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 was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.
Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.
CGI was one of 16 companies that had been qualified by HHS during President George W. Bush's second term to deliver, without public competition, a variety of hardware, software and communication products and services.
In awarding the Healthcare.gov contract, CMS relied on a little-known federal contracting system called ID/IQ, which is government jargon for “Indefinite Delivery and Indefinite Quantity.”
CGI was a much smaller vendor when it was approved by HHS in 2007. With the approval, CGI became eligible for multiple awards without public notice and in circumvention of the normal competitive bidding procurement process.
The multiple awards were in the form of “task orders” for projects of widely varying size. Over the life of the CGI contract — which expires in 2017 — the IT firm can receive awards worth anywhere from the “$1,000 to $4 billion,” according to a contracting document provided by CGI to the Washington Examiner.
This is apparently the route chosen by CMS officials in awarding the Obamacare Healthcare.gov website design contract to CGI.Read the rest of the story HERE.
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2 comments:
How could something THIS BIG not go out for several bids? THEN...LOOK AT THE RESULTS...."PLEASE WAIT"..."TRY LATER".."The WEBSITE IS DOWN".
This would not have happened in the private sector and if it had, someone would have gotten paid off.
We should all be outraged at this.
Bosman, this is the same type of corruption and incompetence as the IRS and Benghazi scandals. They are hiding the truth about the process and numbers just as they did in IRS/Benghazi.
When oh when is the media going start doing it's job? Oh yeah, never. Maybe some high premiums and deductibles will change a few minds, but I doubt it!
-Martha
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