By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--December 4, 2013
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Although the Affordable Care Act has been law for three and a half years, one third of the funds going to the top contractors working on the federal exchanges were awarded in the six months before the new insurance marketplaces opened Oct. 1, a Bloomberg Government Analysis has found.
The torrent of late spending — almost $352 million of $1 billion in awards to the top 10 contractors — indicates the magnitude of the work still to be done as opening day approached, and helps explain the information technology problems that have dogged the exchange system since its launch. In a typical IT project, spending ramps up to a peak, then trails off during the final phase.
The analysis runs only through Sept. 30. A subsequent 16-day government shutdown dried up new contracts and reduced the flow of contract record keeping to a trickle. But given the seriousness of the IT problems and the fact that most of the contracts are on a cost-plus basis, the companies almost certainly are in line for another burst of spending aimed at quickly making repairs.What's amazing is that a huge percentage of this spending all happened in 2013, right about the time that contractors began sounding alarm bells about Healthcare.gov's likely implosion. Not only is this an accounting of how much lucre the Obama administration squandered on a still-broken website, it serves as further evidence that they were well aware that disaster was looming. They were obviously well aware that the exchange was about to hit the fan. Instead of admitting that, they lied to the American people about their level of readiness while, behind the scenes, they threw gobs of cash at the site in a last ditch effort to save their bacon. They went full speed ahead, straight into oblivion.
In aggregate, the 10 firms won a third of their health law-related contract dollars in the six months ended Sept. 30. Besides showing the rush to issue contract awards in the months leading up to the opening of exchanges, the BGOV analysis also revealed that the implementation of the health law is costing substantially more than generally is portrayed.Given that Bloomberg's data only covers the period prior to the government shutdown - before Obama decided to ramp the project up to "private sector velocity" - one has to wonder how much higher the tally is today. How much more cash did they have to burn in order to get the federal exchange to deliver error-ridden signups at an 80% success rate, with no back-end billing system or security?
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