#Obamacare: Sebelius’ history of IT failures in Kansas

Posted by: Phineas on October 24, 2013 at 3:38 pm

**Posted by Phineas



“A track record of epic failure”

Naturally, this is the person you want leading the biggest, most complicated information technology project in US government history, involving a full takeover of 16% of the nation’s economy. For that, my friends, only the best will do:

Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ failure at designing websites to provide government services began during her term as governor of Kansas, long before the Obamacare website debacle, Kansas political insiders told The Daily Caller.

Sebelius oversaw numerous costly and disastrous government website projects during her six-year governorship (2003-2009), including a failed update of the Department of Labor’s program to provide unemployment pay and other services and similar updates pertaining to the Department of Administration and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) services.

The Department of Labor’s overhaul of its computer programs was a notable boondoggle, according to 14-year former Kansas state senator and former state Labor Secretary Karin Brownlee.

“In the Kansas Senate, I chaired the Commerce committee. We had oversight over the Department of Labor. For years, we watched as the Department of Labor under Sebelius worked on that computer program. After seven years and $50 million, something should work,” Brownlee told TheDC.

“In Kansas if you have a 40 or 50 million dollar project, that’s a lot of money,” Brownlee said, noting that the Labor Department project was funded by federal money while other Sebelius website projects sucked up state taxpayer dollars. “They started and stopped that project with at least 3 different major contractors.”

When Brownlee was appointed to head the state’s Department of Labor under new Republican governor Sam Brownback in 2011, she was tasked with cleaning up Sebelius’ technical mess.

Read the article for several example of Sebelius’s managerial incompetence. This line, though, poses a very good question:

“We pretty much expected HealthCare.gov to fail, because she has a pattern of failing on these big initiatives. We thought that was why she was not nominated originally,” Schwab said.

In other words, why did the administration hire someone with such a miserable performance record in just these kinds of projects?

Perhaps we shouldn’t wonder, though. Obama’s first nominee for HHS Secretary, former Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), had to withdraw from consideration under pressure of ethics and tax questions. And who can forget “Turbo-Tax” Timothy Geithner, whose nomination for Treasury Secretary was almost derailed by questions of tax evasion… until he convinced people he was just too dumb to work a simple tax program right.

Vetting is obviously not the President’s strong suit. After all, no one ever asked any tough questions about his background and qualifications (in either election), so why should he do the same for his own nominees? In fact, this excerpt from The New York Times via The Federalist makes one wonder if he was ever really interested in doing the job at all:

Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum. In private conversations with aides, Mr. Obama described Syria as one of those hellish problems every president faces, where the risks are endless and all the options are bad.

That was in reference to Syria this last summer, which had turned into a genuine crisis for the administration. But we know Obama isn’t really interested in foreign affairs, except for the occasional apology tour. But Obamacare is his baby, the thing he’s most likely to be remembered for in the history books. It’s his New Deal, his Great Society, the great liberal project. Wouldn’t he want to be danged sure the person he put in charge was qualified to carry it out?

In real life, I manage a small staff. I hire, train, evaluate, and, if needed, get rid of each of them. We have a job to do, and seeing that they do their job right is part my job. And I am judged in part on how well my staff does their jobs. The same can be said of any boss, any manager, any…. Chief Executive.

Shouldn’t President Obama be held to that same standard?


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Is Sebelius shaking down health-care execs to finance Obamacare?

Geoffrey Cowley, @geoffreycowley




U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius speaks during the opening plenary of the National Health Policy Conference organized by The AcademyHealth February 4, 2013 in Washington, DC. Sebelius spoke on the Obama Administration’s health policy priorities. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Health care reform may be President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, but it’s still a work in progress. The Affordable Care Act’s most ambitious provisions—the expansion of Medicaid , the rollout of 50 state-based insurance exchanges, the enforcement of a law requiring everyone to find coverage—are all set to kick in on January 1. The deadlines would be daunting even in a friendly political environment, but the path is now littered with landmines.

A small one exploded last weekend, after the Washington Post reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was soliciting private donations to help implement Obamacare. Congressional Republicans have forced the administration to go begging by rejecting its funding requests. But the same Republicans pounced when the HHS effort came to light—and the critics’ predictable questions have left the administration on its heels.

