Read 8 damning emails from behind the scenes of the Healthcare.gov meltdown

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We all now know what happened with the federal healthcare marketplace, Healthcare.gov. The three-year development was complicated by changing specifications, and the government's convoluted procurement process meant entrenched companies were getting contracts over and over. But a wave of government accountability reports, concluded after months of investigations, is bringing new attention to the meltdown.

The Government Office of Accountability released a report earlier this week detailing the security flaws in the site, but a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released yesterday is even more damning.

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* An anonymous HHS official, on deputy CIO Henry Chao: "I grow weary of the bullshite passive/aggressiveness of Henry, or rather his lack of engagement to the point that we can only speculate that it is passive/aggressiveness."

* HHS CTO Bryan Sivak recommended HHS "declare victory without fully launching [the website]."

* When an independent security audit came back with negative results, CMS officials were more worried about the report leaking than the conclusion that the site was unsafe for users. CMS security officer Thomas Schankweiler wrote: "We need to hit the pause button on this report ... it is very possible that this report will be reviewed at some point by OIG [Office of Inspector General], and could see the light of day in other ways."

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