Remember all the promises that President Obama made concerning his plan for a National Healthcare System?

It was going to be the great thing since sliced bread. Millions would have access to “affordable Healthcare”.

Well, to say that Scooter’s Signature Program’s Launch has not lived up to expectations is like saying The Titanic ran into an ice cube.

There are more problems with this fiasco than you can shake a stick at.

For example, let’s look at the first point-of-contact with the program for an American Insurance-seeker: the website, Healthcare.gov.

According to reuters.com…

A Reuters review of government documents shows that the contract to build the federal Healthcare.gov online insurance website – key to President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform – tripled in potential total value to nearly $292 million as new money was assigned to the work beginning in April this year.

The increase coincided with warnings from federal and state officials that the information technology underlying the online marketplaces, or exchanges, where people could buy Obamacare health insurance was in trouble.

In March, Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer at the lead Obamacare agency, said at an insurance-industry meeting that he was “pretty nervous” about the exchanges being ready by October 1, adding, “let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” At the same event, his colleague Gary Cohen said, “Everyone recognizes that day one will not be perfect.”

The contract to build Healthcare.gov, issued to the CGI Federal unit of Montreal-based CGI Group, has come under scrutiny after the site, offering new subsidized health insurance in 36 states, stalled within minutes of its October 1 launch, leaving millions of Americans unable to create accounts or shop for plans.

In its third week of operations, the website continues to experience problems, which government officials say they are working day and night to repair. Even allies of the Obama administration have been highly critical, with former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs calling it “excruciatingly embarrassing” and calling for “some people” to be fired.

How and why the system failed, and how long it will take to fix, remains unclear. But evidence of a last-minute surge in spending suggests the needs of the project were growing well beyond the initial expectations of the contractor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Why this went from a ceiling of $93.7 million to $292 million is hard to fathom,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group that analyzes government contracting.

“Something changed. It suggests they ran into problems and knew last spring that they couldn’t do it for $93.7 million. They just blew through the original ceiling. Where was the contract oversight?”

Just who is the CGI Group? What sort of reputation did they have, even before they built this massive failure of a website?

According to a website, out of Fairfax County, VA, fairfaxunderground.com…

Canadian provincial health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obamacare health exchange websites, the Washington Examiner has learned.

CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was officially terminated in September 2012 by a Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s flagship online medical registry.

The online registry was supposed to be up and running by June 2011.

The CMS officials refused to say if federal officials knew of its parent company’s IT failure in Canada when awarding the six contracts.

It wasn’t just those contracts. As mentioned earlier, Obama dumped huge amounts of money on CGI.

CGI Federal is a subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group. With offices in Fairfax, Va., the subsidiary has been a darling of the Obama administration, which since 2009 has bestowed it with $1.4 billion in federal contracts, according to USAspending.gov.

HHS is by far the single largest federal contractor of CGI, showering it with $645 million in contracts. The Defense Department pays the Canadian company $254 million, the EPA $58 million and the Justice Department $36 million.

In comparison, in 2008, under President George W. Bush, CGI contracts totaled only $16.5 million for all federal departments and agencies.

The interesting question is why Obama dumped 1.4 billion in taxpayer money on a company this incompetent and ignored all the warnings.

It’s one more thing that ought to be investigated.

I agree. Let’s investigate. With any corporation, all negotiations begin with the CEO.  CGI Group, Inc. is no different.

Allow me to introduce you to Mr. George Schindler…

Mr. George D. Schindler has been the President of United States and Canada at CGI Group Inc. since January 2013 and served as the President U.S. Operations since October 2011. As a member of CGI’s Management Committee, Mr. Schindler also participates in the development and execution of CGI’s global strategy. Mr. Schindler served as the President of Stanley, Inc. since August 2010. Mr. Schindler served as the President of CGI Federal Inc. from 2006 to October 1, 2011, where he led CGI’s business with the Civilian, Defense, and Intelligence Sectors of the U.S. government. Under his leadership, CGI Federal was named the 2010 Greater Washington U.S. Government Contractor of the Year (greater than $300 million) by the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, PSC and Washington Technology. CGI was also named one of the “9 Hot Companies to Watch” by Federal Computer Week.

In August 2012, Schindler donated $1,000 to Obama’s Re-Election Campaign,according to opensecrets.org. However, by then, his company had already secured the contract to build the website.

That donation was made at the very same time that a bunch of business leaders, including Schindler, met with the president at the White House, to talk about “insourcing”, a pleasant little term which the Administration made up to describe their pleading with American Corporations not to move their assets out of the country to get away from all the taxes that the same Obama Administration was penalizing them with.

Informationweek.com reported at the time that…

“You’ve heard of outsourcing. Well, these companies are insourcing,” the president said. “That’s exactly the kind of commitment to country that we need–especially right now, when we’re in a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those aspiring to get to the middle class here in the United States.”

Obama added: “When a lot of folks are still looking for work, now is the time for us to step on the gas.” And while he gave a nod to what he said were the “the bottom line” benefits of sourcing domestically, Obama asserted “a moral case” for insourcing.

Great sound bites, especially in a political season where attention is focused on 99 percenters, Occupy protesters, and general class warfare. But here’s the reality: There’s no broad trend toward insourcing, but there is a recognition that the pressure to cut costs over the past decade led many companies to push the envelope on offshoring a bit too far, and that it’s time for some rebalancing.

…CGI Group is a midsize tech services company based in Quebec, with offices in more than 40 U.S. locations as well as centers in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai, India. CGI employs roughly 10,000 workers in the U.S. and 20,000 elsewhere.

Of late, the company has been opening development centers in small U.S. towns such as Belton, Texas, Lebanon, Va., and Troy, Ala. CGI U.S. president George Schindler, who attended Obama’s insourcing summit, told me that such locales are becoming more cost competitive with India and offer a pool of untapped IT talent that can add some geographic balance to CGI’s workforce.

“These are areas that have been harder hit by the downturn than others, but they offer a set of dynamics that are working in our favor,” Schindler told me following his visit to the White House. “They offer a great cost of living, they are motivated from a local government perspective, and there’s partnerships with community colleges that can train people in the skills we need. It makes an attractive cost case, whereas the opposite is happening in some other parts of the world.”

As for creating jobs in the U.S., Schindler says it’s great to be able to contribute to local communities. “But it’s business first–the economics have to be there,” he says.

Since Schindler had already secured the Healthcare.gov contract, several months before Obama’s “Insourcing” Meeting, that means that the August 2012 meeting was, like everything else Obama does, a Dog and Pony Show, held for the purpose of Propaganda.

And, as reported above, Schindler’s Corporation had already been “outsourcing” to Canada., where their work was “less than stellar”, to say the least.

To summarize, the failure of Obama’s Rollout of Obamacare , specifically, his miserable excuse of a website, is the result of old-fashioned, “you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-your’s” political shenanigans.

How’s that “Hope and Change” thingy workin’ out for y’all?

Until He Comes,

KJ