Free Republic

(CBS News) WASHINGTON -- CBS News has been digging into the cause of the delays in preparing the website for the government's health insurance market and has learned was a major interruption in the months before President Obama's re-election. At the height of the 2012 presidential election campaign, it was crunch time for the Obama administration to release key instructions so contractors could work toward the October 2013 deadline. But a Health and Human Services official who was closely involved tells CBS News that in late summer, the administration stopped issuing proposed rules for the Affordable Health Care Act until...

A report has the White House "scrambling" to make Obamacare work: The White House is trying to heal what has been ailing the implementation of ObamaCare. Three months before the most sweeping parts of the law are scheduled to go live, the administration has hired Chris Jennings, a veteran of the Clinton administration, to help lead the massive effort. Jennings, a widely respected expert who can read the political winds, was a critic of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) healthcare plan in 2008. As the lead healthcare adviser on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Jennings ripped Obama’s healthcare proposal for lacking a...

If you've been reading all the Obamacare stories lately, you might get the impression that the administration has just realized it will not be able to implement the massive health reform as designed. It has known for months. As far back as March, a top IT official at the Department of Health and Human Services said the department's current ambition for the law's new online insurance marketplaces was that they not be "a Third-World experience." Several provisions had already been abandoned in an effort to simplify the administration's task and maximize the chances that the new systems would be ready...

Surprised by the recent waivers from the Obama administration on the Affordable Care Act? Get ready for more, writes Margot Sanger-Katz at National Journal, because the employer mandate is far from the only piece of ObamaCare that’s not ready for prime time. In fact, it might be easier to select the few components that might be ready for the implementation target date than to number those that won’t: If you’ve been reading all the Obamacare stories lately, you might get the impression that the administration has just realized it will not be able to implement the massive health reform as...

Wall Street investors hungry for advance information on upcoming federal health-care decisions repeatedly held private discussions with Obama administration officials, including a top White House adviser helping to implement the Affordable Care Act. The private conversations show that the increasingly urgent race to acquire“political intelligence” goes beyond the communications with congressional staffers that have become the focus of heightened scrutiny in recent weeks. White House records show that Elizabeth Fowler, then a top ­health-policy adviser to President Obama, met with executives from half a dozen investment firms in 2011 and 2012. Among them was Kris Jenner, a stock picker with...