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Obamacare Website Fixes Could Take Two Weeks Or Two Months
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like nobody is quite sure how long it will take to fix the health insurance marketplace website. '"One person familiar with the system's development said that the project was now roughly 70 percent of the way toward operating properly, but that predictions varied on when the remaining 30 percent would be done," the Times reported yesterday. "'I've heard as little as two weeks or as much as a couple of months,' that person said. Others warned that the fixes themselves were creating new problems, and said that the full extent of the problems might not be known because so many consumers had been stymied at the first step in the application process."'"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9RVy6FWkg
"The first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time; the last 10% of the work takes the second 90% of the time".
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I love how all the Slashbots object to NSA collecting information on them, but they can't wait to get a "civilized" health care system like Europe or Canada. They will be falling all over themselves to hand over all their medical records to the gov't.
I was able to register fairly early (around the 3rd) - when the site was still undergoing the initial onslaught of gawkers. It seems to be working ok now - no more "please wait, we are too busy" page at initial login, logging in takes a few seconds. Once in - I am able to search and view policies for appropriate states. The only real issue I found so far is that some of the insurance companies make it difficult to find actual policy prospectus. BCBS does a decent job with direct links, a few others make you look it up in a list by name (which may or may not match the name they present on the main site) and one (Cigna) has broken links that lead nowhere (but their rates suck anyway).
All in all seems about as usable as I've ever seen in a government site. A heck of a lot better than the tax payment system feds have or any of the state DMV sites I had to deal with (and we are talking "red" states, who clearly should know better, right?)
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
What makes you think Slashbots have any love for the Obamacare site?
it's supposed to be a "market" but it's nothing of the sort. You can't actually see any products or prices. You are only allowed to "apply" and for that you need "register" and then to provide identifying information that Experian approves of.
If this were any industry website, my response would be "fuck that".
Even if the stupid thing were working as intended it would still be broken. It's broken by design.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For some reason people want health care that won't bankrupt them. They look at what citizens of other industrialized nations get and want the same.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
True, but Obamacare does nothing to reduce the cost of health care.
Perhaps the developers picked the wrong 2 of: fast, cheap, or good.
Developers don't typically get to decide that. Management makes that sort of decision. If folks are interested, a full list of ACA contractors is also available.
Write failed: Broken pipe
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
Nor does it pay to code it till it's designed, and debug it till it's tested.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What, you think that insurance companies will actually offer contracts that don't allow them to terminate the contract (or doesn't allow them to raise the rates to the affected individuals so that they cannot afford to continue the insurance) if the individual's medical costs get too high, unless the law forces them to do so? You must live in some other country.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector..."
This website is not even what I would call "private sector". A couple of days ago I looked at some javascript from the registration page. You can look at it yourself HERE, direct from healthcare.gov.
This javascript is hopelessly broken. Even simple string values are completely messed up. I just checked it again, straight from the website, and even the most basic (literally first day javascript student level) mistakes have not been changed!
This is a complete mess. 70% my smooth, shapely, lily-white ass. It ain't even close to working.
I don't know about the Federal site since I'm in California but the California site is great. You just have to enter your zip code (no registration) and it will show you all the plans in your area along with the costs and all of the details of deductibles, etc.
Easy.
The plans are cheaper than my current insurance so that's good too.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The other side of the problem is the insurance companies. Most conservative do not want to admit that large coorporation DO NOT want open fair market competition. They want a monopoly, and a large goverment beuracracy to keep things complicated enought that individuals do not know what they are buying. Make the bariers to entry so prohibative that only the established players can play.
The insurance system is the EXACT opposite of a free market. In a free market INDIVIDUALS would be buying their own health care and paying for the doctors and hospitals out of their own pocket. This would quickly eliminate the $40 aspirin. The system we have now pays the insurance companies who have a legal obligation to the stock holders to maximize profits ( minimize payments). A hospital system that will ramp up charges as much as the insurance companies are willing to pay, and a restricted supply of doctors (AMA). It would be much better to have 10000 mediocre doctors that could be seen right away than a few awesome specialists who are great but you are likely to die in the E.R. waiting to be seen by them.
The best system would be to outlaw medical insurance. Health care would quickly come to an equilibrium so that people could afford it.. The next best system would be to have a single party system, or something akin to regulated phone and utility system. The worst possible system would be to have an unholy alliance of governement and a profit driven private industry.
I do not understand why conservative do not understand that big business is the exact opposite of free market. Probably because they are brainwashed by the Rush Limbaugh, and Fox, who are in turn financed by big business (go figure).
30 or 40 years ago, our health care system worked? Then more and more employers started offering health insurance. This skewed the system, so that people were no longer in charge of the cost of health care. It is exactly the same with college. Used to be your could have a part time job and put yourself through shool. Now with goverment subsidies (college loans) and soldiers returning with GI bill, there is no incentive for colleges to cater to those who are unwilling to take out a 50K + morgage on their future.
