determination to be judge, jury, prosecutor and witness was counterproductive. The administration has a serious screw-up on its hands with the Obamacare launch, and President Obama’s poll numbers show it. Other congressional committees already were deep into investigations of the rollout before Issa started throwing around subpoenas and accusations. His involvement seems to have done little more than revive dispirited Democrats.
Three weeks ago, Issa alleged that the White House ordered contractors to disable the “anonymous shopper” function that would allow people to compare plans. “The White House was telling them they needed these changes,” he told CBS News. Why? He told Fox News that the administration “buried the information about the high cost of Obamacare” so that consumers wouldn’t get “sticker shock.”
In testimony Wednesday, however, an administration IT expert testified that he ordered the “shopper” function disabled until defects could be repaired and that there had been no political interference.
“So when Chairman Issa stated on national television that the White House ordered you . . . to disable the shopper function in September for political reasons, to avoid consumer sticker shock, that’s not true, is it?” asked Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.).
“I object,” Issa howled. “The gentleman is repeatedly disparaging and mischaracterizing what I’ve said.” Tierney then proceeded to read Issa’s quotes, verbatim.
The chairman, who made a fortune in car alarms before getting into politics, opened the hearing with his theory that this was “a monumental mistake” made because “efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines.”
He then allowed the witnesses to say a few words, but couldn’t help interjecting a question between the witnesses’ statements, before adding, “Please, don’t answer yet.”
When his question time did come, he finished it by telling the witnesses he would “recognize the ranking member” — Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) — “to try to rehabilitate your testimony.”
Issa sprung himself on colleagues regardless of rank or party — Republicans John Duncan (Tenn.) and Patrick McHenry (N.C.), Democrats Gerald Connolly (Va.) and Eleanor Holmes Norton, a D.C. delegate — asking them to yield him the floor.
When Republicans Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Jason Chaffetz (Utah) finished before their questioning time had expired, Issa helped himself to it. When Cooper noted, rhetorically, that “we’re not software engineers,” Issa interrupted to say, “You’ve got several here” on the Republican side of the dais.
Several times, before calling on the next questioner, Issa used the moment to offer some additional thoughts of his own: “Mr. [Trey] Gowdy, you’re right on that they should have had the A team on this. . . . You know, I never could quite understand how this thing could handle 60,000 simultaneous users but only do six in a day. . . . Success has many fathers, quite a few mothers, plenty of relatives, but failure is an orphan. You’re going to find an orphan here.”
Ah, yes, the verdict before the trial. And he wants to know why people think he runs a kangaroo court.
Twitter: @Milbank
[I (the author of this blog) have some comments on Milbank's article.
I, and I am sure many others, would like to know what went wrong in the development of the healthcare.gov website.
Representative Issa, whatever you may think of his politics, is a serious person,
who I have no doubt in his hearing made a good-faith effort to uncover some answers to that issue.
As an example, from the New York Times coverage of this hearing, we find that:
Does Milbank, a Jewish graduate of Harvard, and thus twice part of the "elite",
care about this issue?
Or are such issues and questions of no interest to him?
The issues Milbank discusses at such length have no substantive importance.
Milbank gets one thing right, when he writes:]
What in that would Milbank disagree with?
Milbank concludes with:]
Who in the Obama administration had unique responsibility for the healthcare.gov website?
I.e., it wasn't just one of the things they were responsible for,
but it was their sole responsibility,
and beyond that, they had authority over all decisions regarding the website.
The lack of such a person is a glaring defect in the Obama administration's approach to this development,
a point which Issa brings out,
but which Milbank criticizes him for doing so.
Issues such as this Milbank seems impervious to.
He can mock, but he does not seem willing or able to make a positive contribution
to the public's understanding of what went wrong.
Is this one of the values theWashington Post's asserts they have:
Mocking Issa's conduct of the hearing,
without providing insight into the substantive issues?
Moving away from the Milbank piece,
the Washington Post's main story on Obamacare that day
emphasized the low enrollment figures thus far for Obamacare,
while it all but ignored the Issa hearing:]
By Amy Goldstein and Paul Kane
Washington Post, 2013-11-13
[The emphasis of this story is that of its headline, not its (full) URL.
The Issa hearing only comes up at the end of the story, in its final four paragraphs:]
...
The jockeying came as the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday
grilled several administration officials overseeing the technical work on the federal exchange.
One of them, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, an adviser to the president,
turned up only after the committee’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.),
issued a subpoena demanding his presence.