At issue is whether Sebelius has requested donations from industries her agency regulates—a practice that would be ethically improper and possibly illegal. The Post story forcefully asserted that she has. Under the headline “Sebelius turns to health executives to finance Obamacare,” the paper reported that she had spent the past three months hitting up insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical officials for “large financial donations” to help the government shepherd consumers into the nation’s new health system. The claim was attributed to an anonymous HHS official and an unnamed “industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities.”

The paper quoted agency spokesman Jason Young denying that Sebelius had “solicited funds from industries that HHS regulates.” But the charge set off a flurry of news coverage and righteous outrage. “To solicit funds from health-care executives to help pay for the implementation of the President’s $2.6 trillion health spending law is absurd,” Sen. Orrin Hatch said in a statement. “I will be seeking more information from the administration about these actions to help better understand whether there are conflicts of interest and if it violated federal law.”

Lamar Alexander, the senior Republican on the Senate health committee, went further, likening the secretary’s fundraising effort to the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan administration officials secretly sold arms to Iran and funneled the proceeds to right-wing insurgents in Nicaragua. “Secretary Sebelius’ fundraising . . . should be fully investigated by Congress,” he told reporters in Nashville on Saturday.

Will these charges stick? Is a cabinet secretary really shaking down the very industries she regulates? HHS acknowledges that she has asked them to help raise public awareness. The agency also confirms that she has asked business leaders from outside the health sector to help finance groups like Enroll America, a nonprofit foundation set up to educate consumers about the new health care law. Those activities are all kosher under the Public Health Service Act.

But Young, the HHS spokesman, still disputes the central premise of the Washington Post story and all the criticism it has sparked. “The secretary has made no fundraising request to entities regulated by HHS,” he says. “We’ve worked with a wide range of stakeholders. But when it comes to fundraising, we ask only non-regulated entities”—that is, no one from the health-care industry.

If that’s true, HHS could quickly clear the air by releasing a log of the calls Sebelius has made. Young says the agency is busy preparing one and will release it shortly.

This scandal-plagued administration should hope it vindicates her, but the congressional Republicans calling for her head should reflect on their own role in the affair. After failing repeatedly to repeal or overturn Obamacare, they’re now working to thwart its implementation: that’s why Sibelius is begging business leaders for the funds to secure the nation’s health. The richest country in the world should be able to do better.


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The Swine Flu Conspiracy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMqYlnAiIUU&feature=player_embeddedhttp://

Conspiracists Push 'Bilderberger' Theory

Conspiracists Push 'Bilderberger' Theory
AOL
posted: 1 HOUR 9 MINUTES AGO

(March 15) - Another conspiracy theory surrounding President Barack Obama is making the rounds, according to Politico.com.

The latest one contends that many top officials in Obama's administration are involved in a clandestine global cabal bent on creating a one-world government that supersedes the United States.
For decades, conspiracy theorists have viewed the Bilderberg group, an international organization made up of political, financial, academic and military heavyweights that comes together annually to discuss world affairs, as similar to the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations -- two groups comprised of influential movers and shakers who, some say, control world events from behind the scenes.
And now, some in the Obama administration who have taken part in Bilderberg conferences in the past are gaining attention for their alleged involvement in a secret bid for worldwide domination.

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Bilderberg participant who was recently nominated by Obama for the Health and Human Services secretary post, is the latest high-profile figure to be singled out.

Skip over this content One conspiracy-minded Web site called PrisonPlanet.com said that if confirmed, Sebelius "will be pleased to do the bidding of the Bilderbergers in the Obama administration."

The fact that other top members of the Obama team -- economists Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker -- have participated in Bilderberg conferences has only added fuel to the fire.

This latest theory comes just weeks after AOL ran a story about the Birthers, a group of conservatives who believe Obama is ineligible to be president because of alleged questions surrounding his birth status.

Click here to read more about the Bilderberg conspiracy from Politico.com.

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Source: http://news.aol.com/article/bilderberger-conspiracy/382953

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