British firm awarded huge contract to take over Obamacare

Bizz Pac Review – by Joe Saunders, July 5, 2013

A big part of Obamacare is in British hands.

And the news in Friday’s New York Times came with exquisite, if unremarked, timing.

Under the headline, “Big Contract Is Awarded to Administer Health Rollout,” The Times reported:  

“Racing to meet an October deadline, Obama administration officials said Thursday that they had awarded a contract worth as much as $1.2 billion to a British company to help them sift applications for health insurance and tax credits under the new health-care law.”

So someone confirmed the White House had selected a British company to take over America’s health-care system … on the Fourth of July.

Historical irony aside, the story isn’t without other misgivings.

“The company, Serco, has extensive experience as a government contractor with the Defense Department and intelligence agencies, and it also manages air traffic control towers in 11 states and reviews visa applications for the State Department,” The Times reports. “But it has little experience with the Department of Health and Human Services or the insurance marketplaces, known as exchanges, where individuals and small businesses are supposed to be able to shop for insurance.”

So the train wreck rolls on. With a deadline of Oct. 1 looming, the administration has already punted away one huge part of Obamacare’s implementation by deferring for a year its mandate on businesses with 50 or more employees to provide workers health insurance.

Now, it’s awarded a contract to handle the insurance exchanges that are key to the part of the law that requires individuals to have health insurance to a company that’s not only foreign owned, but has little experience in such work, to boot.

Perversely, according to The Times report, that actually might have been a positive for the administration, since having not worked with insurance exchanges before meant Serco isn’t vulnerable to charges it had access to non-public information that other companies who have already been working on the exchanges might possess.

That sounds suspiciously high minded for an administration that tosses around taxpayer money to crony projects like Solyndra without blinking.

It also sounds bizarre.

A foreign company, lacking experience in one of the most crucial parts of the Obamacare rollout, gets the contract to handle it exactly because it lacks experience to do so, and for only $1.2 billion in American taxpayer money.

It would be hard to find a better example of the liberal illogic that’s governed Obamacare from the get-go.

http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/07/05/british-firm-awarded-huge-contract-to-take-over-obamacare-79197