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Users visiting the Obama administration’s Healthcare.gov site are being tracked by 15 different sites via cookies installed on their browsers.Using the Chrome browser plug-in Collusion for Chrome, The Daily Caller was able to determine that a user who visits the Obamacare site will have 15 different sites collecting information about them.The sites include: polldaddy.com, googletagmanager.com, doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com, youtube.com, dnn506yrbagrg.cloudfront.net, ytimg.com, quantserve.com, chartbeat.com, google.com, bing.com, duckduckgo.com, pingdom.net, mxpnl.com and optimizely.com.PollDaddy.com, for example, which is managed by Automattic — the same company that manages WordPress — conducts polls and surveys for companies.Pingdom tracks site performance issues. Kissmetrics tracks people across multiple platforms,...

HealthCare.Gov Needs Five Million Code Lines Rewritten By Andrew Johnson October 21, 2013 9:13 AM Comments 42 Obamacare’s online exchanges have been riddled with problems since they came online three weeks ago, and those issues may continue for at least the next few weeks. Contractors said fixing the problems by the November 1 deadline set by the administration would be “unrealistic,” according to the New York Times. From the sluggish websites to garbled enrollment information, the flaws require the extensive rewriting of code: “One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be...

The Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday it was bringing in outside help to resolve some of the technical woes that have beset the federally run insurance exchanges, which the agency acknowledged “has not lived up to the expectations of the American people.” “We are committed to doing better,” agency officials said in a blog post that also said that “our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve healthcare.gov.” Spokespeople for the agency didn’t immediately respond to questions seeking more...

A top Democratic senator said Sunday that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius will testify before Congress about the problem-plagued ObamaCare website, amid a growing call for her to accept requests to testify. “Ultimately, Secretary Sebelius will testify,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, told “Fox News Sunday.”

Full Title: Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two; Update: Wasn’t tested until days before launch?Via Lachlan Markay and Ace, who calls it “Nixonian.” This is the rare Hot Air item that might actually make liberals angrier at the White House than conservatives. If you’d staked your party’s credibility on realizing the utopian dream of universal health care only to have Obama deliver this fartburger, you’d be furious. Why anyone on either side still wants Sebelius in charge, I have...

In a Politico article lamenting the second week of failed performance of Healthcare.gov, the Obamacare insurance website, the unnamed official attempts to explain why the whole thing has been such a dismal failure: it's the Republican's fault.

Confirming our fears from a few days ago, the early numbers are in for Obamacare... and they are not good. Of course, listening to "bloggers" an be bad for your health, but it seems, very few of the million of "uninsured" have decided that it is as crucial as the "leader" has exclaimed. As Millard Brown Digital reports, fewer than 1% of those trying to register for health insurance under Obamacare have completed the enrollment process. The following inverted pyramid highlights the dismal reality of the Affordable Car Act so far...   

CGI Federal is the Canadian IT contractor responsible for creating most of the ObamaCare website. Tuesday, after describing the site as a "complete train wreck," the Washington Post took an in-depth look at the company -- its origins, track record, and how it landed the ObamaCare contract. It is all worth a read, but one staffer told the Post that the working environment at CGI is so awful today that "People are getting sick, fainting in conference calls." The healthcare.gov debacle has taken its toll on the working environment at CGI Federal's 10-story complex in Fairfax, Va., according to a...

The technical troubles with Obamacare’s exchanges are bad enough that even supporters are turning critical. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, a longtime champion of the health law, has declared the launch so far a “failure” and a “disaster.” Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is asking whether anyone will be fired over the botched rollout. But here’s the thing: The serious problems that have gotten the most attention so far may only be the beginning of the headaches for the exchanges. Right now, the most visible problems are concentrated on the user end, in the registration and enrollment process....

By all accounts, the roll out of Obamacare’s insurance exchanges has been a fiasco of epic proportions. But diehard supporters claim that this is a minor roadblock that won’t affect the law’s long-term future. “Obamacare is here,” lectured liberal columnist Eugene Robinson. “Get used to it.” Robinson might be right. Then again when funny man Jon Stewart echoes Tea Party “wackos” to demand a one-year delay of the individual mandate, the lynchpin of the edifice, you know all is not well. And Stewart is hardly alone. CNN anchor Wolfe Blitzer is also recommending a delay. The reality is that the...

Obamacare website looks "like nobody tested it," programmer says (CBS News) Healthcare.gov launched more than a week ago, and while millions of Americans have signed into the site, not many have been able to actually sign up for insurance because of glitches with the website. Administration officials implementing the new health care law will be on the hot seat Wednesday as the House Oversight Committee hopes to find out what the problems were. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told CBS News' Jan Crawford that he plans to ask how the mess surrounding the website could even happen. No one knows how...

What the president heralds as his signature accomplishment is not only creating great domestic upheaval as a political and policy failure, it is also an immense American technological failure on display for the world to see. The American brand has been dealt some sharp blows under this administration. We are suffering from a weak economy, reeling from the recent embarrassing debacle over Syria’s chemical weapons, and we still haven’t brought anyone to justice over what happened in Benghazi. The world watched as our enemies protected junior nobody Edward Snowden when he handed over our secrets, and now the world is...

The Obamacare online exchanges have been met with several concerns since they launched at the beginning of the month, but a recent discovery may raise further fears about privacy under the health-care law. The Weekly Standard’s Jeryl Bier reports that during the process of creating an account, the website asks users if they accept the “Terms & Conditions,” which prohibit unauthorized attempts to upload information or change the site. But the website’s source code, which is not visible to users on the standard “Terms & Conditions” page, includes a warning that users should have “no reasonable expectation of privacy”:

Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut. Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there...

Obamacare is imploding. But thanks to the government shutdown, everyone is talking about the implosion of the GOP instead. The shutdown drama has distracted from the fact that Obamacare’s debut is worse than many realize — and it threatens the fundamental viability of the law itself. The administration claims the Obamacare online exchanges crashed because the Web site got more than 8 million hits in the first week. Please. You know how many people visit Amazon.com every week? More than 70 million. The difference is: 1.) Amazon seldom crashes, and 2.) on Amazon, people actually buy something.

A growing consensus of IT experts, outside and inside the government, have figured out a principal reason why the website for Obamacare’s federally-sponsored insurance exchange is crashing. Healthcare.gov forces you to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping. This, in turn, creates a massive traffic bottleneck, as the government verifies your information and decides whether or not you’re eligible for subsidies. HHS bureaucrats knew this would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away.

The irony is rich. President Obama told Maryland college students just days before the launch of his healthcare "marketplace" that it would take just a few keystrokes to compare prices and policy details. "Don't take my word for it, go on the website," Obama told a crowd at Prince George's Community College in Largo, MD, five days before the launch. "See for yourself what the prices are. See for yourself what the choices are and then make up your own mind. That's all I'm asking." But the bureaucrats in his administration clearly weren't listening. They created a website that is...

The website for President Obama's health care overhaul is still experiencing technical problems more than a week after its launch. Anna Werner revisits a Dallas man who still can't log on to the website and compare health plans.

A provision in ObamaCare requiring medical providers to switch from paper patient charts to electronic records is intended to reduce costs and improve care. But privacy advocates fear the transition is too fast for security measures to keep pace. Daimon Geopfert -- a security and privacy expert with the McGladrey consulting group -- compares the situation to a group of banks with tunnels to the same vault. "The security of that master vault, in many cases, is as insecure as the least secure of those banks," he said.