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How To FIx Healthcare.gov: Go Open-Source!
McGruber writes "Over at Bloomberg Businessweek, Paul Ford explains that the debacle known as healthcare.gov makes clear that it is time for the government to change the way it ships code: namely, by embracing the open source approach to software development that has revolutionized the technology industry." That seems like the only way to return maximum value to the taxpayers, too.
Don't they know that Open Source is Inferior?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
When your system doesn't work and you are way behind schedule.
Make a radical change and fire someone. That's sure to fix things.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Prototype and test. Go open source if you want to do so, but it isn't a silver bullet. If you don't test your software under simulated load conditions, you won't know if it will work. And for a work in progress, open source may have a delayed benefit time of several months before you get the feedback you need. People scratch their own itches in open source. They don't necessarily look at the entire system integrity. Only testing will do that.
I'm all for it just as long as the mandates are delayed until the infrastructure is really done this time.* When does the RFP go out?
* And maybe a "few" other kinks in the law ironed out.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It's probably not even salvageable. Starting over would be the best choice. But, let's be honest, even a correctly functioning website still doesn't alleviate the massive problems inherent in the law itself. It was a pork laden bill designed for corporate crony interests, which is structurally why it will never work.
No, having government oversight of such a large part of our economy was a bad decision. There are no winners here.
Let the community fix your broken products for free.
I don't know if that is ethically responsible for a government to do.
http://torrentfreak.com/obama-administration-uses-pirated-code-on-healthcare-gov-131019/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TorrentfreakBits+%28TorrentFreak+-+Bits%29&utm_content=FaceBook
"As it turns out, the Government website uses the open source software DataTables, which is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library.
While using open-source software is fine, the makers of Healthcare.gov decided to blatantly remove all references to its owners or the original copyright license."
...what's important out of all this is the appreciation that those unaffiliated with programming should now have who got us all in this mess to begin with. Maybe now, our leaders, managers, supervisors, etc., etc., will stop breathing down developers' necks and instead of scoffing at these things, will take a few moments to stand back and say, "Wait a minute... This is all being rushed. Let's take our time with all this and execute a properly-developed plan."
I would not want to be on the Healthcare.gov team during all this. Just imagine the hell they must be going through...
healthcare.gov didn't fail because the designers didn't use open source software at every point in the chain - if the rumors are to be believed, an audit found open source code in there that had simply had its licence removed - it failed because it was designed by the lowest bidder and was not subject to the rigorous testing regime demanded by a national service.
FOSS is great for reigning in costs, but it is not a patch for unskilled developers or a crutch for incompetent project managers who are unable to keep the project on track and within scope.
TFA, and virtually everything I've seen on 'Obamacare' are not helpful
First, I've yet to see *one* legitamit (or even fringe) news organization film themselves without editing sit down at a computer and **attempt to enroll in ACA**...if this exits, please post a link
2nd, a major problem of this article (and again virtually every news or analysis on ACA I've seen) is the lack of necessary information distinguishing **STATE EXCHANGES** and the **NATIONAL EXCHANGE**
I hear it mentioned that the two exist, and are different, and I see a map that shows which states have their own ACA program and which do not, therefore defaulting to the Federal system....however I absolutely have not heard any distinction made when any blog/news report/etc mentions 'Obamacare's failures'
3rd, The problems of "Obamacare" are myriad to be sure, but in the coverage of the "rollout of the website" no IT workers are interviews...no one with any expertise actually explains what the problems are...
We can easily understand (if you visit the website) & read a few news reports that the website's "failure" is a timeout when people try to sign up. Again, we don't know if this is the *state* or *federal* exchange, but the point is that the website breaks b/c of too many hits.
Server over capacity.
A few news articles to explain this much, but not any more.
what does /. call 'server over capacity' type problems???
ROUTINE IT WORK
I used to have my CCNA, it has lapsed. I'm not pretending rolling out a functional site like ACA is easy, but it's **well known** how to make a system like that, from a web coding perspective, work.
It's routine IT work done daily all over the world.
So, the real analysis is that the ACA needs more servers.
It's that simple....note 'simple' does not in any way mean "easy"....but the concept is well understood by many IT engineers.
"an open-source approach" is usually helpful in any system experiencing major problems...but this is routine IT work....not in any way a massive failure
if you want to assign blame: blame the contractor that got the 1$billion to develop the ACA site
Thank you Dave Raggett
The government already tried this. Remember their $18m Drupal websites over the last few years? Just because it *can* improve the process and *can* reduce the costs doesn't mean government will manage to accomplish that. They can make the best open source just as shitty and expensive as the worst proprietary, with great ease.
If the program had a good administrator, it would really engage some geeks on matters of vital health care policy, and it would work wonders for transparency.
If it had a fair or poor administrator, it would just be a piece of shit.
Am I the only one that thinks things have gotten a bit hyperbolic. I hear a lot of non technical people talking about how "bad" the architecture is.
This is a new product and has more users a few weeks in then most of the big boys had in over a year.
We are not selling a iPhone or a plane ticket here. This is a complex infrastructure with lots of back end interactions. The front end is fairly modern. They haven't gotten around to minimizing and consolidating the JS files, but that will come I'm sure.
I've gotten through the sign up process, they added some stuff to do some ad-hoc shopping. I've seen much more dragging of feet by supposed enterprise players. What are we 20 days into this enormous platform? Most of the people complaining don't even need the damn thing because they already have insurance.