Park reiterated the administration’s assertion that
the Web site will be working smoothly for the “vast majority” of Americans
by the end of the month,
but he sidestepped repeated requests to be more precise.
The spotlight at the hearing was trained, in part,
on an official with direct oversight of the technical aspects of the Web site:
Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Republicans on the panel accused Chao and Park
of not including adequate protections for consumers’ privacy.
They suggested that political considerations came into play
when officials were deciding which features would be available on Day One.
At times, they referenced testimony Chao gave
during a recent closed-door session that lasted nine hours.
Chao, who has worked at CMS for two decades,
repeatedly said that his comments were taken out of context
and that he was not worried about the privacy of consumers’ personal information.
“There was some rearrangement of the words that I used,” he said.
[For a far more detailed and helpful account of what transpired at the hearing,
see the New York Times story.
Note especially the important information in this story
which Milbank not just ignored, but distracts attention away from
by his emphasis on the hearing's procedural aspects versus its substantive ones.]
By ROBERT PEAR and ERIC LIPTON
New York Times, 2013-11-13
WASHINGTON —
The chief digital architect for the federal health insurance marketplace said Wednesday that
he met periodically with White House aides
to discuss the status of the website over the last three years,
but he said the meetings focused narrowly on specific technical issues
and therefore gave the president no clear warning of the disaster that ensued on Oct. 1.
The official, Henry Chao, said he had provided “status briefings” to the White House
on the development of certain features of the website,
envisioned as the main vehicle for people to compare and buy insurance plans under the new health care law.
[Holy crow.
Where was the overview of the site's readiness for prime time,
both in terms of its functionality and its load-bearing capability?]
Jeanne M. Lambrew, the president’s health policy coordinator,
generally attended and often led the meetings,
Mr. Chao said at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The committee, investigating the rollout of the new health care law,
has requested testimony from Ms. Lambrew and from Nancy-Ann DeParle,
who was director of the White House Office of Health Reform from 2009 to 2011
and then deputy chief of staff for Mr. Obama until early this year.
Kathryn H. Ruemmler, the president’s chief lawyer,
rebuffed the panel’s request.
In a letter to the committee on Tuesday,
she said the testimony of Ms. Lambrew and Ms. DeParle was not needed
“in light of the extraordinary information
that has been provided to the Congress to date.”
Moreover, Ms. Ruemmler complained that Republicans on the committee
were seeking testimony on a “broad and amorphous range of issues”
not tied to any “legitimate oversight interest.”
[The question remains:
What did the White House managers for this project know about its status,
and what direction did they give?]
The panel is trying to find out
how much the White House knew about defects in the website, HealthCare.gov,
and whether politics contributed to some of the underlying problems.
Committee Republicans said they still wanted to hear from Mr. Lambrew and Ms. DeParle.
“They are the people we need” because
they were “the political people in charge,”
said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio.
At the hearing on Wednesday,
federal officials working on the project were unable to tell committee members
how much it would cost to fix the site,
on which the government has already spent more than $600 million.
Neither Mr. Chao nor Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the White House,
nor Steven VanRoekel, the chief information officer for the federal government,
could answer questions about the cost of repairing the site,
which has been plagued with software and hardware problems since it went live on Oct. 1.
[Unpleasant but understandable.
They really do not, and cannot, know how many problems remain.]
Even while testimony was underway before the oversight committee,
a separate House panel questioned other administration officials
about the security of the website
and the protection of personal information that consumers provide
when applying for health insurance and federal subsidies.
Roberta Stempfley, an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said there had been at least 16 reported attempts to infiltrate the system. In addition, she said, there has been at least one effort to delay or shut down the site, by an outside party trying to orchestrate a “denial of service” attack involving repeated queries meant to overload the system.
Ms. Stempfley, testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security, did not provide details of the incidents, which she said were being investigated. After the hearing, a Homeland Security Department official said none of the attempts appeared to have been successful or to have resulted in the unauthorized release of personal information. On an average day, the official said, 620 similar reports come in to the department.
The security of the health care website had not been fully tested when it opened to the public last month, according to federal officials and documents from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Many questions at the oversight committee hearing focused on website procedures that required consumers to create password-protected accounts before they could see the exact cost of health plans for which they were eligible.
Mr. Chao rejected Republican suggestions that the administration had blocked an “anonymous shopping” feature because it feared that consumers would be shocked if they saw the full unsubsidized prices of insurance policies.
In fact, Mr. Chao said, federal officials excluded the feature because it had failed to perform properly during testing. “It failed so miserably that we could not conscionably let people use it,” he said.
