The Myth Of The $634 Million Obamacare Website

 ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters For America:

When he announced hearings this week into the troubled launch and implementation of President Obama's health care reform, Rep. David Camp (R-MI), Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, demanded to know why "after spending over $600 million" the online health care exchange portal, healthcare.gov, doesn't work properly.

In light of the site's systemic failures, that bulging nine-figure price tag ($634 million, to be exact) has produced endless guffaws within the conservative media, where the figure has been adopted as evidence of a policy debacle.  

"Who pays $634 million and has three years and screws it up that bad?" asked Fox News' Sean Hannity on October 18. Added Rush Limbaugh: "That website, by the way, the original projected cost: $93 million. The end cost: $643 million.  I kid you not."

Wow, $550 million in cost overruns for healthcare.gov since 2010 when the health care reform law was passed?

That's false.

The life of the $600 million figure appears to be the latest example of how misinformation is fermented within the right-wing media and then adopted as quasi-policy by the Republican Party. After all, Rep. Camp is holding a hearing specifically to determine why the government's $600 million health care website doesn't work, even though the site didn't cost $600 million.

The eye-popping $634 million figure was first trumpeted in a piece by Andrew Couts at Digital Trends on October 8. It pointed out that the Montreal-based company awarded the contract to build healthcare.gov, CGI Federal, had received $634 million in government contracts related to health care. (Digital Trends lateramended the article and lowered the figure to "more than $500 million" that was allegedly spent "to build the digital equivalent of a rock.")

Stunned by the bloated figure, Couts noted "Twitter, created in 2006, managed to get by with only $360.17 million in total funding until a $400 million boost in 2011. Instagram ginned up just $57.5 million in funding before Facebook bought it for (a staggering) $1 billion last year."

Conservative commentators loved the report and quickly referred to it as fact.

"As for cash, it appears that HHS spent over $600 million for the online system -- more than it took to get Facebook started," wrote John Sununu in a Boston Globe column, while the Washington Times reported, "The administration hasn't said how much these efforts will cost; estimates indicate the website already has cost taxpayers more than $600 million."

Even ABC News pushed the report, noting "The administration has not provided a final cost of the website, although some estimates place it between $500 million to $600 million."

But the accounting employed by Digital Trends raised some eyebrows even within the conservative media. National Review Online contributor Greg Pollowitz tweeted that the CGI contracts Digital Trends pointed to included work that the firm had done for the U.S. government years before health care reform was actually passed into law.

Glenn Beck's site, The Blaze, also debunked the number. "While the federal website to signup for Obamacare was riddled with errors and had a rocky rollout, it didn't cost $634 million to build," wrote Liz Klimas. Citing an official inside GCI, The Blaze reported the $634 figure "includes all of the company's contracts for a Health and Human Services Department program over the last seven years."

Independently, the Sunlight Foundation estimated it cost $70 million to build the much-maligned website, not $634 million. (Officially, CGI was awarded a $93 million contract for the healthcare.gov job.)

And today in his Fact Checker column in the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler looked at the question of the healthcare.gov cost and concluded, "A conservative figure would be $70 million. A more modest figure would be $125 million to $150 million." Kessler noted that the cost for the entire health care project beyond the website would be "at least $350 million."  

Despite those red flags, the bloated figure has been widely embraced as factual within the conservative press. 

As for the Twitter and Instragram comparisons, they don't make much sense in terms of what those hugely popular and relatively simple social media sites do (swap updates and photos) as compared to what healthcare.gov is supposed to do. Noted Kurt Eichenwald at Vanity Fair regarding healthcare.gov:  "The site is one of the most complicated Web-based undertakings ever envisioned not only by the federal government but possibly by any Internet product provider."

Meanwhile, the $600 million misinformation has created some odd contradictions within the conservative media, where it is still regularly touted. For instance, on October 9, a report posted on Foxnews.com referred to healthcare.gov as the "$93M ObamaCare website."  Yet day after day, Fox hosts such as Hannity, Dana Perino, and Andrea Tantaros ridicule the "$600 million" the government allegedly spent to build its health care exchange website.

And then there's Blaze news anchor Amy Holmes who appeared on CNN on October 21 to discuss the health care controversy. She  said that "the website got over $600 million to be able to be set up." Strange, right? On October 10, The Blaze debunked the "rumor" that healthcare.gov cost $600 million to build. Then eleven days later The Blaze's Holmes told a CNN audience that healthcare.gov cost $600 million to build.

Sifting through the vast range of cost estimates for healthcare.gov, the Washington Post's Kessler suggested, "readers should be wary of many cost estimates uttered by lawmakers." That also holds true for estimates uttered by conservative commentators.

How The Full Benghazi Emails Undermine The GOP’s Cover-Up Claims

By Hayes Brown/Think Progress

On Wednesday, just days after Congress held hearings claiming that the Obama administration misled the public in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2012 attack on an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the White House released 100 pages of emails that seem to undermine GOP claims that the White House orchestrated a “cover-up.”

