Free Republic

Thundering ruling shakes country, Judge also convicts former Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski, former Bank Hapoalim Chairman Dan Dankner, Olmert's former chief-of-staff Shula Zaken and 10 out of 13 individual defendants.

Has HHS gone from the CGI Federal frying pan into the Accenture fire? A month ago, the HHS unit responsible for Healthcare.gov dumped its original prime contractor and awarded the project to Accenture in a no-bid assignment, a move that raised eyebrows especially considering how little time was left in the enrollment cycle to get the web portal problems resolved. Now, a new Washington Post report raises even more eyebrows about the decision, given Accenture’s troubled history with federal contracts: Accenture, the contractor urgently tapped to help fix the federal health-insurance Web site, is a favorite of corporate America but...

A Virginia man’s personal information has been stolen after he signed up for Obamacare on the healthcare.gov website. Now, he’s questioning if the website is the reason why. “There’s a possibility someone got my personal information from your website,” Virginia Beach resident Rich Guillory said in a video shot by WVEC-VA while speaking on the phone. “They knew my name and they had my number” — along with his address and social security number as well. he day after he signed up on the website, he got a call from someone claiming they could help him with finding health insurance....

Debacle: U.S. intelligence agencies report that developers linked to the Belarus government helped create the Healthcare.gov website and may have inserted malicious code making it vulnerable to cyberattacks and hacking. The disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov was bad enough. But as if Americans need another reason to avoid Healthcare.gov, we now hear that the Obama administration, through the Department of Health and Human Services, has indirectly contracted with developers in the worker's paradise of Belarus, a former Soviet republic still closely tied to Russia, to write some of the software code used for the website. The Washington Free Beacon's Bill Gertz...

What is it about the primary cultprit behind the failure of healthcare.gov that allows them to continue to win federal contracts despite the most spectacularly incompetent website design and implementation in history? The Daily Caller is reporting that CGI, the general contractor used by CMS to build the Obamacare website, has received six additional contracts from CMS after the failures were discovered. The company that built the failed Obamacare website received six additional contracts from the Obama administration's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after the website's disastrous launch, The Daily Caller has learned.According to a company spokesman, CGI...

Developers linked to the government of Belarus may have placed malicious code inside the healthcare.gov website allowing it to hack into the personal information of consumers. No - I'm serious. Washington Free Beacon: U.S. intelligence agencies last week urged the Obama administration to check its new healthcare network for malicious software after learning that developers linked to the Belarus government helped produce the website, raising fresh concerns that private data posted by millions of Americans will be compromised.The intelligence agencies notified the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency in charge of the Healthcare.gov network, about their concerns...

Remember when John McAfee warned us in November that anybody who signed up to the Obamacare site might have their bank account cleaned-out by hackers? The eccentric genius and former fugitive called the government website 'a hacker's wet dream', adding that there were 'NO safeguards' that would stop someone from starting a fake Obamacare website 'for a couple hundred dollars' that could 'empty your bank account' in hours.  McAfee added unambiguously that 'It's going to happen, and it's going to happen soon... nothing in the Obamacare system safeguards against this.'  And I thought he was just trying to sell...

Last night's interview of President Obama by Bill O'Reilly stuck out to me for one main reason. Obama refused to answer the questions and lied through his teeth in the process. He refused to acknowledge there was a "smidgen" of corruption present in the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS. He refused to acknowledge any failure in Benghazi. He refused to admit what was really happening with the ObamaCare website. He went so far as to say it was finally working the way it was supposed to work. That one lie is the easiest to prove. Fox News - Thousands...

Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors. Roughly 22,000 Americans have filed appeals with the government to try to get mistakes corrected, according to internal government data obtained by The Washington Post. They contend that the computer system for the new federal online marketplace charged them too much for health insurance, steered them into the wrong insurance program or denied them coverage entirely. For now, the appeals are sitting, untouched, inside a government computer. And...

The man who appeared before Congress last week to explain the security pitfalls of HealthCare.gov took to Fox News on Sunday to explain just how easy it was to penetrate the website. Hacking expert David Kennedy told Fox’s Chris Wallace that gaining access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees via HealthCare.gov took about 4 minutes and required nothing more than a standard browser, the Daily Caller reported. “And 70,000 was just one of the numbers that I was able to go up to and I stopped after that,” he said. “You know, I’m sure it’s hundreds of thousands, if...

