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President Obama’s healthcare aide sent a memo to then-White House advisor Larry Summers in May 2010
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Said that the people involved in the healthcare roll out did not know how to run a business and were lacking in necessary skills
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This is one of the earliest warnings released in light of the failed website
A memo has been reveals that shows how the President was warned about problems with the implementation of his signature healthcare legislation years before the website went live.
One of the campaign staffers who became an expert on President Obama’s health care legislation during the 2008 race wrote a memo to Larry Summers in 2010 warning that there would be catastrophic issues with the roll out.
David Cutler has now shared a copy of the memo that he sent three years ago with CBS, showing how called for the inefficiencies to be addressed but was ignored.
Head start: Healthcare advisor David Cutler sent a memo to Larry Summers warning him of the problems with the proposed healthcare roll out in May of 2010
‘I do not believe the relevant members of the Administration understand the President’s vision or have the capability to carry it out,’ Cutler wrote in a memo to Summers, who was working as a top White House economic advisor at that point.
In the wake of the massive technical problems with the website, there have been a number of memos and documents released showing the waves of unheeded warnings.
The most explicit of which came from the tech contractors hired out to create and test the website before the launch on October 1.
The September 6 report states that they viewed it as a ‘near certainty’ that problems would result from their ‘limited testing timeframes’ and the small number of predetermined scenarios that they were given for trouble shooting.
Blame game: Larry Summers, who previously served as the Treasury Secretary, was heading up the White House National Economic Council at the time that he received the memo
TN Sen @BrianKelsey gave Kathleen Sebelius “Websites for Dummies” during #Memphis #healthcare event #news pic.twitter.com/LxUwUA9Yxx
— The Daily News (@memphisdaily) November 1, 2013
The major differences between that report, which was directed to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the memo written by Cutler are the time and direction.
Mr Cutler’s memo was written more than three years before the contractor’s report, and he sent it directly to Summers.
Mr Summers went on to serve as the head of the White House’s National Economic Council, meaning that he worked closely with the administration and should have been able to alert his colleagues about the stern warning as they crafted their public message.
‘You need to have people who have understanding of the political process, people who understand how to work within an administration and people who understand how to start and build a business, and unfortunately, they just didn’t get all of those people together,’ Mr Cutler told CBS News.
‘It is frustrating any time you really want to see something succeed because you believe it’s good for people, and it doesn’t get off on the right foot.’
Under fire: The President’s Healthcare website has been up for more than a month and he continues to ignore calls for it to be taken down and rebooted given the major technical problems