At the end of the day the exchanges are not even selling insurance. Insurance companies are doing that. It's like using googles shopping feature. Ultimately the insurance company is Amazon.com. If you need the insurance you'll go directly to the person selling it. Hell we probably should have started with the exchanges being nothing more than a fancy craigslist.
People who need insurance because they are sick or scared will get it. They will get the subsidies etc. The vast majority of these so called "healthy young" are just declining insurance through there employers. They just have to fill out a bunch of paper work with their HR department.
At the end of the day healthcare.gov is something to help people get insurance. The subsides and the new rules are what will get it for them.
They can't utilize talent they can't control. If they tried then inconvenient questions would be posed, like "why can't we just show them the cost of plans?" Instead, they need people that obey and build a site that deliberately obscures costs behind subsidies and keeps citizen outrage to a minimum.
So no, they won't be employing uncooperative talent that might fail to appreciate the political sensitives involved.
I understand the political grandstanders on both sides using this in their latest talking points but I really expected a bit more from Slashdot. Crashing Websites, Grumbling Users: Obamacare's Debut Is a Typical Tech Launch is the most balanced and informed article I've seen written on this topic.
Basically the webs has been out for little 2-3 weeks now. It's a National rollout. And it's all on 1.0 code. Of course there will be issues. Network design is done using estimates, but scaling is done using metrics. Load-testing with a 100K concurrent user target will not help you when 200K users show up at your door.
This is all business as usual at the start of the sign-up period. Where users can also call in their applications and also fill them out in person. I'd be surprised if they couldn't mail in their applications as well.
Take a shitty website, and pile on more feces! Genius! Poo-pourri couldn't even cover up that smell!
entirely!
Not only did they not want to go open source they offered the contract to ONE company. There was no open bid.
It gets worse. They also didn't want the programmers available for congressional subpoena. The whole thing was done as secretively and opaquely as possible.
This isn't a failure of system design. Its idiots destroying thing by trying to do everything in the most sneaky and underhanded manner possible.
Answer this... if we knew everything about Obamacare at the time of voting that we know now... would it have passed?
No.
Which is why they don't tell us anything. They don't respect your vote. You don't get to decide. Your opinion is worthless. They will do what they want to do. And if you want something else they will lie to your face.
Was the IRS attacking political opponents of the president on purpose? Of course not. Until it was proven that they were.
Was the NSA tracking Americans domestically intentionally? Of course not. Until it was proven that they were.
Was the ATF selling guns to the drug cartels and then not arresting anyone? Of course not. Until it was proven that they were.
They don't care what is right or wrong or what you want or deserve. All irrelevant.
They have the power and you do what they say or else. The government has gotten completely out of control and it won't get better until pretty much everyone in power is removed.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Look, I use open source all the time and have contributed to many projects and ran a few. I love open source just as much as the next slashdotter.
BUT, broad statements like "open source will fix healthcare.gov" don't add anything to the conversation. What if it was built on open source and it failed? Would we be making the same claims about commercial software? "If only they had used WebSphere and DB2!! Everything would have been wonderful!".
No. No. And. No.
As many people have already pointed out, the problems with healthcare.gov are mostly the same ones that plague many large scale IT projects. Insufficient testing, complex interactions between many existing complex systems (which are hard to get right), consultants that get paid for code delivered, working or not, and so on.
Now, TFA actually makes the argument that healthcare.gov as an _open platform_ would be a good idea. It goes on to point out that that's one thing that makes some of the bigger web apps successful: they are platforms for building apps rather than apps themselves. How much of that is true is open for debate (is google really a beautiful platform or is it a bunch of hacks held together by duct tape? only google engineering knows for sure...) , but as a goal, healthcare.gov as a platform isn't a bad idea.
However, platforms don't just materialize from thin air. In fact, building a platform before you have apps is a recipe for failure. It's usually only after the third or fourth app that the patterns emerge that make a platform possible. It takes time for good platforms to evolve.
Given that, designing healthcare.gov from the beginning as a platform would probably have failed, too. The developers would have created a wonderful platform for some vague requirements that likely didn't actually meet the needs of an insurance exchange at all.
From a pure software engineering perspective, what's happening right now isn't that bad. Version 1.0 launched, it had problems. Let's get working on Version 2.0 and maybe try out some new ideas. Then for Version 3.0 and 4.0, we can start thinking of a platform. The other important point here is that you have to plan for multiple versions and long term maintenance/evolution for software. The suggestion that healthcare.gov should have been run as a startup in the government rather than outsourced is probably the best idea for fixing the problem.
-Chris
It's a ridiculously complicated system. (Scroll down to the graphic.) Figure out a way to release it in stages. Step 1, you can create an account and log in and read what the system will someday be. Step 2, make sure it's getting to all the right info from all the right places. Etc...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
is the better solution. In fact, the *tards that created this mess should be forced to fix it w/o any additional money being paid as it doesn't meet the specifications. That's right, simply enforce the effin contract that included the provision that it must meet the specs as written - which it doesn't before any money is to be paid. Maybe we'd not have companies feeding at the public expense. I'd love to have what they paid for the fucking website in my wallet and I'd at least have made something that looks reasonable and possibly worked instead of the crap they've got now.
Hell I'll fix the damn thing for Five Million and have it working in 2 months.
Amazing how the public dialog is now "how to fix socialized medicine" when just a short time ago it was more like "should we have socialized medicine?" Well played, Mr Obama.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Not another article about open source curing cancer. Yes, open source will fix the health care website. Anyone that thinks this is either has limited professional IT experience or makes their living on open source. Whether it's open source or closed is almost entirely irrelevant.
