Ultraviolet Thunderpussy's View: Commentary, Vintage Male Photos, Videos.

Where is the money for the "tech surge" going to come from? (Hot Air) Sebelius told Congress this afternoon that she will indeed agree to testify about the O-Care rollout — just not this week, as she has a scheduling conflict. Here’s a question for her when she does via Byron York: How are they paying for this all-hands-on-deck salvage operation of Healthcare.gov, which even The One himself described as a “tech surge” in the Rose Garden today? I’m not asking that rhetorically, either. Appropriations can be very confusing; plenty of people watching the “defund” pageant play out assumed, I think, that a shutdown would mean choking off funding for ObamaCare until it was over. Not so, but you can understand why that mistaken impression might be had. Maybe York and I — and John Cornyn — are similarly mistaken and there’s an obvious source of funds for the “surge,” but if so, what? Unless I missed it, neither O nor HHS has said how big the “tech surge” is. Maybe they’ve hired 200 people to come in and re-write millions of lines of code, or maybe they’ve convinced 10 highly regarded IT managers to come in and reorganize the site with the people already on staff. I can kinda sorta buy that the latter might work pro bono, for the glory of “rescuing” ObamaCare, but not the former. So if we’re talking about dozens or hundreds of new contractors, where’s that money coming from? The site already went wildly over budget earlier this year and, as York notes, the GOP has already once refused HHS any new money to implement the law, leading Sebelius to engage in an egregious shakedown of health-industry execs. Maybe those execs are paying for the “surge”; given that the insurance industry stands to be completely wrecked by a “death spiral” if the young and healthy don’t start enrolling soon, they have every incentive to scrape the money together even without Sebelius leaning on them. Or maybe it’s as simple as HHS moving already-appropriated money around to pay for this thing. If they have to cut corners on normal functions to keep their pet boondoggle from crashing on the launchpad, they’ll do it. But that gets us back to the question of how much money we’re talking about here. If they’ve already had to cover heavy cost overruns with the funds they have on hand, how much money’s left to pay for the “surge”? Incredible though it may seem, what we’re going to see next month, I think, is Obama starting to pound the table and demand that Congress — including House Republicans — pony up however many millions he now needs for his big Healthcare.gov salvage operation. He can’t force them to do it, but he can beat on them for awhile when they refuse. Right before the shutdown, ObamaCare critic Avik Roy posted this poll noting that, when presented with a menu of possibilities for the program, a plurality of voters prefers trying to fix it to outright repeal: I haven’t seen polling on fixing the website itself versus abandoning it or taking it down for awhile but you can imagine the same voter instinct applying to that — it just got started, it hasn’t had a chance yet, they have people who can fix it if only they had the money, blah blah blah. That still won’t move Republicans to appropriate the money, which means O’s problem in funding this boondoggle will remain unsolved for now, but it’ll give him a scapegoat if/when he’s forced to yank Healthcare.gov off the air for awhile. And you know how much he loves a scapegoat. A commercial may start before the CNN video starts playing . (CNBC) The Affordable Care Act is more than just a website, President Barack Obama told Americans in an address from the White House rose garden. Yet, after three weeks of urging patience with tech problems on the federal health insurance exchange, the commander in chief expressed his own impatience. "There's no sugarcoating it. The website has been too slow, people have been getting stuck during the application process, and I think it's fair to say nobody's more frustrated by that than I am," he said. The president said his administration is now working with outside technology experts to try to address just how to fix the Healthcare.gov website and enrollment system which serves as the portal for 36 states that opted out of building their own marketplaces. "We've had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team. And we're well into a tech surge to fix the problem, " he said. But the administration offered few details about those IT experts, and offered no timeline for how quickly the problems will be resolved. "One of the problems with the Obama administration launching this has been their lack of transparency," said Robert Laszewski, president of insurance industry consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates. Laszewski had hoped the president would offer more details on the true extent of the problems making it difficult for people to enroll online. Why has no one been fired? CNBC's Bertha Coombs asks David Simas, White House deputy senior advisor for communications and strategy, for transparency. Simas says tech experts from both inside and outside the federal government are working to identify, isolate and fix the website glitches. "Just exactly what is wrong with the computer system? How long will it take to fix?" he asked. "How can they really expect to fix this on the run?" Evan Burfield, a former federal technology contractor who now heads technology incubator firm 1776, said the administration may not yet know the full extent of the problems. "You have—I think it's eight contractors and each one's working a different piece," he explained. "What it really feels like is this hasn't integrated together particularly well." In 2009, Burfield worked with a team from CGI Federal, the lead firm responsible for building the federal exchange, to build Recovery.gov—the federal site that tracked spending of federal stimulus funds. In that case, he said the Obama administration approached the project like a tech start-up. "They brought in a small set of innovative players," he said. "It was six to eight really key technologists sitting around a table with government for a number of months getting this thing built." The Department of Health and Human Services went with a traditional federal IT contracting process, enlisting dozens of IT firms to build different parts of the infrastructure needed to carry out enrollment, including CGI; QSSI, a unit of UnitedHealth Group; Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin. "That's not the way you see start-ups in the commercial world building technology anymore," Burfield said. Burfield said other agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have had more success using a more targeted private-sector strategy for contracting with IT firms. "Ultimately fixing that—that structural issue—and really getting at how the government buys technology, I think would make a tremendous impact on the effectiveness of government," he said. But first, the administration is focused on getting the federal exchange up and running smoothly.