However, the chairman of the oversight committee, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, pointed to a government document indicating that the anonymous shopper feature had been tested successfully in September and was to be “turned off” for unspecified reasons.
Mr. Issa tried repeatedly to determine
who in the administration had decided to go forward with the website on Oct. 1 despite indications that it was not ready.
“This was a monumental mistake to go live and effectively explode on the launch pad,” Mr. Issa said.
He added, “We have discovered and will undoubtedly continue to discover that efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines at the end.”
David A. Powner, director of information technology issues at the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said, “Clearly, knowing what we know now, a delay in the rollout would have made sense.”
one must begin with the unjustifiably negative coverage of them by the MSM.
Take as Exhibit A the following opinion piece by the Washington Post’s master of mockery, Dana Milbank:
2013-11-13-WP-Milbank-darrell-issas-obamacare-kangaroo-court
Darrell Issa’s Obamacare kangaroo courtBy Dana Milbank
Washington Post, 2013-11-13
“The American people do not want to see a kangaroo court here,” Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, said midway through Wednesday’s four-hour prosecution of Obama administration technology experts by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) hopped to attention. “ ‘Kangaroo court’ is quite an accusation,” he said, “and I hope the gentleman from Tennessee, when he uses the term kangaroo court in the future, will think better of making an accusation.”
Sorry, Mr. Chairman, but the pouch fits. It was indeed a kangaroo court, and Issa was the main marsupial.
No human makes leaps quite like Darrell Issa. He leaps to conclusions. He makes huge leaps of logic. He leaps before he looks. And he invariably leaps right into the White House, alleging high-level political misbehavior and administration corruption for just about everything that goes wrong.
On Wednesday, the topic was Obamacare, but the California Republican followed the script he used when investigating “Fast and Furious” gun-running, the Benghazi attack, and IRS targeting: make inflammatory allegations of high-level skullduggery, release selective information that appears to support the case while withholding exculpatory details, then use his chairman’s privileges to turn hearings into episodes of “The Darrell Issa Show.”
He went well beyond his own five minutes of questioning time Wednesday without halting, then cut off the ranking Democrat on the panel when he tried to do the same. Issa proceeded to interrupt no fewer than 12 members of the panel — Republicans and Democrats alike — to make additional speeches and ask further questions.
“Would the gentleman yield?”
“Would the gentlelady yield?”
“Could you yield for just 10 seconds?”
“Point of privilege!”
“I want to make a statement.”
He certainly did. And, as usual, Issa’s determination to be judge, jury, prosecutor and witness was counterproductive. The administration has a serious screw-up on its hands with the Obamacare launch, and President Obama’s poll numbers show it. Other congressional committees already were deep into investigations of the rollout before Issa started throwing around subpoenas and accusations. His involvement seems to have done little more than revive dispirited Democrats.
Three weeks ago, Issa alleged that the White House ordered contractors to disable the “anonymous shopper” function that would allow people to compare plans. “The White House was telling them they needed these changes,” he told CBS News. Why? He told Fox News that the administration “buried the information about the high cost of Obamacare” so that consumers wouldn’t get “sticker shock.”
In testimony Wednesday, however, an administration IT expert testified that he ordered the “shopper” function disabled until defects could be repaired and that there had been no political interference.
“So when Chairman Issa stated on national television that the White House ordered you . . . to disable the shopper function in September for political reasons, to avoid consumer sticker shock, that’s not true, is it?” asked Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.).
“I object,” Issa howled. “The gentleman is repeatedly disparaging and mischaracterizing what I’ve said.” Tierney then proceeded to read Issa’s quotes, verbatim.
The chairman, who made a fortune in car alarms before getting into politics, opened the hearing with his theory that this was “a monumental mistake” made because “efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines.”
He then allowed the witnesses to say a few words, but couldn’t help interjecting a question between the witnesses’ statements, before adding, “Please, don’t answer yet.”
When his question time did come, he finished it by telling the witnesses he would “recognize the ranking member” — Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) — “to try to rehabilitate your testimony.”
Issa sprung himself on colleagues regardless of rank or party — Republicans John Duncan (Tenn.) and Patrick McHenry (N.C.), Democrats Gerald Connolly (Va.) and Eleanor Holmes Norton, a D.C. delegate — asking them to yield him the floor.
When Republicans Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Jason Chaffetz (Utah) finished before their questioning time had expired, Issa helped himself to it. When Cooper noted, rhetorically, that “we’re not software engineers,” Issa interrupted to say, “You’ve got several here” on the Republican side of the dais.