There's more wrong with that site than the software. The problems are so many ranging from how it came to be, what its results are, who it most affects, who it doesn't affect [as in who it excludes], what parties wrote the legislation in its current form and how it coincidentally benefits primarily them, and lots more.
This is the worst government trainwreck of a law I have ever seen. Requiring auto insurance for drivers and (in some states) driver-license holders has demonstrably had the effect of raising auto insurance rates for all. How this lesson learned did not translate into higher healthcare insurance rates is proof that the people either have no good intentions or are simply unqualified to make such plans and decisions as they failed to consider something so simple and obvious. That there are so many exemptions sprinkled in and about proves they are aware of the problems it poses for people but they only wish to help or protect themselves or their friends.
We need the proposed 28th amendment ratified so that this sort of unfair and unbalanced legislative practice can never happen again.
That seems like the only way to return maximum value to the taxpayers, too.
Will that un-spend 600+ million dollars?
http://tinypic.com/r/2rqner7/5
Make it open source and easily customizable enough for other countries to use. Then put in bunch of hard to find security bugs and let the NSA exploit those bugs to spy on other countries. Two birds, one stone, everyone is happy. You're welcome.
Yes, it was the lowest, but there apparently weren't any other bidders, or at least none that anyone can find or name.
You see, they didn't actually put it out to open bidding, and instead awarded the contract to someone with political connections.
They used something called "task orders," which allows bureaucrats to completely bypass open bids. Basically, if you win one government contract somewhere along the way (even for a completely different project), it's possible for the government to award you future contracts on other projects without worrying about all of that pesky "low bidder" stuff.
It has become painfully obvious to me that government IT contracts exist solely to give well connected contracting companies billions of dollars of taxpayer's money since these same large creatively dead companies can't actually come up with products that real consumers would want. My guess is that if you contracted these companies to build an iPad that it would be 1 inch thick and have a 640 x 400 resolution and have an owner's manual that came in a set of binders.
So these companies are going to fight opensource as hard as they can seeing that it destroys all kinds of things they had going for them. Open source means that other companies can come in and scoop their contracts. Open source means that people like slashdoter and the DailyWTF will go through the code highlighting crap that came from 3rd rate 3rd world outsourced coders. Open source could even mean horror upon horrors that if good code is generated that other governments will copy it and simply modify it to their own needs.
But the worst horror is that if they charge 50 billion dollars for a few thousand lines of modifications to an existing system people like us will be willing to testify at the fraud trial.
Actually there is one worse horror: that people like us contribute free functionality, upgrades, and fixes.
If you give the people any chance to participate in government, besides paying taxes and voting for the carefully-groomed, reliable idiots, then they are likely to develop some misplaced sense of ownership.
That is absolutely NOT how this plantation is run.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It is TAX DOLLARS AT WORK !! Not some fucking commie GNU is not unix license that has nothing to do with anything that is not stupid as stupid does !!
Yes, of course this is a stupid suggestion !! But this is /. and that is what makes this place so fucking funny !!
from torrentfreak, about healthcare.gov
"As it turns out, the Government website uses the open source software DataTables, which is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library.
While using open-source software is fine, the makers of Healthcare.gov decided to blatantly remove all references to its owners or the original copyright license.
In other words, they simply took the open-source software and are passing it off as their own, a clear violation of the GPL v2 and BSD (3-point) licenses DataTables uses."
Presented by someone with (among other things): A: not any real world experience in dealing with systems on a large scale, or, B: someone in their early twenties who thinks open source is the end all be all. Not to mention the time and cost healthcare.gov has already cost the US taxpayers, going open source at this point would be a disaster. But hey, healthcare.gov is already a joke and a disaster, so making it a disaster would be a step up, I guess...
The only fix for healthcare.gov is to drop the bomb on it. 3 years and $630 million dollars and in true government style, it is a complete and total disaster and this is just a small taste of how everything that was good about our healthcare system is going to be destroyed by a massive, blundering bureaucracy.
The only fix is to defund Obamacare, scrap it and start over.
"How to make a million dollars and not pay taxes"
Step one... make a million dollars
Step two... when the IRS calls, you tell them two simple words. "I forgot"
TFA: "How to create a great, highly available, high throughput, secure Obamacare web site using open source software"
Step one... make a great, highly available, high throughput, secure Obamacare web site
Step two... release the source code to the community under the best possible license
Management is the reason why healthcare.gov has been such as disaster. Open source or not, it wouldn't have mattered. They didn't even get to start coding until this spring, because the government was so slow in issuing specifications for the site. Then as if the tight deadlines were not enough, Administrators kept issuing changes to the site up until last few weeks of September (despite an October 1st launch date). It wasn't little a change here or there either.
One of the last big overhauls was making it so people had to register before they could browse the plans. This was apparently becasue they wanted people to see what the price would be with the subsidy. The idea being that for many people the price before the credit would scare them away from buying in.
There is also more info on this at the new york times
n/t
Thank you Dave Raggett
When I saw the news "Healthcare.gov sux" (or similar) my firsth thought was "QA really sux in this project".
You don't need to go open source, you need a good staff.
as some very helpful individual elucidated in a different post on this thread: "its not like building a hobby site"
if you notice, my original post assumed a level of IT knowledge on behalf of the reader (you)
i'm saying I havent heard any problems reported professionally whatsoever, and of the reports that **do** exist mention **only** problems that, at the core, are routine IT Engineering problems
I'm demanding better journalism (re: TFA) and smarter commentary from us, /., b/c we are the kind who know this stuff (hence my assumption that you know something of IT)
who else will explain things but us (experts)?
who ever has?
the real experts need to be heard...let's speak coherently!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Oh my non-existing-god!