ACCENTURE LLP, the Obama Administration’s choice to take-over 'rescue operations' at Healthcare.gov, has a history of committing fraud, waste, and abuse in its contracts with other Federal agencies like the Department of Education and the United States Postal Service. Just seven months ago, the Postal Service Inspector General’s office issued a “Management Alert” to outline “potential fraud risks associated with Accenture Federal Services Contracting Practices…” In the June 2013 document, the Deputy Inspector General for the Postal Service recommended: “The Postal Service should consider Accenture for suspension or debarment and review existing contracts to determine whether the contracts warrant termination....

For every hot product launch in 2013, there has also been a high-profile launch that was a miserable failure. MarketWatch's Jim Jelter takes a look at the top five of the flops.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Democratic and Republican critics of Maryland's troubled health exchange urged state officials on Monday to consider other options to signing up state residents for health care plans. Rep. John Delaney, a Democrat, formally asked the state's health secretary for a specific assessment of the idea of switching to the federal health exchange while Maryland's exchange is being repaired. He wrote in a letter to Dr. Joshua Sharfstein that Maryland could make the switch in whole or in part or on a temporary basis.....

More than 100,000 Americans who applied for insurance through HealthCare.gov and were told they are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) remain unenrolled because of lingering software defects in the federal online marketplace, according to federal and state health officials. To try to provide coverage to these people before they seek medical care, the Obama administration has launched a barrage of phone calls in recent days in 21 states, advising those who applied that the quickest route into the programs is to start over at their state’s Medicaid agency.

This is how you take your lumps in the Obama administration. Botch the roll-out of the president’s legacy law so badly that you end up with three million fewer insured people than when we started, and you get to retire, announce it over a holiday weekend, and grab that juicy pension for 41 years of mediocre-to-disastrous public service. The person tasked with overseeing the development of HealthCare.gov is retiring, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Monday.The departure of Michelle Snyder, the chief operating officer at CMS who’s been in public service for 41 years, comes...

Only the Obama Regime would have the cheek necessary to refuse action on a House subpoena by claiming it does not trust the motives of Government Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa! Concerned by widespread reports that personal information is not secure on the ObamaCare signup website HealthCare.gov, Issa’s Oversight Committee subpoenaed security testing documents from MITRE Corporation, the IT firm hired by Health and Human Services to perform Security Control Assessments of the site. Jim Esquea, HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation wrote to Committee Chair Issa claiming HHS ( now obviously enjoying complete control over MITRE) would be delighted to...

In our last DUFU, we heard from Will the Shill Pitt how wonderful and easy signing up for ObamaCare is--even though he hadn't, uh, exactly completed the process. Well, today's DUFU will tell a different tale, i.e., "Tales from the Whipped: ObamaCare Sign-up Nightmares." We visit this THREAD by DUmmie Demo_Chris, "9 HOURS in and Healthcare.gov still wont let me look at the actual PLANS." Fortunately it won't take us 9 hours to look at the actual comments of the DUmmies, in Bolshevik Red, while the commentary of your humble guest correspondent, Charles Henrickson, wondering if William Rivers Pitt...

President Obama is back on the offensive when it comes to promoting the Affordable Care Act. But White House aides may want to hit the spell-checker next time before they get carried away promoting the president’s message. On Thursday, the White House tweeted a picture of Obama holding a sign with the Twitter hashtag “#GetCovered Because.” The message on the president’s sign read: “Nobody should go broke just because they get sick.” The photo immediately launched a small social media tidal wave, with people creating their own “GetCovered” images. But the White House may have unintentionally created one of the...

Arctic storms swirling around the top of the world are more common than previously thought with about 1,900 in the first decade of the century, researchers say. As they churn across the top of the globe each year they leave warm water and air in their wakes, melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, scientists at Ohio State University reported Wednesday.

Congratulations to New York Times writers Lizette Alvarez and Jennifer Preston. They managed to write an upbeat article about the "vastly improved' Obamacare website without mentioning not one but two huge elephants in the room. The writers bubble over with excitement over the fact that in the first week of December, 112,000 people "selected plans" at the HealthCare.gov website. Left unsaid was the fact that there is still no payment system on that website plus the fact that anybody providing their personal information is at extreme risk of having his personal information hacked due to the fact that HealthCare.gov continues...