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WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden is apologizing to Americans that the website for new health care exchanges wasn't ready to go when it launched on Oct. 1. Biden becomes the highest-level administration official to apologize for the website's failures. .. Biden says he and Obama were under the impression the site was ready. He says he's confident it will work by the end of November ..

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, apologized Wednesday for the frustration that millions of Americans have experienced while trying to shop for insurance on the HealthCare.gov website, even as she defended the problem-plagued rollout of President Obama’s health care law and tried to explain the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of individual insurance policies. Ms. Sebelius, fighting for her political life at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said she was “as frustrated and angry as anyone with the flawed launch of HealthCare.gov.” Ms. Sebelius said she was ultimately responsible for “this debacle,” including...

<p>Due to glitches in New York’s health care exchange website, citizens attempting to navigate the Obamacare enrollment process are winding up at a cupcake shop in Brooklyn, the New York Post reported.</p> <p>Brooklyn Cupcake has been erroneously listed as one of 288 locations where New Yorkers have been directed by the state Health Department for assistance seeking medical coverage.</p>

WASHINGTON, Oct 30 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's top health official apologized on Wednesday for the botched rollout of the government's healthcare website, acknowledging it was a "debacle", while also blaming insurers for cancelling coverage for hundreds of thousands of people. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, .. vowed to win back the confidence of millions of disappointed Americans. "Hold me accountable for the debacle. I'm responsible," Sebelius said in response to questions from Marsha Blackburn, the Republican U.S. Representative of Tennessee, .. Technical glitches have dogged the Healthcare.gov since its launch on Oct. 1, .. . But critics...

<p>Health Fail: Healthcare.gov's implosion may be due to one of its major developers being selected less for its technical competence than for cronyism. Perhaps the White House was hoping for a friends and family discount.</p> <p>Why pick a Canadian firm with a French name to help develop the official ObamaCare website? It certainly wasn't based on the track record in developing health care software of CGI Federal, the IT contractor that orchestrated most of the Healthcare.gov website.</p>

We don’t know the identity of the model whose face graces the splash page of online train wreck HealthCare.gov — we (and many others) are just glad we’re not her. It must be tough to be the face of failure on every news broadcast. Now, Obamacare Splash Page Stock Photo Girl has found a new gig, on the cover of the new National Review. The clever cover re-creates the HealthCare.gov splash page with a few modifications, including a big green “Abandon Hope, All Who Click Here” button where the “Apply Online” button used to be. Another new feature is a...

A look at why HealthCare.gov hasn't been user-friendly and what its flaws suggest about its development and launch

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the no-bid contract to build the failed Obamacare website. Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company. Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

It's hard to fathom the sheer insanity following the creation and utter failure of the ObamaCare website. With an amazingly high price tag of roughly $300 million for the site itself, and hundreds of millions going to associated companies to facilitate the rollout, this entire situation has been an incredible disaster for President Obama and a colossal waste of taxpayer money. The final cost of the website is still being pondered as the GAO says the cost was $394 million and that's not including the costs of administrative costs and salaries for the exchanges themselves. Of course, since it's taxpayer...

In the heady days after the October 1 launch of the Affordable Care Act -- better known as ObamaCare -- Lady Gaga, Amy Poehler, Nina Dobrev, Rosario Dawson, Sarah Silverman, Olivia Wilde, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Hudson, Pearl Jam, Lance Bass, John Legend, Alyssa Milano and Kerry Washington joined the President to encourage Americans to #getcovered. Since then, technical glitches and website snafus have so marred the ObamaCare website that the team who built it has been called to testify before Congress on Thursday. But there will be no celebrities flanking them on Capitol Hill, as the stars that helped launch...

<p>But under questioning Thursday, Campbell said her company, CGI’s, total contract was “about $290 million,” $112 million of which has already been paid.</p> <p>Slavitt said QSSI received “just under $85 million” for the data hub, which covers much — but not all — of the firm’s work for CMS.</p>

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) holds a hearing on implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and its challenges since the October 1 opening of health care exchanges.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the federal government’s procurement process was long beset by gross corruption and overspending. During the mid-1980s, investigations from watchdog groups such as the Project on Government Oversight (then called the "Project on Military Procurement") uncovered just how bad Washington’s spendthrift culture had become. These studies illustrated the extent of inbred and massive fraud in the procurement process, by drawing attention to the outrageous prices the government was paying for essentially everyday items such as toilet seats for government planes. The $640 toilet seat became a symbol of government inefficiency and waste. Today, that...

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,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration's showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors. As questions mount over the website's failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government...

The Affordable Care Act runs more than 2,600 pages and now hundreds of thousands of regulations. No one knows every single provision that is in the law, which Congress did not even bother to read before passing it. Among its most controversial provisions is the mandate forcing Americans to purchase health insurance or face fines from the IRS. Those fines can even take the form of wage garnishment. Americans who fail to comply and pay the fine can end up in jail. There is, though, a provision buried in Obamacare that provides a way out of having to comply with...

Heh. Double-heh. I don’t know who this “Rex Harrison” guy is, but his Obamacare parody website is worth checking out. As someone said on Facebook, the White House really ought to hire this guy to reverse-engineer the real site.

Pres. Obama said today that buying Obamacare health insurance through the administration's www.healthcare.gov website is the same as buying something on Kayak.com or Amazon.com.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden on Monday morning, President Obama addressed the website glitches and delays that have plagued the initial rollout of the Affordable Care Act, declaring the “product” to be good and reminding his audience that the healthcare law is “not just a website.” Since its October 1 rollout, the online registry for the Obamacare health exchange has been beset by website glitches, long wait times, and clunky programming. “You probably heard the new website where people can apply for health insurance and browse and buy affordable plans in most states hasn’t worked as smoothly as...

So, were they lying, or merely clueless? On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough disclosed that in off-the-record briefings prior to the rollout of the Obamacare website, Obama administration officials were "extraordinarily confident" of success. They displayed a site that Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said looked "great," "very user friendly" and "very simple." View the video here.