The stupid site won't even give real information until after you sign up. I don't want to give them sign-up info unless I decide to actually sign-up. But I cannot get the info to make that decision with.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There is some gold in this file. Some highlights:
:function() { //TODO: add functionality to show alert text after too many tries at log in
},
//$('#signUpButton').hide(); pod 6 doesn't want this hidden
// make sure we don;t try to do this before the saml has been posted
resources['ffe.ee.myAccount.TEST'] = 'Apples to Apples';
Seems like someone was trying to work out how to add resources. Looks like they also wanted to test out the quoting:
resources['ffe.ee.myAccount.quoteTest'] = '“Apes.”';
Hmm looks like you can't update your name at the moment. I guess you could call XXX-XXXX to do it: resources['ffe.ee.myAccount.profile.updateName'] = 'To change your name you must call 1-800-XXX-XXXX';
Hey I wonder what happens when you try to login too many times incorrectly? Apparently nothing:
showAlertText
I wonder who "Pod 6" is?
And then my personal favourite, which is written twice in the code:
Why is there a semicolon in the "don't" word? It is a typo or couldn't they figure out how to escape a single quote character in whatever is generating their JS? (This line is repeated twice) I'm guessing it was just a rushed developer who was running out of time.
I do not feel so great for Obamacare at all.
I mean, the code itself ( as referred to the following link: https://www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration.js ) is hopelessly broken.
The code looks more like a primary school coding project than a government project.
Or does this signify the quality of (or rather, the lack thereof) : care Obama wants give the US citizens ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What people don't realize is the private sector contractors in Gov't IT have little to do with regular private IT contracting. In order to gain these contracts you need to basically game the formula used to award the contracts. It's a bit more complicated than just having the lowest bid. A lot of it has to do with things like the number of Phd and Master degree workers you have to offer. This often leads to staffing composed of people who have unrelated degrees or people who are from diploma mills.
The Obamacare IT is no more or less messed up than any other gov't system of recent times.
Sadly, Obama can't just raid Silicon valley for some top tier talent to make a new system. That's illegal. Instead the contracts go to companies you've likely never heard of that specialize in sucking off the gov't teet. I'm sure 1/2 the budget was wasted making a 5000 page technical specification document complete with overdone pie in the sky UML diagrams no one understands.
That's the way things will continue so long as the contracting process doesn't take into account the previous success of the contractors work force.
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I particularly like all of the "TODO" comments in production code.
Get used to it. Those of us who have been carrying health insurance for years have been required to pay for you dumb fucks who don't carry health insurance because you "never get sick" and now just got cancer or ran your car into a tree.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Here, lets look at your "facts", which are really just half statements with commentary.
*** The fact is that the ACA (aka Obamacare) sets up exchanges for people to purchase insurance from private companies. The government is not providing the coverage -- the private sector is.
You left out the part about doing it with other people's money, aka Taxdollars.
Only if low-income people need help with the premiums. That's hardly a precedent.
*** And yet there's a hue and cry about "government-run healthcare." Guess what: it already exists, it's called the VA. Single-payer? That already exists too, it's called Medicare (probably Medicaid too.)
Forgetting to mention those are huge expensive boondoggles with very poor outcomes in the case of the VA.
Actually, the VA has a high satisfaction rating compared to the private sector.
***The main point is that medical-insurance coverage is now open to tens of millions of people who would not be able to purchase it otherwise.
Again, open, but at the cost of taxdollars, and for people that don't want the health insurance because they don't really need it, like young healthy adults.
The fact is, nobody needs health insurance...until they do. And then, if they don't have it, we all pick up the tab when they go to the emergency room. And that's where the requirement that we all have insurance comes in. All of us have to contribute to our heath insurance. If we don't, we're mooching. Plain and simple.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Why didn't your state setup their own exchange like my own, New York? It worked great. The fed site redirected me right to new york's site.
Easy Peasy.
I guess if the state you live in just couldn't get the job done themselves, and NEEDS TO RELY ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DO IT FOR THEM, well, beggers can't be choosers, can they?
Are you sure the domain name for your state's site should end in .ru?
That's the real point - the ACA was a compromise, where the conservatives wanted to avoid single payer, and to keep a large and ongoing role for the existing businesses in the industry, and the got what they asked for. Now, they keep trying to force re-negotiation after re-negotiation, to get more. If we just use the humorous definition of an "honest" politician - one who once bought, stays bought, there are a large percentage of conservatives who can't live up to even that tongue in cheek definition of honest. That's not normal politics. Some people keep saying both sides are part of the problem, because they see both sides making some of the usual back room deals, and some people aren't yet noticing it's overwhelmingly one side that won't stick to the deals they made and wants to keep re-negotiating until the "compromise" is 100% their way.
