Tweet of the Day, #Obamacare testing train wreck edition

**Posted by Phineas

"Train wreck"
“I didn’t test the site. I thought you did!”

National Review’s Jim Geraghty catches HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitting in the pages of The Wall Street Journal something she should have known years ago:

This is going to sit well with her boss, don’t you think? After all, the fourth-greatest president ever is always willing to humbly own up to mistakes. He might even recognize the mistake he made in hiring the former Kansas governor and fire her in the spirit of accountability.

Oh, stop laughing.

Besides, as Jim argues elsewhere, why should we want her fired?

If you think Sebelius is a blitheringly incompetent leader and manager, who ignores red flags and who is now requiring underlings to attempt increasingly implausible, desperate spin, and you want to see Obamacare go awayΒ .Β .Β .Β why would you want to get rid of her? The next HHS secretary might be better at the job.

As Napoleon once said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”

Speaking of that “testing issue” Sebelius isn’t the only one to acknowledge a mistake total, catastrophic screw up. Writing in the Washington Examiner, Richard Pollock reports that Sebelius was indeed right when she said they had only a brief time to test the site and its systems. “Brief,” as in 4-6 days before launch:

Federal officials did not permit testing of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website or issue final system requirements until four to six days before its Oct. 1 launch, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the project.

The individual, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the troubled Obamacare website project as suffering from top-level management disarray, changing systems requirements and recurring delays.

The root cause of the problems was a pivotal decision by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials to act as systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program. Usually this role is reserved for the prime information technology contractor.

As a result, full testing of the site was delayed until four to six days before the fateful Oct. 1 launch of the health care exchanges, the individual said.

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Federal officials were β€œfreezing requirements in time to permit full testing at all levels of the site β€” integration testing, user testing, performance testing and tuning,” the individual said.

β€œNormally a system this size would need 4-6 months of testing and performance tuning, not 4-6 days,” the individual said.

No, really? When you’re only taking over 16% of the entire US economy?? Surely you jest.

ReadΒ the whole article. This is how our $634 million was spent.Β Obamacare, and all the revelations like this coming out every day, is the greatest selling point for small-government conservatism America has ever seen.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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