Open source? America is definitely committed to its descent into communism!
How will they make their money?
Why fix it? Junk it.
BTW, why do you suppose the Federal Government gave this huge job to a Canadian software company.
You American software engineers not up to the task?
it failed because it was designed by the lowest bidder
Wrong.
It failed because it was a crony capitalism project, gifted by the Obama administration to a former campaign worker.
http://tealmedia.com/ ... Teal Media was selected as the lead visual design team on the redesign of HealthCare.gov. Check out The Atlantic article about the redesign.
http://tealmedia.com/index.html#about ... Jessica Teal - Principle ... Jessica founded Teal Media following her successful stint as Design Manager for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.
Govt in the UK went open source with their national system. Perhaps they have some lessons to share.
That is all.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
the thing i like about open source is that, even when it is broken, i can "git it and fix it" all by myself, as can anyone else so inclined. at may seem magical, but somehow the best fixes do tend to swim upstream against the current. you lot have a broken system, and from what i am hearing, you are not expecting this to get sorted any time soon, if at all. had it been open source this discussion would now be irrelevant, as the problems would have been fixed by now. i believe this has been proven, over and over again, in the real world. open source for life. (speaking of fixing things, is anyone at slashdot interested in sorting out your apparent dependency on microsoft style cr/lf?)
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/healthcaregov-code-developed-by-the-people-and-for-the-people-released-back-to-the-people/277295/
Atlantic article the Teal Media website refers to.
Dave Cole, a lead developer at Development Seed, wrote in a blog post this March. Cole, who served as a senior advisor to the United States chief information officer and deputy director of new media at the White House
More cronies.
Reading the article, it should be obvious, how clueless these people are, or, what lengths they are willing to go to in order to sell their lies to the american public.
C>
C>format /X .gov:
C>
-- L8R, guitardood
so you're agreeing that the reports of 'Obamacare Failure' are based on faulty journalism, and that, further, what has been reported are simple IT Engineering solutions?
that's what I'm hearing...b/c you say this:
right...so you're saying that the contractor who was paid $1Billion to 'roll out' the site made a "common" mistake that most /. readers would catch?
glad you agree?
Thank you Dave Raggett
....perhaps Jessica Teal and Teal Media and a bunch of 20-somethings with limited experienced actually had something to do with the situation?
were made by Karmashock! Bravo!!!!!!!
It failed because they went with the lowest bidder
It didn't fail because they went with the lowest bidder. This was apparently a "sole source" contract. They just added another task onto an existing contract.
Meet CGI Federal, the company behind the botched launch of HealthCare.gov
CGI's business model depends on embedding itself deeply within an institution.
"The ultimate aim is to establish relations so intimate with the client that decoupling becomes almost impossible," read one profile of the company. ...
CGI Federal's winning bid stretches back to 2007, when it was one of 16 companies to get certified on a $4 billion "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity" contract for upgrading Medicare and Medicaid's systems. Government-Wide Acquisition Contracts — GWACs, as they're affectionately known — allow agencies to issue task orders to pre-vetted companies without going through the full procurement process, but also tend to lock out companies that didn't get on the bandwagon originally. According to USASpending.gov, CGI Federal got a total of $678 million for various services under the contract — including the $93.7 million Healthcare.gov job, which CGI Federal won over three other companies in late 2011.
It's also true that CGI Federal began lobbying as it started winning government work. According to OpenSecrets.org, it has spent $800,000 since 2006 lobbying on several different tax and appropriations bills.
Feds reviewed only one bid for Obamacare website design
Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.
CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal....
There is no evidence CMS issued any public solicitation for the Obamacare website contract. The Examiner asked both CMS and CGI for copies of any public solicitation notice for the Healthcare.gov task orders. Neither CMS nor CGI furnished any such public notice.....
The ID/IQ system provides a fast-track contract approval process, but it is much less likely than competitive bidding to secure high quality at a reasonable cost.
“Whenever you have limited competition, but certainly with a sole source or a one-bid offer, the government has to question whether it is going to get the best product at the best price,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog organization that monitors federal contracting.
Both USAspending.gov, which tracks federal spending, and the FFATA Subaward Reporting System, which specifically tracks contracts, refer to CGI as the lone bidder for the Obamacare website design award.
Each site describes the CGI contract award as the product of “full and open competition,” but CGI is the only bidder listed.
I can't find the link at the moment, but apparently this company is "favored" within the administration.... for some reason.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Someone should file a freedom of information act request for the code.
Several years ago when I worked at NASA our branch chief speculated that someone could request, and get, the our in house developed data acquisition system and have potentially sellable product.
I've done this for engineering applications. In fact I've worked with automated systems that do a pretty good job of automated code generation. But in either the manual or automated case, it takes numerous iterations through the requirements definition phase to capture the inputs (what the customer wants), map these to requirements, discover holes (where a specific case might not be addressed) or conflicts. The solution in these cases is to go back to the customer and get more information. Or in some cases, tell them that 'it just won't work like that'.
Writing legislation, passing a bill and then building a web site doesn't work this way. What do you expect the developers to do? Go back to Congress and ask them to re-write the law if a problem is discovered? I don't think so.