To the people who have elected a politician who won't stick to his "final" deals, I don't care how popular that rep is in their home district, they weill never be able to get anyting they promise you for you, once it becomes obvious to the people they have to work with that they don't regard their promises to other politicians as binding. There's a lot of new representitives who are already getting that reputation, and you can keep sending them to Washington, but they won't get on any of the powerful comittees, they certainly won't be able to keep any promises they make to you in the future, and they will have literally hundreds of powerful people looking to sink their careers on any pretext possible.
While we are at it, the Earned income Tax Credit was a conservative idea, to move people from wellfare to "workfare". It's an idea that was once too conservative for Richard M. Nixon. It was supposed to fix every "problem" America was having with "entitlement programs". it was conservative politicians who promised that adopting the EITC would mean continuous surplusses and never having to touch Social Security. Now we have a breed of conservatives who keep referring to the EITC as a liberal creation, blaming it on conveniently dead liberals such as Teddy Kennedy, and saying it's "part of the problem", and pushing to get rid of it. Given that example, can anyone honestly claim that the conservative faction will keep ANY parts of the ACA, such as the no excusion for prior conditions rules, or people being able to keep their college age child on their health insurance? If you're thinking that there are some good ideas in the ACA, but as a whole, the thing is too big, complex, and unweildy, I sympathise, but there have been people fighting against every single tiny part, and for moving back to a pre-New Deal model for Medicare as well,
Who is John Cabal?
It just goes to show: It doesn't always pay to contract everything out to the private sector...
Because government employee programmers, who probably belong to a union and cannot be fired for anything less than murdering the boss, would have done better?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
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But I can choose not to have a car and not pay a penalty for it. (in fact, one might call it a bonus)
You can't choose not to have a body. And when your body needs health care, are you going to "choose" to die instead of going to the emergency room?
The fact is, you'll become a burden on the rest of us if you get sick and you don't have health insurance.
Where is my choice to opt out in the ACA without penalty?
It's in the same place as your choice to opt-out of paying taxes. Freedom isn't free. Suck it up.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Perhaps he is a responsible individual that has set aside enough money to pay for an unexpected emergency in the event he gets sick?
Obviously you don't have a clue as to how much it can cost to treat a serious illness. Very few of us have the means to set aside cash for that kind of event.
You know it is possible to survive in this world without health insurance. People have been doing it in this country pretty much since the day it was founded.
Wrong. People die from lack of health insurance.
Your negative view of the general population is actually quite disturbing. You seem to feel we need a nanny state to protect us from ourselves.
Actually I'm not concerned about protecting us from ourselves. Rather, I am concerned about protecting us from people like you, who would choose to forego getting health insurance and put the burden on the rest of us.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
For some reason people want health care that won't bankrupt them. They look at what citizens of other industrialized nations get and want the same.
You mean eight hour waits in ambulances to game national healthcare system metrics, going to the US for treatment to avoid waits, and crackdowns on treatment for immigrants? Americans don't want the first, the second is redundant, and Obamacare will probably rule out the third.
You dont know much about the UK.
I wasn't asking.
If you did, you wouldn't rely on the Daily Tele(graph) for accurate information.
In the UK, they wont send you home to die simply because your employer doesn't have insurance, or enough insurance. This is what people in the US want. Basic care in the UK or Australia isn't glamorous, but it's far cheaper than the most basic care in the US. In fact top hospital cover in Australia is far cheaper than the most basic care in the US.
People want to know they can go to a hospital with serious problem and not have to worry if they have the cash to pay for it. This is the assurance you have in Canada, the UK or Australia.
Also, you'll find the vast majority of people travelling overseas (out of the country) will be for elective surgery which is usually not covered or not covered completely and optional.
Finally, am I the only one who sees the notion of your employer providing health care akin to indentured servitude? Preventing you from changing employers at will or even taking time off (a sabbatical)?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Wow that's absolutely ridiculous. How is it that a site can be rolled out THIS unfinished?
Amazon and eBay seem to have worked with what I imagine is a similar to greater load. All while managing to avoid any highly publicized information leaks (at least I think, correct me if I'm wrong), and having pretty good uptime.
Could you imagine finding lorem ipsum text or just completely broken scripts on either of those sites? The people responsible would be gone long before the project saw the light of day. You want to know what the price tag on the site is...634...MILLION dollars.
Dafuq.
Why should people have to volunteer to fix something that we (taxpayers) paid a 9-digit sum of money to generate to begin with?
I'm pretty sure that somewhere in that contract, there was some language that said the end product needed to actually function. It's not on us to fix it - it's on the Government to hold the contractor accountable, or tear them apart piece by piece for breach of contract.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.