Several times, before calling on the next questioner, Issa used the moment to offer some additional thoughts of his own: “Mr. [Trey] Gowdy, you’re right on that they should have had the A team on this. . . . You know, I never could quite understand how this thing could handle 60,000 simultaneous users but only do six in a day. . . . Success has many fathers, quite a few mothers, plenty of relatives, but failure is an orphan. You’re going to find an orphan here.”
Ah, yes, the verdict before the trial. And he wants to know why people think he runs a kangaroo court.
Twitter: @Milbank
[I (the author of this blog) have some comments on Milbank's article.
I, and I am sure many others, would like to know what went wrong in the development of the healthcare.gov website.
Representative Issa, whatever you may think of his politics, is a serious person,
who I have no doubt in his hearing made a good-faith effort to uncover some answers to that issue.
As an example, from the New York Times coverage of this hearing, we find that:
Mr. Issa tried repeatedly to determine[Excellent question.
who in the administration
had decided to go forward with the website on Oct. 1
despite indications that it was not ready.
Does Milbank, a Jewish graduate of Harvard, and thus twice part of the "elite",
care about this issue?
Or are such issues and questions of no interest to him?
The issues Milbank discusses at such length have no substantive importance.
Milbank gets one thing right, when he writes:]
The chairman, who made a fortune in car alarms before getting into politics,[Sure sounds to me like Representative Issa got that exactly right.
opened the hearing with his theory that
this was “a monumental mistake” made
because “efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines.”
What in that would Milbank disagree with?
Milbank concludes with:]
Several times, before calling on the next questioner, Issa used the moment to offer some additional thoughts of his own:[Again, sounds to me like Issa got that exactly right.
“Mr. [Trey] Gowdy, you’re right on that they should have had the A team on this. . . .
You know, I never could quite understand
how this thing could handle 60,000 simultaneous users
but only do six in a day. . . .
Success has many fathers, quite a few mothers, plenty of relatives,
but failure is an orphan.
You’re going to find an orphan here.”
Ah, yes, the verdict before the trial.
And he wants to know why people think he runs a kangaroo court.
Who in the Obama administration had unique responsibility for the healthcare.gov website?
I.e., it wasn't just one of the things they were responsible for,
but it was their sole responsibility,
and beyond that, they had authority over all decisions regarding the website.
The lack of such a person is a glaring defect in the Obama administration's approach to this development,
a point which Issa brings out,
but which Milbank criticizes him for doing so.
Issues such as this Milbank seems impervious to.
He can mock, but he does not seem willing or able to make a positive contribution
to the public's understanding of what went wrong.
Is this one of the values theWashington Post's asserts they have:
Mocking Issa's conduct of the hearing,
without providing insight into the substantive issues?
Moving away from the Milbank piece,
the Washington Post's main story on Obamacare that day
emphasized the low enrollment figures thus far for Obamacare,
while it all but ignored the Issa hearing:]
2013-11-13-WP-Goldstein-Kane-low-enrollment
Administration: 106,000 enrolled in health insurance in first month of HealthCare.govBy Amy Goldstein and Paul Kane
Washington Post, 2013-11-13
[The emphasis of this story is that of its headline, not its (full) URL.
The Issa hearing only comes up at the end of the story, in its final four paragraphs:]
...
The jockeying came as the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday
grilled several administration officials overseeing the technical work on the federal exchange.
One of them, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, an adviser to the president,
turned up only after the committee’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.),
issued a subpoena demanding his presence.
Park reiterated the administration’s assertion that
the Web site will be working smoothly for the “vast majority” of Americans
by the end of the month,
but he sidestepped repeated requests to be more precise.
The spotlight at the hearing was trained, in part,
on an official with direct oversight of the technical aspects of the Web site:
Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Republicans on the panel accused Chao and Park
of not including adequate protections for consumers’ privacy.
They suggested that political considerations came into play
when officials were deciding which features would be available on Day One.
At times, they referenced testimony Chao gave
during a recent closed-door session that lasted nine hours.
Chao, who has worked at CMS for two decades,
repeatedly said that his comments were taken out of context
and that he was not worried about the privacy of consumers’ personal information.
“There was some rearrangement of the words that I used,” he said.
[For a far more detailed and helpful account of what transpired at the hearing,
see the New York Times story.
Note especially the important information in this story
which Milbank not just ignored, but distracts attention away from
by his emphasis on the hearing's procedural aspects versus its substantive ones.]
