What happened to Jeffrey Zients, the management “guru” widely touted by the White House to be the right man to oversee the healthcare automation project?
Who is Jeffrey Zients, and how is he qualified to fixHealthCare.gov?
In hopes of quickly working out the kinks, the White House has enlisted the help of former budget official Jeffrey Zients, one of Obama’s go-to guys when he wants programs to run smoother. Zients spent much of his career as an entrepreneur, most notably leading Sirius/XM Satellite Radio and Revolution Health, as well as playing a key role in bringing baseball back to Washington.
The president brought Zients into his administration as chief performance officer and deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. The key word from those titles is “performance.” This guy has spent some time sniffing out ineffectiveness and inefficiency. In 2011, Obama tapped Zients to head a government-reform initiative that started with changing how the government handles trade and export issues.
Roughly one year later, the president named Zients as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget after Jack Lew — now Treasury secretary — moved from the head spot to serve as Obama’s chief of staff. <Source>
From all indications, President Obama and his cadre of progressive socialist democrats appear to have wanted to contain the growing healthcare.gov crisis, so they did what any insular and corrupt administration would do, they used a high-ranking, politically-connected “fixer” who simply lacked the technical expertise to get the job done. Unfortunately, screaming, threatening, and placing IT people under tremendous pressure to achieve a political fix doesn’t work. Especially, if the underlying system architecture was poorly designed and implemented.
You can’t fix what doesn’t exist …
It is not so much the front-end website that was broken, but the failure of the administration to support the front end with a working back-end. Whoops! You could collect data, but it would go nowhere since an estimated 30-percent of the backend system was yet to be developed. We now see that the mechanism to transmit enrollment and payment data to insurance companies was non-existent or deeply flawed. Leaving millions of Americans who visited the site wondering if they were really covered by January 1st, 2014.
So the White House needs another “high profile” fixer with credentials …
White House names former Microsoft exec to run Healthcare.gov
The White House is rebooting HealthCare.gov's repairman.
Former Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene will take over the volunteer job of overseeing ongoing fixes to the federal Obamacare marketplace HealthCare.gov starting Wednesday, officials said. DelBene is replacing management guru Jeffrey Zients, who was tapped by President Obama in October to manage the emergency repair job on that then-badly crippled website.
The switch comes at a critical time for HealthCare.gov, which has seen dramatic performance improvements under Zients. The site, which had very low enrollment levels in the first two months of operation because its tech troubles, now is engaged in a furious effort to sign up as many people as possible in new Affordable Care Act insurance by the New Year
DelBene, who retired last summer as president of the Microsoft Office division after two decades at the software behemoth, is the husband of US Rep. Suzan DelBene, (D-Wash), a fellow ex-Microsoft executive who was elected to Congress in 2012. Before Microsoft, DelBene was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company, and a software developer and systems engineer for AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Officials said DelBene has agreed to stay on the job of managingHealthCare.gov for at least the first half of 2014, which would include the March 31 deadline for open enrollment on that and other Obamacare exchanges.
Although he will be paid for his work, DelBene plans on returning all of that money to the US Treasury, the White House said.
Zients was originally scheduled to start his new job as director for the National Economic Council at the beginning of 2014. But on Tuesday it was disclosed that Zients will take that job after the State of the Union address on Jan. 28. In the meantime, Gene Sperling will stay on as council director until Zients takes over. Source: White House names replacement for HealthCare.gov repairman Jeff Zients
Promises to stay at least 6 months? Works for free!
What is going on? One, it appears that the new fixer is married to a progressive socialist democrat from the uber-liberal State of Washington. Two, you do not manage an on-going high-tech projects with short-term leaders, even if they are donating their time and effort. Where is the actual leadership team? I deeply believe that DelBene was hired as a “front-man with credentials”and that he is going to be used more for his public relations value than his technical expertise (if any) in supporting a true re-architecting of the system.
While the relationship between healthcare.gov's prime contractor and Michele Obama (and Valerie Jarrett) was bandied about previously, I also find it amazing that Kurt DelBene's wife represents Microsoft's district and somewhat disturbing that the uber-wealthy representative may have recommended her husband for the job.
Bottom line …
There is an old saying in data processing, “garbage in, garbage out.” Definitely something to consider since the basic premise of Obamacare – the wealth redistribution from the young healthy cohort to the uninsured, unhealthy cohort, is economically doomed from the start. Too many socialist political calculations and the nationalization of one-sixth of the American economy is behind a system that cannot be rationally sustained. Leading to the assumption that the system is defective by design – with the sole purpose to throw the private insurance system into chaos and bring about an American outcry for a socialist single-payer system as a remedy to millions of Americans being screwed by a corrupt and ineffective system.
This is simply another political calculation to take the pressure off President Obama. A totally inept, corrupt ideologue who needs a $4 million vacation in Hawaii due to the pressures of his office. Surprising since he does little to govern, preferring to spend his time doing what he does best: campaigning on a web of provable lies, fundraising, golfing, shooting hoops, and vacationing.
How can any real leader take off on vacation when the nation’s healthcare system is in peril? Oh I forgot, it will all be fixed by the executive/fixer flavor of the day.
-- steve
Obama plant posing as Conservative calling for political dirty tricks.
The repubs response to the systematic destruction of our country reminds me of the knock on the UN in the cartoon movie T. America. They're going to write a note, and then if the dems don't fix it they're going to write a nastier note.
Where's the substantive response to the illegal activity of this administration? When will we see real heroes step up? Vote for real heroes in 2014!
After all, we knew practically nothing about the man that so many people felt was trustworthy enough to put in the White House and give him a cadre legislators whose leanings were certainly far left and largely self-serving for their own power.
Maybe next time, if there is one, We, the People will pay more attention and remember WHY we had a Constitution and Bill of Rights that the Founders hoped would provide LIMITED power of government.
Do we have to give our personal information to non-vetted government workers using non-secure procedures? I know the answer is yes but being forced to compromise our personal information is the basis for another law suit?
This is the Cloward and Piven strategy in action, it was always the plan. The massive increase in SNAP benefit recipients, the expansion of every government assistance program and now the Obamacare law, together they will easily achieve the goals of the Cloward and Piven plan, bankrupting the federal government and creating an opportunity to institute a new system of governance...one that gives even broader, more intrusive powers and direct control of the entire economy, full blown central planning.
This will allow the pols in DC to finally have a very direct and absolute power over who succeeds and who fails...the vast majority will wish they had what the least of us now has.
Why are Americans taking this laying down while the country is being destroyed?
Go check the graves of our founding fathers, I'm sure there's no more dirt on them from all the spinning.
This was all planned by the Chicago thugs according to Michelle Malkin's book Culture of Corruption I'm presently reading.
Question is how can we stop this now with the Rats in control in the Senate likely blocking impeachment of this new Chicago mob.
? James Madison
? James Madison
? James Madison