The Hill – by Elise Viebeck House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa on Thursday subpoenaed Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius over ObamaCare’s rocky rollout.
Issa (R-Calif.) accused Sebelius’s agency of withholding documents that would shed light on why HealthCare.gov launched with massive technical problems on Oct. 1.
The subpoena compels HHS to produce certain documents by Nov. 13. In a statement, Issa called the department’s failure to comply with previous information requests “completely unacceptable.”
“The American people deserve to know why the administration spent significant taxpayer money on a product that is entirely dysfunctional and puts their personal information at risk,” said the California Republican.
Issa had raised the possibility of a subpoena in a letter to HHS last week. He issued a similar order to ObamaCare contractor Quality Software Services Inc. on Tuesday.
The Obama administration is under enormous pressure to explain why the healthcare law’s online enrollment system is still failing.
Republicans on the Oversight Committee are seeking information about the site’s construction and testing, as well as the number of people who have successfully enrolled so far.
Issa’s initial Oct. 10 request fell during the government shutdown, when HHS’s staff was severely curtailed.
Department spokeswoman Joanne Peters said the committee has now made five separate requests for documents and interviews with HHS officials.
“While we are working diligently to satisfy their interest and have repeatedly communicated our intent to cooperate, their timeline was not feasible given the vast scope of their requests,” Peters said.
I would laugh if this wasn’t so pathetically sad.
Congress conducting an investigation because somebody did something wrong???
The Afraudable Health Care Act doesn’t affect them at all but I guess they have to put on a playact and pretend they care so they can get re-elected without having to commit voter fraud on a noticeable scale.
An act is exactly what it is Tammy. The American people are being duped and they are hiding so much from us it’s not even funny.
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This has just got to be a smoke screen in order to get something like TPP or (?) passed behind our backs.
Case in point. How can Sebelius apologize and say she is accountable to us when she said earlier she doesn’t work for us?
This is crazy-makin’ stuff and these people don’t make any sense anymore. America is being set up to be taken down!!
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