Compare this to tax law. That has had decades to evolve, as a manual system before TurboTax came on the scene. And many of the discrepancies were actually encountered and solved. Just not in software. So when it came time to write code, the regulations (requirements) were well understood and complete.
Have gnu, will travel.
What exactly is preventing these people from going to health insurance company websites and buying health insurance. Let them buy health insurance that way and then give them the subsidy through a tax credit. I guess it's an excuse to hire more government workers and contractors.
There's no proof there was only a single bid. But a spokesperson from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) told the Daily Caller, “CGI did not receive any sole source awards. They competed for the work on our multiple award contract.”
But don't let facts get in the way of your rant by all means.
"if the rumors are to be believed, an audit found open source code in there that had simply had its licence removed"
Where are these rumors, do you have a link to the source?
Was it truly lowest bidder? Anyone really check the procurement details? Or was the contract really let on the golf course? As a survivor of federal IT, I can speak to the wonders of golf course procurement by vendor-friendly management and what a mess it inevitably leads to for the poor schmos in IT who have to use the product and make it work.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Reuters puts money spent so far at $200M, and project at $300M. Source: As Obamacare tech woes mounted, contractor payments soared
You can make your point without resorting to embellishments you know.
There were 4 bidders according to Reuters.
Where did you get your information?
It failed (like many government programs) because nobody really cares or even has to care. Sure, the government employees want to do a good job, but their livelihood doesn't depend on it. The government contractors themselves don't care either, because they'll still keep getting new contracts that they can screw up the same way as the old ones. And even if they were prevented from bidding again, they'd just change their name and go again.
They didn't even get to start coding until this spring,
Wow, if that is true, I'm actually impressed that they got it working as well as they did by October. That's a lot of work to get done quickly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
supposedly it was a golf course contract of sorts. I don't know all the details, but I do know that it was not handled in a professional manner.
"ISO-9001 certified quality frameworks that result in CGI's on-time, on-budget delivery track record"
From Forbes investigation the issue is that you cannot browse the plans without entering all of your personal information for verification first. The system then needs to cross check all of the info to calculate your government subsides. This causes a major bottleneck which greatly slows down the system. Most would balk at the prices without the subsides.
Quote from the article: So, by analyzing your income first, if you qualify for heavy subsidies, the website can advertise those subsidies to you instead of just hitting you with Obamacare’s steep premiums. For example, the site could advertise plans that cost “$0 or “$30 instead of explaining that the plan really costs $200, and that you’re getting a subsidy of $200 or $170.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/14/obamacares-website-is-crashing-because-it-doesnt-want-you-to-know-health-plans-true-costs/
Most people have no background in Engineering Economics which has long shown the best of breed solution has the highest up front cost, with the lowest long-term costs, due to having the lowest MAINTENANCE costs. Roadways are a great example of how low bid doesn't improve the infrastructure. Best of breed is the only solution.
Free, open source software reduces the opportunity for graft. You don't think 100% of the money DC spends is honest, do you? Or even 50%?
was not subject to the rigorous testing regime demanded by a national service....not a patch for unskilled developers or a crutch for incompetent project managers who are unable to keep the project on track and within scope.
I worked for CGI Federal for a few years, and this describes the environment to a T.
"an examination by the Sunlight Foundation shows the administration turned the task of building its futuristic new health care technology planning and programming over to legacy contractors with deep political pockets .. Sunlight reviewed contract award information from USASpending.gov and FedBizOpps.gov, and found 47 organizations that won contracts from Health and Human Services or the Treasury Department to manage, support or service the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Among them were top contractors like Northrop Grumman, Deloitte LLP, SAIC Inc. General Dynamics and Booz Allen Hamilton." link
Would have been a fat white dude knocking on your door, briefly regaling you with tales of anvils, pianos and frogs falling on your head, your daughter being gang-raped while your wife was beheaded. You know, typical insurance agent talk, and then he'd tell you it would cost you from 2 bucks/mo. -> 20/mo and shove a couple of War & Peace sized pamphlets in your meaty fist.
You'd slam back some JD, have a 24 oz. rare steak, talk to the missus about it, and then you'd dump your six times as expensive insurance and the fat dude would do all the work after you'd signed on the dotted line. Internet my ass jugalo..
It would have been the perfect deal (completely without any computers/internet). Thinking of that as a starting point and caca like Facebook and Twitter, Windows, MacOS , even Linux, and well, it becomes kind of obvious that computers ain't your friend and neither is the internet. For posting bullshit like this, however, it is great!
"Anything worth doing
Stop trying to validate everyone prior to purchase. Let’s call it roughly 1 million simultaneous visitors. Your bottle necks are in the multiple back-end databases that must be accessed to validate identity and eligibility. Why put the bottleneck first? Show visitors prices for various classifications. Ask them to self select their category, show them their prices. Validate their identity and eligibility after they have committed to purchase, if they selected incorrectly, tell them at that point and return to home page. Simple. This really isn't that difficult unless your agenda is to gather information for political purposes. As a professional programmer, postpone the long running operation until the smaller number of buyers elects. Every visitor will not buy on first visit. It takes a few trips. Allow those visits to not require a real back-end round trip. Give them a wizard to self select and validate on purchase. Takes load off of back-end databases. Speeds response times. Sacrifices nothing other then knowing your visitors prior to purchase. Why is that important? Yeah, good question.
No, it appears to have failed because of incompetent overall management, contracting plans, and architecture, regardless of if award strategy was low bid, best value, or low cost/technically acceptable or who paid the most into the criteria.
