"Thanks anyway we don't need no help"
The Obama administration appears to have passed up offers from Amazon and Microsoft to help fix the federal government's troubled healthcare enrollment website, according to documents released on Tuesday by a congressional investigating committee.
An Oct. 7 inquiry from Amazon's subsidiary Amazon Web Services Inc. was turned down by two senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseeing implementation of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law, according to copies of emails provided by the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Microsoft also contacted HHS and the White House with offers of "technical expertise and assistance," but the company has not provided any such services, a Microsoft representative said in an Oct. 25 letter to the committee. The letter did not say whether the administration had responded to Microsoft's offers.
Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the committee and a dogged critic of the Obama administration, last week wrote to eight technology companies asking whether they had been involved in what the administration had called a "tech surge" aimed at fixing the website, Healthcare.gov.
The oversight committee released some of the companies' responses.
Republicans have long been opposed to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, known as "Obamacare," and have started their own congressional probe into the role of the White House in the Oct. 1 rollout of the website. It is a critical tool of the reforms, meant to help the uninsured get medical coverage, but it has been riddled with snags.