The e-mails between the White House, CIA, State Department, Justice Department, and the FBI were part of an effort to draft unclassified talking points for lawmakers to use during media appearances and formed the basis of U.N. Ambassador’s Susan Rice’s prep for the Sunday morning talk shows. The CIA wrote the first draft of the talking points, before sending it out to the rest of the government. Click the pictures to view larger versions of the emails that debunk the basis many of the Republican’s claims of a conspiracy.

GOP Claim: The Obama administration struck references about Al Qaeda for political reasons.

In the very first of the declassified emails in the set, the CIA is revealed to have willingly struck references to Al Qaeda’s involvement in the attack, a deletion that conservatives have previously slammed as political in nature. A CIA official, responding to an inquiry about whether or not the Agency was sure that Al Qaeda took part in the attack, noted that the initial draft “could be interpreted that way,” suggesting that the document be revised to say that terrorist group took part in the protests instead. The CIA was also under “express instructions” to avoid naming perpetrators so to not to undermine the FBI’s investigation, according to an email from Sept. 14.

GOP Claim: Obama lied about there being a protest in Benghazi to hide that it was a terrorist attack.

The addition of references to “demonstrations,” another email shows, was completed before the document was sent out to the rest of the government, as was that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” The fact that no protest actually occurred in Benghazi prior to the attack was used as another data point that the Obama administration was hiding something about its response to the attack. Rather than being political, however, it appears the CIA made the changes to make the talking points more accurate based on what information was currently available, a situation that is often the casewhen dealing with intelligence.

GOP Claim: The White House directed the intelligence agency to lie about whether Islamic terrorists were involved.

John Brennan, then the White House Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and now the CIA Director, reviewed the talking points as well, but didn’t perform the scrubbing many conservatives have suggested the White House enacted. Instead, Brennan left in place a reference to “Islamic extremists” in his suggested edit, undercutting the notion that the administration wanted to hide the nature of the attack. In fact, the White House, according to an email to then-CIA Director “cleared [the document] quickly.” Over the course of the next day, after State and Justice were looped in, the turf war that has been previously reported played out.

GOP Claim: Susan Rice had access to the classified information and lied about it on television.

On Sept. 15, the talking points were finally sent to Congress after multiple edits and provided to Rice to prepare for her Sunday show appearances the next morning. We now know that Saturday evening the intelligence community received new information related to whether or not a demonstration took place, not in time to change the points. Instead, Rice gave the much shortened talking points as provided, setting off the firestorm that eventually ensued.

Read all of the emails here.

UPDATE

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) still isn’t convinced no cover-up occurred. After telling CNN host Wolf Blitzer, “We’re not accusing anyone of anything sinister,” just one minute later, he implied that the CIA was forced to provide false information. “How did they go from the correct information to the incorrect information, and isn’t 100 pages or more a pushback on the CIA effectively telling the CIA, ‘You’ve got to change your story?’” Issa asked.

GOP’s Benghazi Conspiracy Falls Apart: White House Didn’t Change Susan Rice’s Talking Points

By Hamed Aleaziz/Think Progress

Intelligence officials told CNN that the intelligence community, not the White House, changed the now infamous Benghazi talking points given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice before her appearance on several morning news shows in September. CNN quoted both the spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence and an anonymous official “familiar with the drafting of the talking points.” The DNI spokesperson said that the only “substantive changes” came from the intelligence community and not the White House.

Former CIA Director David Petraeus told lawmakers in a closed door hearing last week that the CIA’s original assessment on the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack was that it was carried out by al Qaeda affiliated groups. But he reportedly said that analysis was later taken out after an interagency review in favor of a more general assessment that “extremists” carried out the attack to broaden the scope and not tip off terrorists to U.S. knowledge on the matter. And despite the fact that Petraeus said the CIA approved the change, Republicans, led by Republican senators John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC) and Kelly Ayotte (NH), have accused the White House of stripping the language for political reasons.

But Shawn Turner, the spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, told CNN that it wasn’t the White House’s decision:

“The intelligence community made substantive, analytical changes before the talking points were sent to government agency partners for their feedback.There were no substantive changes made to the talking points after they left the intelligence community.”

Another anonymous intelligence official echoed Turner, saying that the changes were made based on legitimate intelligence and for legal purposes:

“First, the information about individuals linked to al Qaeda was derived from classified sources. Second, when links were so tenuous – as they still are – itmakes sense to be cautious before pointing fingers so you don’t set off a chain of circular and self-reinforcing assumptions. Third, it is important to be careful not to prejudice a criminal investigation in its early stages.”

Indeed, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told the New York Times last week that in his closed door briefing, Petraeus “was adamant there was no politicization of the process, no White House interference or political agenda.”

The fight over the talking points will most likely continue; it has even become a campaign cause for Republican senators like Lindsey Graham. Others like John McCain have vowed to do “everything” to block the potential nomination of Susan Rice for Secretary of State. But Democrats in Congress and media commentators are beginning to wonder why Republicans are picking a substance-free fight with Rice, a woman and an African-American, after the drubbing they took in last month’s elections among those demographics.