HHS tried to be the systems integrator (think general contractor). Most of the government is incompetent at that role (DoD and some of the more techie agencies are better); HHS is particularly poorly-prepared. Several of the development contractors are also good systems integrators, but you usually can't bid on both the SI piece and a development piece of the same project. So that skill set was wasted. With the 45-50+ contractors and the architecture they chose, they made the integration process even harder and that's without counting all the connections to back-end systems to get through the ID and subsidy bits.
I'd like to thank the Administration for producing the best possible advertising for hiring companies like the one I work for and our peers and competitors. Almost makes up for the initiative Congress foisted upon us to help companies eliminate their employees' accrued vacation time by forcing 12-15 days off earlier this month.
if the rumors are to be believed, an audit found open source code in there that had simply had its licence removed
Removing the license defeats the point of open source, so I challenge the validity of your argument. Well, at least until someone who wrote the code cares about the license abuse - at which point it might help.
If they sold it on silk road, and they accepted BTC as payment, then it would have a chance.
"That seems like the only way to return maximum value to the taxpayers, too."
Ha ha, no. The only way to return maximum value to the taxpayers is to never voluntarily forcibly take it from them in the first place. And by that, I mean, stop doing so much stuff. If you're counting on government to do anything beyond protecting your natural rights and enforcing reasonable laws, you will pay dearly for your faith, and I'm not too sure about the rights and reasonable laws these days either.
No, that's not how task orders work. Task orders are added to contracts, which for things like this are generally competitively awarded. The alternative would be to write the complete spec first, run the competition, source slection, waitthrough theobligatory obstructionist contest of the award and then have the low bidder triple the price with change orders because your spec was incomplete and inconsistent. Task ordersallow you to do aneval on ,uch smaller, managbly sized chunks, maintain control of the project both technically and financially, and limit significantly your liability whenyou fire the prime.
Beware of snake oil salesmen and those who espouse silver bullets for software development.
Possibly here:
patriotsheartnetwork: Feds reviewed only one bid for Obamacare website design
It was the first result for 'healthcare.gov "task order"'.
Caveat being that of the first 10 results, 3 are unrelated and the rest seem be right-wing.
They refused to provide any proof that there were any other bidders. Name the other bidders. Show the open bid documentation. Is it inconceivable that a multiple award contract could be shopped out in a way that only one bidder got to be 'all the bidders' on a contract? And, because the Hate America First crowd is in charge - it was a 'subsidiary' of a Canadian company. (You know, like the Obama busses)
Of course, our government (who is willing to use the power of the IRS to oppresses, disenfranchise, and violate the privacy of the current regime's political opposition) wouldn't go so far as to play these games? Right? We should trust them. Hasn't Snowden taught us that?
Have no fear. A few FOIA Requests and some Congressional subpoenas will prove you wrong, at which point you will start quote Hillary with "WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE!!!" You will go find a new topic of the day to spin for your Rahh Rahh My Team - regardless. It's how it works.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/20/as-gop-hits-at-obamacare-site-administration-vows-fixes/?hpt=hp_t1
Every netizen of planet Earth should create an account at HealthCare.gov and use 'Barak Obama' as their name.
And then create more accounts for:
John Smallberries
John Yaya
John Bigbuttae
John Bangdingou
John Holeefuk
John Whorphine
etc.
Let's give Obama a really bad case of diarrhea when he finds out that he is the beneficiary of 3 billion Barak Obama accounts.
(Y) }:-D
Ha ha.
Just buy the source to an existing and functional high volume on line site. Product is product whether it's Insurance or computers. Hell, buy Geico's site. All the security is built in, a product model, etc. All you have to do is modify to fit the new product.
But noooo...Government always has to reinvent the wheel.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"
I'll let Lisa Loeb take it from here ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
you have links?... so do I...
http://washingtonexaminer.com/feds-reviewed-only-one-bid-for-obamacare-website-design/article/2537194
And really given what a joke the roll out was do you HONESTLY think using your ACTUAL HUMAN brain that they had an open bid on this?
Can you for a second bypass the partisan rot and think about this as if it weren't something you're horrifically biased about? TRY. Consider what you know and try to defend how this has played out.
What is more, who bid on it? If multiple companies bid... who were they? The government won't say. You have to submit a freedom of information act request to get that information and of course the government will basically drag their feet on that until they can fake up an answer.
How many of these scandals do we need to go through before you finally understand they're dirty. We're dealing with fundamentally corrupt people here. It can't be explained with incompetence. Its too systematic and methodical. Its corruption. And people like you let them get away with it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Lol they could start with reducing the amount of Javascript hits to their servers.
Looking at the page where you input your address in Firebug, a total of 54 JS files are being loaded. 54! About 15-20 where JQuery plugins...arguably they are using too much open source.
The problem isn't open-ness - the problem is the site was developed by noobs who didn't imagine that 50+ hits to a server for JS files was likely to cause problems. I imagine the development process was probably ultra-bureaucratic as well which never helps.
Obama mentioned open source early on, but you know how things go when you promise change and change your promise. Presidency is a broken record, and they have long since lost the hearts and minds of the voter, is likely why they opted for corporate backing in the 80's and 90's. Now we the people are just bitches.