2013-11-13-NYT-officials-say-they-dont-know-cost-of-health-website-fixes
Health Website Official Tells of White House BriefingsBy ROBERT PEAR and ERIC LIPTON
New York Times, 2013-11-13
WASHINGTON —
The chief digital architect for the federal health insurance marketplace said Wednesday that
he met periodically with White House aides
to discuss the status of the website over the last three years,
but he said the meetings focused narrowly on specific technical issues
and therefore gave the president no clear warning of the disaster that ensued on Oct. 1.
The official, Henry Chao, said he had provided “status briefings” to the White House
on the development of certain features of the website,
envisioned as the main vehicle for people to compare and buy insurance plans under the new health care law.
[Holy crow.
Where was the overview of the site's readiness for prime time,
both in terms of its functionality and its load-bearing capability?]
Jeanne M. Lambrew, the president’s health policy coordinator,
generally attended and often led the meetings,
Mr. Chao said at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The committee, investigating the rollout of the new health care law,
has requested testimony from Ms. Lambrew and from Nancy-Ann DeParle,
who was director of the White House Office of Health Reform from 2009 to 2011
and then deputy chief of staff for Mr. Obama until early this year.
Kathryn H. Ruemmler, the president’s chief lawyer,
rebuffed the panel’s request.
In a letter to the committee on Tuesday,
she said the testimony of Ms. Lambrew and Ms. DeParle was not needed
“in light of the extraordinary information
that has been provided to the Congress to date.”
Moreover, Ms. Ruemmler complained that Republicans on the committee
were seeking testimony on a “broad and amorphous range of issues”
not tied to any “legitimate oversight interest.”
[The question remains:
What did the White House managers for this project know about its status,
and what direction did they give?]
The panel is trying to find out
how much the White House knew about defects in the website, HealthCare.gov,
and whether politics contributed to some of the underlying problems.
Committee Republicans said they still wanted to hear from Mr. Lambrew and Ms. DeParle.
“They are the people we need” because
they were “the political people in charge,”
said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio.
At the hearing on Wednesday,
federal officials working on the project were unable to tell committee members
how much it would cost to fix the site,
on which the government has already spent more than $600 million.
Neither Mr. Chao nor Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the White House,
nor Steven VanRoekel, the chief information officer for the federal government,
could answer questions about the cost of repairing the site,
which has been plagued with software and hardware problems since it went live on Oct. 1.
[Unpleasant but understandable.
They really do not, and cannot, know how many problems remain.]
Even while testimony was underway before the oversight committee,
a separate House panel questioned other administration officials
about the security of the website
and the protection of personal information that consumers provide
when applying for health insurance and federal subsidies.
Roberta Stempfley, an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said there had been at least 16 reported attempts to infiltrate the system. In addition, she said, there has been at least one effort to delay or shut down the site, by an outside party trying to orchestrate a “denial of service” attack involving repeated queries meant to overload the system.
Ms. Stempfley, testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security, did not provide details of the incidents, which she said were being investigated. After the hearing, a Homeland Security Department official said none of the attempts appeared to have been successful or to have resulted in the unauthorized release of personal information. On an average day, the official said, 620 similar reports come in to the department.
The security of the health care website had not been fully tested when it opened to the public last month, according to federal officials and documents from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Many questions at the oversight committee hearing focused on website procedures that required consumers to create password-protected accounts before they could see the exact cost of health plans for which they were eligible.
Mr. Chao rejected Republican suggestions that the administration had blocked an “anonymous shopping” feature because it feared that consumers would be shocked if they saw the full unsubsidized prices of insurance policies.
In fact, Mr. Chao said, federal officials excluded the feature because it had failed to perform properly during testing. “It failed so miserably that we could not conscionably let people use it,” he said.
However, the chairman of the oversight committee, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, pointed to a government document indicating that the anonymous shopper feature had been tested successfully in September and was to be “turned off” for unspecified reasons.
Mr. Issa tried repeatedly to determine
who in the administration had decided to go forward with the website on Oct. 1 despite indications that it was not ready.
“This was a monumental mistake to go live and effectively explode on the launch pad,” Mr. Issa said.
He added, “We have discovered and will undoubtedly continue to discover that efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines at the end.”
David A. Powner, director of information technology issues at the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said, “Clearly, knowing what we know now, a delay in the rollout would have made sense.”
Labels: Dana Milbank, healthcare.gov, Washington Post
posted by KHarbaugh at 15:38
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