Wonkbook: 40 percent of Obamacare’s IT isn’t even built yet

Posted by Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas

HealthCare.gov is still 40 percent unfinished. “The chief digital architect for the federal health insurance marketplace said Tuesday that 30 percent to 40 percent of the project was still being built. The official, Henry Chao, made the assessment in testimony before a panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Lawmakers expressed surprise that so much work remained to be done seven weeks after the federal website opened to the public. Mr. Chao, the deputy chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the government was still working on “back office systems,” including those needed to pay insurance companies that are supposed to provide coverage to millions of people under President Obama’s health care law. “We have yet — we still have to build the financial management aspects of the system, which includes our accounting system and payment system and reconciliation system,” Mr. Chao said. These parts of the system, he said, are “still being developed and tested.”” Robert Pear in The New York Times.

Despite Mr Barack Hussein Obama’s personal promise that the ACA site would be fully functional by the latter part of November.

It is not.

And I am in keeping with my own personal promise to never link the two words “president” with “Obama” since 2008.  I am nothing if but a man of my word.

Mr Obama has created a littered trail of broken promises for not only the last few years, but specifically with regard to his ACA.

The front end of the site wouldn’t work.

Now, the back end of the site is guaranteed not to work, according to digital professionals.

Which means this:

Those who signed up for ObakaKare within its stringent limits may find themselves as completely unknown quotients, come January of 2014.

Because the back end of the ACA failed to connect to the various health care providers so linked.

Can you imagine those persons, expecting themselves covered, going into an office and finding they are not?  Can you imagine the frustration, the anger, the sense and feeling of betrayal?

Get a grasp of that sense.  Because it is coming.

Further, from CNBC.com:

No security ever built into Obamacare site: Hacker

by Matthew J. Belvedere

It could take a year to secure the risk of “high exposures” of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday.

“When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn’t appear to have happened this time,” said David Kennedy, a so-called “white hat” hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week.

“It’s really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn’t built into it,” said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec. “We’re talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself.”

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw the implementation of the website, the components used to build the site are compliant with standards set by Federal security authorities.

“The privacy and security of consumers’ personal information are a top priority for us. Security testing happens on an ongoing basis using industry best practices to appropriately safeguard consumers’ personal information,” said the spokesperson.

Another online security expert—who spoke at last week’s House hearing and then on CNBC—said the federal Obamacare website needs to be shut down and rebuilt from scratch. Morgan Wright, CEO of Crowd Sourced Investigations said: “There’s not a plan to fix this that meets the sniff test of being reasonable.”

Imagine your chagrin.

Imagine you had input a massive amount of your personal information into the healthcare.gov site, and you were stonewalled for minutes or hours or perhaps days.  No telling.

Then imagine your chagrin when you discover you are not covered because the “back end” of the ACA site didn’t manage to communicate with the insurance provider you chose.

BZ