The website wasn't broken in the first place. This was their plan from the beginning, to put in a broken failure but have plausible deniable. The whole situation causes a "PROBLEM" which is then publicized by the corporate media (instead of talking about Bengazi, Banksters, Spying, Oath Breaking, and the Constitution), So they get public outrage over the first incarnation of this website. They 600 Billion spent paid for them to learn a ball park structure, and how much traffic to expect, meanwhile behind the scenes, the only reason it never went live yet is the REAL programmers haven't created the SQL tables in the NSA UTAH data center yet. Which fits right in with the PROBLEM, REACTION for the free shit army (FSA) people, now Obamacare will deliver the SOLUTION. The solution will fuck with private information linking analyzing, and exploiting your employment, taxs, savings, banking, property ownership, firearms ownership, mental health evaluation (under the DSM-5 -- MOAR false science!)
Now that the (FSA) has demanded this monster be fixed, it's green light to roll out the real website they intended all along. (the sucking up of EVERYTHING YOU FUCKING DO)
Meanwhile the Corporate Fascist media's journalists are simply skirting around the edges whining about COST, while ignoring the MATH exponents problem of DEBT vs GDP
This whole thing is like the NWO thugs sat around figuring out what is the one thing they could do to reach out and TOUCH every fucking person, Even if you don't want to be TOUCHED, and that after that TOUCH, they then control every aspect of you. Dictate to you, Control You (Ban FIrearms, Capitol Controls on Banks-- Gee fucking slashdot just look at CHASE@!), Steal From you, and as us who served know, KILL you. Hell as hackers you know you can blackmail, time theft, time framing for crime, change logs, delete, copy, just fucking ANYTHING to people with this unconstitutionally stolen data.
IF your smart you already have healthcare.gov in your squid and their entire fucking CIDR NETBLOCK blocked
Meanwhile, Might I suggest you've put a bullet through your TELEVISION receiver and stop getting programmed by these cock sucking European Socialist Psychopaths with their supporting FSA.
Carbon Tax - Fraud TREASON
Bankster Bailouts - Fraud TREASON
FIREARMS BAN - TREASON
Federal Reserve run by foreign banksters = the SENATE is TREASON
These fuckers are twisting everything, they've gutted the fucking US Constitution.
They CALL ME the fucking NUT JOB?
No you dumb fucks, they just declared CIVIL WAR is what they did. It's just that the war has started ELECTRONICALLY FIRST.
My only promise to the Obama Care Navigators, is that I will try to avoid you like the plague
, but if you push law enforcement nsa spy database exploit shit in my face with your unconstitutional shit, your time on this EARTH will be short. Funny they didn't brief you new little fucking European Socialist programmers that many of us here already took an oath, long before all your fucking bullshit came along. I don't really know what defend the US Constitution means to you, but to me YOU are the fucking terrorist -- DHS is the terrorist, NSA is the terrorist. DOJ is the terrorist. You can pretend only a little while longer, the sheep are waking now. After you fuck the derivatives your fucking reign on Earth is done motherfuckers! Even if I wanted to protect you, I COULD NOT. Not even GOD can help you after that. Funny how the oath at the end says, SO HELP ME GOD. Welp you zionists with the ritual to unbind your oaths, dual ISRAEL/US mosad rifling through our Classified Vaults, Networks, Exploiting the ice creams inside, Corrupt Sold out Officials, Constitution Haters, Gun Grabbers, Control Freaks, Carbon Tax Nazis, Psychiatrists tying GUN owners to Medical Records -- GOD Tried to WARN YOU, and Man tried yet one last time to remind you-- again--to remind you by having them written in the VERY WORDS of
That is the only solution for Obamacare and healthcare.gov.
My wife and I were paying $180/month for a halfway decent health plan, and now we're going to have to pay $800/month for the same thing under Obamacare. We're not rich by any means, and often have to live thrifty to make sure all the bills get paid and that there's enough left for savings. This is going to wipe out any ability we have to save for the future - outside of government programs, which will be illiquid by the time we retire.
Fuck you Obama, Fuck you Big Government, Fuck you Leeches in the Welfare Class who refuse to produce.
If I donate my time to help the government, how do I make a living? The only reason open source kind of works now is software developers either (1) make a living as low-paid contractors and do open source on the side, or (2) are subsidized by big companies like IBM who need open source to compete with Oracle and Microsoft. If all the software-development jobs disappear, how do I make a living?
We the people pay for this shit via tax dollars, I for one am sick of the US Government treating public stuff as its own private property.
In addition, we need to bring back the concept of "public" property. I think this is where most of the backlash against the government, and government property lies. The US Government treats what should be public property, as Private Government property.
Congress is having hearings on Thursday, to investigate problems related to healthcare.gov, and guess who won't be attending ? Only the executive in charge of it, Kathleen Sebelius.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sebelius-wont-testify-at-obamacare-hearing-2013-10-19
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - Health and Human Services Department Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will not testify at a Congressional hearing Thursday on the the Affordable Care Act's website problems, according to media reports on Saturday. An official with the Health and Human Services Department told CNN that Sebelius did not have enough time to respond to the request.
Just not enough time to answer questions about all the money pissed away to produce the turd that is healthcare.gov. She must be working so hard to fix it, right ?
Nope ... she can't attend the hearings, because she's going to be living the good life, at a gala in Boston.
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1310/18/ebo.01.html
has the time on appear at the Inaugural Kennedy Forum gala the night before in Boston. So she'll be in Boston at a gala, but unable to testify on the Obamacare roll out in Washington the next day.
Ah, the good life, courtesy the taxpayer, complete with get-out-of-trouble-free card.
