Report: Republicans Turn to John McAfee to Fix Obamacare Website

From the sun-soaked shores of Belize to the surreality of a media-saturated flight from police -- to helping House Republicans salvage Obamacare?

Nothing is too weird for one-time renegade and always-entertaining software maven John McAfee, who turned down a request from a Republican-led Congressional committee to help fix beleaguered Healthcare.gov, according to USA Today.

McAfee -- who is currently busy collecting cash to fund a startup that will produce products to shield users from government surveillance -- was asked Oct. 14 by the counsel for the Committee on Energy and Commerce to give notes on what to do with the Obamacare Web site, which has been plagued with problems since it went live.

McAfee suggested the experiment be blown up and rebuilt from scratch -- a solution dismissed as "political suicide" which led to the unlikely alliance's dissolution before it began, the newspaper reported.

Here's what Washington asked McAfee, as per USA Today:

"Given the failures of healthcare.gov, and Mr. McAfee's expertise, I was hoping he might be able to discuss his views with staff on the hill. It would be an informal discussion: we would take notes but these would not be for attribution, it would mainly guide our oversight and review of the program. This would hopefully not be a heavy lift for him: what problems could lead to the compromise of personal identifying information? What could we be doing to prevent data or identify theft? What advice generally does he have?"

Here's a pointer, for starters, straight from McAfee himself: "If the government intended this as a PR stunt, I would certainly not have chosen me for advice," McAfee told the newspaper.