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

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Kurt DelBene

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 managing HealthCare.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.

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Discussing security threats at Healthcare.gov, with Carrie Wofford, Democratic Strategist; Kurt Bardella, former House Oversight Senior Advisor; and Avik Roy, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow.

"I am pleased to announce Kurt Del Bene as my Senior Advisor and successor to Jeff Zients," said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary for Health and Human Servicesin a blog post on HHS's site on Tuesday.

Sebelius said, "The President and I believe strongly in having one person, with strong experience and expertise in management and execution, who is thinking 24/7 about HealthCare.gov. "

She lauded Zients for doing "an outstanding job working with our team to provide management advice and counsel on the HealthCare.gov project," saying the site now "is night and day from what it was when it launched on October 1."

"I am very grateful for his service and leadership."

Sebelius said DelBene "will be a tremendous asset in our work" because of his "proven expertise in heading large, complex technology teams and in product development."

She also said his responsibilities, while similar to those of Zients, will reflect the fact that the site has improved in recent months.

DelBene will "provide management expertise, operations oversight, and critical advice on additional enrollment channels, field operations, marketing and communication." He also "will execute the plan in place, so that we can ensure the site's performance is strong through the close of open enrollment on March 31,2014," Sebelius said.

"This will include a focus on increasing system stability, redundancy and capacity, and building on improvements to the user interface, while continuing to prioritize security and privacy issues in line with industry best practices."

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Jeffrey Zients

DelBene's wife, Rep. DelBene, in a statement said, "I'm pleased that the President has appointed Kurt to help oversee the continued improvement and implementation of the federal HealthCare.gov website website.

"The fact remains that there are millions of Americans who do not have access to affordable, quality healthcare today. To change that, it's critically important that HealthCare.gov works as it was supposed to."

"With his long career in the private sector, Kurt has the unique combination of skills and experience as an executive in the technology industry to manage a project the size and scope of HealthCare.gov," Rep. DelBene said. "I've long said that we need more people to enter public service who are focused on delivering results. Kurt has demonstrated throughout his career that he is about results, and his decision to join the Administration will be extremely valuable to their efforts to improve the website."

Adam Jeffery | CNBC

Healthcare.gov

Kurt DelBene also won praise from his former bosses at Microsoft, including company founder Bill Gates.

"Kurt is a talented and capable executive, with a track record of successfully managing complex large-scale technology projects," Gates said. "Working with Kurt over many years, I know him to be a passionate advocate for using technology to solve difficult problems at scale. He brings deep expertise as a manager and engineer to his new responsibilities. I'm certain he'll make an important positive contribution in his new role with HHS."

(Read more: More Obamacare extensions)

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said "Kurt's a phenomenal leader who established Microsoft Office as a world-class service for billions of people. Clearly, Kurt's technical and business skills will be invaluable in his new endeavor."

When DelBene takes over on Wednesday, he will be facing a less dire situation than the one Zients had to deal with after his appointment in late October.

Nearly two months of widespread software and hardware fixes made by government workers and private contractors during Zients' tenure at HealthCare.gov have left the site functioning much better than it had been after its botched Oct. 1 launch, with quicker load times and a sharply reduced error rate.

But it still needs to process what officials predict will be several millions enrollments in coming months. And the construction of a back-end system that handles critical financial transactions for insurers who sell plans on the site has been repeatedly postponed because of the frantic rush to fix the consumer interface.

Although enrollment on HealthCare.gov has greatly increased after the site was essentially relaunched at the beginning of December a slew of upgrades the pace of sign-ups is believed to still be well below the rate needed to hit 7 million enrollees nationwide by the close of enrollment in March, the target set by Obama officials.

For coverage that would begin Jan. 1, consumers have until next Monday to enroll in insurance bought through either the federal or state-run Obamacare exchanges.

Boston Bomber Believed He Was a Victim of Mind Control

Suspected Boston marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev believed that he was a victim of mind control, according to the results of a five month investigation published yesterday by the Boston Globe.

Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police four days after allegedly carrying out the bombings with his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was thought to have “some form of schizophrenia,” according to family friends, while his mother said Tsarnaev “felt like there were two people living inside of him.”

“He believed in majestic mind control, which is a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist,” Donald Larking, a 67-year-old who attended a Boston mosque with Tamerlan, told the Globe. “You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things. Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him.”

The link between allegations of mind control and violent acts such as political assassinations or terror attacks has been a running theme in numerous different high profile cases.

Aurora theater gunman James Holmes said he was “programmed” to carry out the massacre by an “evil” therapist, according to an alleged inmate of the ‘Batman’ shooter. Steven Unruh claims that Holmes told him he “felt like he was in a video game” during the shooting and that he had been brainwashed with the aid of neuro-linguistic programming.

The parallels between James Holmes and another alleged victim of mind control – RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan - are astounding.

As the London Independent reported in 2005, evidence strongly indicates that Sirhan was a Manchurian candidate, a victim of mind control who was set up to be the fall guy for the murder. Sirhan was described by eyewitnesses as being in a trance-like state as he pulled the trigger.

“There was no way Sirhan Sirhan killed Kennedy,” said (Sirhan’s lawyer Larry) Teeter….He was the fall guy. His job was to get busted while the trigger man walked out. He wasn’t consciously involved in any plot. He was a patsy. He was unconscious and unaware of what was happening – he was the true Manchurian Candidate.”

The CIA’s use of mind control to create killers is a matter of historical record. MK-ULTRA was the code name for a covert, illegal CIA human research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence that came to light in 1975 through investigations by the Church Committee, and the Rockefeller Commission. 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti insists that the program is ongoing and has not been abandoned.

According to his lawyers, Sirhan Sirhan “was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno programming and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed,” and served only as a diversion for the real assassin.

Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six other people, was also obsessed with mind control.

Were the Tsarnaev brothers set up or brainwashed into carrying out the Boston marathon bombing? It’s a claim that would be virtually impossible to prove, but it would explain a number of extraordinary contradictions pertaining to the case, including why the brothers apparently shouted “we didn’t do it” during their shootout with police.

The aunt of Tamerlan Tsarnaev claims that the footage which emerged of police arresting a naked uninjured man was her nephew, contradicting the official narrative that Tsarnaev was critically injured in a shootout and suggesting he may have been killed while in custody.

TERROR SCARE AT HARVARD DURING FINALS

A police officer secures an area at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on Monday. Associated Press

BOSTON—Harvard University students were allowed to return to two buildings Monday afternoon after an earlier report of bombs on campus forced the evacuation of four buildings, the school said.

Students were allowed back into Thayer Hall, a dorm, and classrooms in Emerson Hall. The other two buildings, the Science Center and Sever Hall, were still being checked, officials said.

After receiving the bomb report in the morning, the Harvard University Police Department ordered students and others to evacuate. Access to Harvard Yard was restricted.

"Harvard's focus is on the safety of our students, faculty and staff," the university, based in Cambridge, Mass., said.

Harvard requested that the Massachusetts State Police send its bomb squad and bomb dogs, said Trooper Dustin Fitch. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was also responding to the incident, officials said.

The Harvard Crimson, a campus newspaper, reported that a dean told students there that exams were canceled for the morning, according to the paper's Twitter feed.

There were briefly worries Monday about yet another campus threat in the area, after the University of Massachusetts Boston tweeted that there was a "possible person with a firearm" and evacuated a building. But the state police quickly said the report was false and the scene was clear.

Confidential Obamacare Navigator training manual uploaded online

“INFORMATION NOT RELEASABLE TO THE PUBLIC UNLESS AUTHORIZED BY LAW: This information has not been publicly disclosed and may be privileged and confidential. It is for internal government use only and must not be disseminated, distributed, or copied to persons not authorized to receive the information. Unauthorized disclosure may result in prosecution to the full extent of the law.” That is the warning at the bottom of every page of the 217-page confidential Obamacare Navigator training manual sitting online for anyone to come across –and as Watchdog.org reports, that’s exactly what someone did. Tammy Duffy, a radiation health physicist from New Jersey, was talking with Obamacare Navigators one day and asked a question regarding people who are self-employed, in which they could not provide an answer. She then asked for a copy of the manual, which they would not give her since it’s not meant to be available to the public. “I asked the nice ladies for a copy and they said I could not have it because it was a government document not for the public. So I thought maybe there is an outline or shorter version that is for the public. I went to Google and typed in ‘healthcare insurance marketplace Navigator SOP,” Duffy said. Sure enough, a Google search of “Healthcare insurance marketplace Navigator SOP” yields a link back to the “Health Insurance Marketplace Navigator Standard Operating Procedures Manual.” The manual is labeled as “restricted distribution” by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and threatens prosecution to anyone authorized to view it who ultimately disseminates it to unauthorized people — and it’s online for everyone to see. navigators Duffy knew she came across something that should not be online and tried reaching out to the federal government informing them of this. Nothing happened. “I immediately sent an email through the White House web site that these documents are on the web for all to see. I got no response. I also called the White House yesterday and spoke to a volunteer (and said) these restricted documents are on web. I have heard from no one. I also sent it to a friend who works at the Department of Defense and said, ‘Get this taken down.’ It’s still up there.” The document itself does not seem to contain sensitive information or secrets even though it is labeled confidential. While nothing within the manual seems to be out of the ordinary or raise eyebrows, it contains parts instructing Navigators how to interact with people they speak with. It also includes sections on “Identifying Personally Identifiable Information,” “IRS Data Safeguards” and “Preventing Fraud.” However, despite sections on preventing fraud and protecting people’s personal information, Breitbart News obtained an early copy of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report on Obamacare Navigators that documents Navigators encouraging fraud. The report titled, Risks of Fraud and Misinformation with ObamaCare Outreach Campaign: How Navigator and Assister Program Mismanagement Endangers Consumers, details how ill-trained the people in charge of signing Americans up for Obamacare actually are. It notes that ”documents call into question the effectiveness of the Navigator program and the Obama administration’s ability to safeguard consumer information” and that “poorly-trained Navigators gave consumers incorrect information about the health care exchanges, violated HHS rules and procedures, and even encouraged applicants to commit tax fraud in some instances.” The Oversight committee found: *Navigators from the Urban League of Dallas were captured on video encouraging applicants to lie on their health insurance application so the applicants could qualify for tax subsidies. Navigators were also recorded advising an applicant to lie about her smoking habits to obtain a lower monthly premium. It was later discovered that two of the so-called Navigators involved in the incident were assisting consumers with their applications even though they had not completed their training and certification requirements. *One self-identified Navigator gave a television interview in which she told viewers blatantly incorrect information—that applicants’ credit scores could impact their eligibility for certain plans. It later came to light that the woman was not a certified Navigator but rather a volunteer with a Navigator organization. *Mountain Project, Inc., a Navigator organization in North Carolina, has been collecting and mailing paper applications on behalf of applicants, in violation of Navigator rules and procedures. Even more worrisome is that Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, previously stated during a hearing that it’s possible felons could be hired into the Navigator role since it lacks background checks. “Isn’t it true that there is no federal requirement for navigators to undergo a criminal background check,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) asked Sebelius during the hearing on November 6, 2013. “That is true,” Sebelius answered. “States could add in additional background checks and other features, but it is not part of the federal requirement.” Cornyn then asked, “So a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to them?” Sebelius responded, “This is possible.” To see the full 217-page Obamacare training manual, click here.