Obamacare & Gun Registries

The same company that built the nightmare that is Healthcare.gov is also responsible for the boondoggle that was the Canadian long gun registry. Mark Steyn does a great job at highlighting what their previous “success” means the American people can expect from just the website fiasco in Obamacare:

The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive. …

That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun registrations, Canada’s auditor general reported to parliament that much of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic information such as names and addresses.

He continues to explain that there was supposed to be a helpful toll-free number to support the database, but it was never used or really useful. Then, the company said that they just needed to start over, so they were given an additional $81 million, on top of the $2 billion already lining their pockets, to build a second registry. About 4 years beyond their deadline for the new registry, they still didn’t have a functioning product.

Interestingly, the gun registry isn’t the only other high profile failure of this company. Apparently, the Ontario government gave up a diabetes registry that the company was contracted to do after not meeting deadlines and being over budget, but the taxpayers were still out $46 million for a database that was never used.

Steyn also points out that despite these very spectacular and very public failures, the company’s executive brags, “[w]e continue to view U.S. federal government as a significant growth opportunity.” Your money, and now every detail of your healthcare decisions, are in the very best of hands…

Anyone want to bet that another “growth opportunity” they see for the federal government is another gun registry? It would be interesting to know if they have ever hired any lobbyists to push that type of legislation. If they could make more than $2 billion on the last attempt to simply register 7 million long guns in Canada, think about how much they would stand to make trying to register all of the guns in the U.S.

9 thoughts on “Obamacare & Gun Registries”

  1. If the ratios hold about $80 billion.
    And that’s a pretty big if. Because big goverment programs scale linearly with increasing size and complexity.

    Because when you have 40 times more guns clearly the project will only cost 40 times more.

  2. The conspiracy theorist would say that its GOOD these guys are running the health care website, and a potential gun registry database- because they can’t actually do good work. They are secret freedom fighters!

  3. Obamacare isn’t intended to work. It is intended to fail. Then the Dems will blame the GOP and the evil insurance companies. They will then put forward Single Payer as the solution for the problem they have created.

    And the voters will love them for it.

    So, I’d say hiring an awful contractor likely to screw up the job and be way overbudget is actually a success, if you’re a Democrat, at least.

    1. It’s a heads we win tails you lose scenario.

      Where any failings show the need to go even further, and any success show that they can be *trusted* to go further.

      And why should they care about the money? It’s not coming out of their pockets.

      That said this mess is bad enough that they realize it could damage them. Hence the desperation to blame the law itself on the GOP, instead of merely the bad effects.

  4. Yet another predictable Failure of the Marxist Left.
    They have lost any semblance of ‘credibility’ more than 5 years ago.
    It seems curious they even bother to speak (or read the TelePrompter) any more.
    All we have received from this ‘Unknown-President-From-Nowhere’ is $22 Trillion in debt by 07 Feb 2014 with absolutely nothing to show for it (except unpayable debt for our Grand-Children).
    An Anti-American with zero experience who failed… Go figure.

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