Obamacare's Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn't Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/14/obamacares-website-is-crashing-because-it-doesnt-want-you-to-know-health-plans-true-costs/
Perhaps, hiring people who have a vested interest in the ACA succeeding, let's say the American people, to do the work might have made some sense. Outsourcing the work, using, obsolete, 12 year old technology and having people who don't give a damn if it works so long as they get paid is a sure recipe for disaster.
If Obama wanted an opportunity to create jobs - especially, in an industry where the average IT worker has seen a 4% wage increase over the past 10 years, he should have found all the out of work IT workers whose jobs have been sent overseas and and hired them - at least to design the systems. Coding can be be done by any competent code monkey (domestic or foreign) if the specs are right and QA is implemented and followed.
We wouldn't see the issues we are seeing now had this been done. Oh wait....who hired the contractors????? Anybody know?
"Best of breed" for software development works the opposite way. The "magic quadrant" solutions touted by Forrester and Gartner tend to be associated with companies presenting the most polished sales staff selling solutions that meet the most checkboxes with the flashiest demos. "All you do is click apply, and it's done!" Problem with those "best of breed" vendors is that instead of delivering a tight package of software that does a few things well, they give you a toppling stack of software that does tons of stuff poorly. They charge a lot to license, charge a lot to implement, and charge even more to support.
P = Population of the United States over the age of 18
.8=100,297,712 users
H = Number of households
Givens:
All members of P will require information from the site.
Open enrollment for most company health plans is from Oct 1 - Oct 15.
Therefore:
Most members of P who need to compare to company health plans will need to access the site between when it opens - Oct 1 - and the deadline for open enrollment in their company plan - Oct 15.
Assuming 80% of P is in the above category:
L = (P - H) * 0.8
Using data from census.gov:
P=~240,133,500
H=~114,761,359
L= (240133500-114761359) *.8
L=125372141 *
Multiple by number of clicks/page loads to accomplish the basic tasks and you have a number of approximate hits. From what I have seen of the site, that is approximately 20 page loads.
So 2,005,954,240 hits / 15 days / 24 hours per day / 60 minutes per hour / 60 seconds per minute = ~1548 hits per second minimum capacity required.
If we further assume that the initial surge will be more than 1/15 of the population, then that number can be scaled appropriately.
It's not black magic.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
I have faith. The government could screw even open source up.
With all the costs we have heard (even if it's a fraction of what we heard) and the amount of time they have had AND the amount of weeks past the initial launch, still not having a plan is a utter fucking joke. There is no excuse in the world that explains the ineptness and outright unpreparedness that this whole website sign up ordeal has been. To try and defend any part of this shows partisanship that does nothing but instill that some people just can't accept being wrong. I hope that this works out for all of us, because we all stand to lose if it fails. Unfortunately this was not brought about by the American public but by politicians that look for every avenue to skim money out.
If cost of healthcare was really the issue why not go after the whole medical field for reforms? To implement coverage for all is like trying to kill a serpent by nipping at it's tail.
I really love the "How about this - why don't we do something deliberately, in a planned fashion, that has wide support in society?" quote. Half the country wants to cover everyone, and doesn't think money should be a consideration when it comes to health care. The other 50% think people should simply DIE if they get sick. Period. There is NO "wide support" for either side, and there NEVER WILL BE. Until the other half the population quits screaming about every stupid event of the day, and actually decides to show some compassion towards the poor and unfortunate, this will NEVER HAPPEN.
So then we have this: "How about we just don't throw crap to say we did something?" Which is EXACTLY what happens when you have people screaming and not working together. This is what you get. It's the ONLY way to move forward at this point.
Welcome to America, bud.
Heh, yeah, remove the cover on the rectifier, yeah, that one that looks like box, take a file, and clean the contacts.
Cue: Coders running screaming in horror from their cubicles.
Hillary says it best: "Recently in Washington unfortunately we have seen examples of the wrong kind of leadership."
No shit. Amazing what passes for contrition these days, too. Obama, however, prefers to hand wave one thing, do another, and blame somebody else. In this case it was a blessing for free software, open source, or whatever, that Obama was as completely two-faced as usual.
Using Bing, eh?
right...i agreed w/ you when you said that 3 steps back up the tree
my GP point...waaay back up there...was that Obamacare website's problems are **routine problems** solved by IT engineers everyday
somehow, you think your point about their mistake in testing (which you yourself say is an "obvious error") is in conflict with, or a counterpoint to my point waaay back about Obamacare's problems being routine IT problems
you seem willing to continue to engage on the topic but i don't see how I can if all you do is say something similar to my point as if it is a counterpoint
Thank you Dave Raggett
This might be a dumb question, but wasn't there a model in Massachussetts that they could follow?
that was the headline of the GP post to which you refer...
but indeed, I agree you probably just misread it
Thank you Dave Raggett
what I meant by that is, 1. taking a general, greater point that you agree with and 2. finding one sentence that, when isolated from its context away from the rest of the post can be pedantically criticized, and then 3. making posts that seem to be making counterpoints to the general, greater point of the GP (which you agree with) but 4. only citing one isolated, contextless sentence is confusing and not adding value to the discussion
Thank you Dave Raggett
The Healthcare.Gov DataBase is LICENSED under GPL v2 by Spry Media, but, after the PIRACY, CGI wiped off the acknowledgement! There's lots more about it all! Like, Hiring Mainframe folks INSTEAD of website developers and a few good proper programmers! You wouldn't think they needed so much money, as not to hire a few good folk! Contracted at $83.4 Million, can't imagine contractors couldn't do it for anything less than $634 Million! Apple spent $1.5 M for the iPhone 5...