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Put nothing beyond these crooked sonsabitches:
CBS: Healthcare.gov Chief Project Manager Kept in Dark About Website ProblemsBY: Chief Project Manager for building healthcare.gov Henry Chao was apparently kept in the dark about glitches the Obamacare website experienced prior to its launch, Sharyl Attkison of reported Monday on CBS Evening News. Chao gave over nine hours of closed testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform earlier in preparation for this week’s hearing. Among the more disturbing revelations, Chao said he was unaware of a CMS September 3 memo which warned of two high security risks in the system. The threat posed by the technical issues posed a possibly “limitless” risk potential, according to the memo. However, Chao testified he had been informed that there were no “high” security risks:
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James O’Keefe, the guerrilla videographer who helped bring down ACORN (the “community organizing” group that Barack Obama worked for as a lawyer and trainer) and got NPR’s president fired, is back. This time, his undercover investigators focused on Obamacare’s “navigators,” the nearly 50,000 people who, in the words of the Department of Health and Human Services, “will serve as an in-person resource for Americans who want additional assistance in shopping for and enrolling in plans” on the Obamacare exchanges (at least when they’re finally working). The total value of grants doled out for nonprofits and community organizations to hire navigators has topped $67 million nationwide, and some of the money is going to a group run by ACORN’s highly controversial founder. The events of O’Keefe’s video of a Texas navigator site run by the National Urban League are a familiar sight to viewers of his past efforts exposing Medicaid and voter fraud. Government-paid workers supposedly trained to uphold the law advise clients on how to lie on government forms, evade legal requirements, and ignore proper procedures.
“You lie because your premiums will be higher,” one navigator advises an investigator for O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, who tells the worker he sometimes smokes. “Don’t tell them that. Don’t tell ’em.” The investigator then poses as a low-income worker at a university who has unreported cash income on the side, worrying about how that might affect his premium subsidies. That’s no problem for a navigator, who says, “Don’t get yourself in trouble by declaring it now.” “Yeah, it didn’t happen,” another navigator says. One more chimes in: “Never report it.” Records show that the National Urban League was paid $376,000 by the federal government for its Obamacare outreach in Texas. O’Keefe’s cameras then visit Enroll America, a nationwide nonprofit group that has launched a multi-state grassroots campaign to help millions of Americans sign up for health coverage. Daniel Clayton of Enroll America says the group is “purely nonprofit. It’s not partisan, non-political.” But when Brian Pendleton of Enroll America is introduced at a speaking engagement, Enroll America is described as “the official group for the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” Enroll America, O’Keefe reports, appears to be sharing data and working directly with an explicitly political group called Battleground Texas, activities that he notes “are prohibited unless certain conditions are met.” Adrian Bell, the regional field director for Battleground Texas, proudly notes the group was “started by President Obama’s national field director” and is “dedicated to turning Texas blue There’s much more in the video, which O’Keefe hints will not be his last. Left unexplored is how so many navigators nationwide were hired without any background checks required. While Texas and some other states have passed requirements of their own, the absence of such checks at the federal level was acknowledged by HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week. She was asked by Texas senator John Cornyn if “a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to them.” “It’s possible,” was Secretary Sebelius’s less-than-comforting reply. Michael Astrue served as commissioner of Social Security until earlier this year, and in the 1990s served as general counsel for HHS. He wrote in The Weekly Standardlast month that he is genuinely frightened of the lax security surrounding the Obamacare website, and the fact that navigators will access the federal data hub to help people enroll:
In Texas, some of those people work for Local 100 United Labor Unions, a New Orleans group run by ACORN founder Wade Rathke. Local 100 is a “sub-grantee” providing navigators for the Southern United Neighborhoods group, which received a $600,678 grant to promote Obamacare enrollment. It also received a $270,193 grant for similar work in Arkansas and a $486,123 grant for Louisiana. Marcel Reid, a former dissident board member of ACORN who broke with the group in 2008 over its questionable practices, told me earlier this year, “ACORN is forming new groups under new mismanagement, and if Wade Rathke is involved in any of them, it spells trouble.” Many of the Navigator problems uncovered in O’Keefe’s videos and by other media outlets could have been predicted, given the propensity of Obama World to associate with highly ideological and often administratively sloppy “community organizers.” Last Friday, the Washington Post ran a piece by Ed Rogers, a former top deputy in the 1988 George H. W. Bush campaign, entitled “Six Reasons Obamacare Will Get Worse for Democrats.” One reason leaps out:
The law’s problems are coming from more sides than a pentadecagon. But one of the most serious things undermining its credibility is the Obama administraion’s seemingly complete indifference to corruption within one of the key groups tasked with its implementation. We’ll have to see just how much worse it gets. — John Fund is national-affairs columnist for National Review Online. |
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The obumbler nose down the next block and growing:
Krauthammer: Obamacare Crafted In A Way To "Maximize Number Of People Who Would Lose Insurance"CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, this is the Gulf oil spill -- drip, drip, drip -- and the president being utterly helpless. Except that Obama is the one who drilled the well. And this is not outside of him -- this is his doing, his signature achievement. I think as damaging as the website problems are, I think much more damaging is what his numbers are with people rating him on job approval and whether they have a favorable opinion of him.
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