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DHHS Preparing 'Tech Surge' To Fix Remaining Healthcare.gov Issues
itwbennett writes "It's no secret that the healthcare.gov website has been plagued by problems since its launch 3 weeks ago. On Sunday, the Department of Health and Human Services said that it's now bringing in the big guns: 'Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the [HHS] team and help improve HealthCare.gov,' the blog post reads. 'We're also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them.' Other emergency measures being taken as part of what HHS calls a 'tech surge' include defining new test processes to prevent new problems and regularly patching bugs during off-peak hours. Still unclear is how long it will take to fix the site. As recently reported on Slashdot, that could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months."
Single payer - have everyone buy into Medicare. Done.
Personally, I'm not that bothered by teething problems. Plenty of sites have experienced them. Yes, there are many ways they could have been avoided, but they weren't, and they will undoubtedl be fixed.
More interesting would be to know what penalty clauses are in the contracts? If they were absent, it's a whole lot clearer why these problems have hit. There was simply no financial incentive to design a site that could scale appropriately.
Or bring it into compliance with the GPLv2 or BSD3 licenses.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Defund the NSA, and repurpose their data center for this. Two birds with one stone.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government"
Part of me wants to send Obama a copy of, "The Mythical Man-Month". Another part of me wants to just sit back and watch.
How is taking over more of the economy an even better idea when the DHHS can't even take over half of medicine? Single-payer is dead in the water and immoral. There is no real way to kill the entirety of Obamacare but Congress should work to mitigate its impending harm.
Which platform did they use to implement this ?
Nullius in verba
It's not about helping the poor; it's about feeling good for helping the poor. Whether the poor are helped or not is irrelevant.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Just how broken is it? Let's find out.
I tried creating an account early Sunday morning and failed.
I tried again Sunday evening, and it worked... on Firefox, anyway. On Chrome, logging in took me to a blank screen.
( See https://plus.google.com/u/0/113779301404424240904/posts/2mxh2wPTein )
If you try creating an account on healthcare.gov, reply here with what happened. Let's see how broken it is.
Thirty Million out of 300+ million supposedly don't have health insurance.
So, lets write a plan that affects all 300+ million instead of one that addresses the 30 million.
Brilliant!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not to worry, we can all just stop giving to charities that used to help folks with health problems. And we can feel even better that we are paying for some folks who don't even want health care.
Another conspiracy theory I heard was that Democrats wanted Obamacare to fail so that in ten years they'd propose fixing it with single-payer. Since Obamacare can't fund itself and the website is a tort law travesty which sounds more likely?
I nominate for worst analogy of the day.
Zero of the fifty states are sovereign, nor has any state ever been (any state that was once a sovereign nation gave up that sovereignty upon acquiring statehood). There is a separation in powers between states and feds, but it is absolutely nothing like the UN and member nations. The UN cannot make and enforce laws in member nations, the Fed can make and enforce laws in states. You could argue that healthcare is the responsibility of states, not the Fed, but that's a completely different argument than the one you're apparently trying to make. It's more like a county government forcing each town within it to enforce new dog license laws.
I'm sure there's tons of people salivating at the chance to jump all over this topic and say things like "classic government inefficiency at work." But the reality is that these kinds of projects happen every day in private sector companies. You only hear about them when they make the news. I've seen many companies throw out millions in sunk costs because they couldn't get an ERP system massaged enough to fit their business processes. Often, the companies realize too late that they're getting bled dry by outsourcing "partners" and getting nothing in return, then make the hard decision to just dump everything and try again.
Some of it may be leadership incompetence (analogous to CIOs getting swindled by consulting salesmen over copious rounds of golf and strippers) but HHS doesn't have hundreds of web developers on staff, and there would be a monster backlash if they actually did go out and hire them as permanent employees. IN the real world, they're forced to outsource to be "good stewards of the taxpayer's dollar" and end up getting crap. I can't believe that no one over the last 30 years has come to the realization that outsourcing always costs more, and results are not guaranteed no matter how much money gets flushed. What probably happened is that the project got awarded to the lowest bidder of the big consultancy firms, who promptly replaced all the super-geniuses they promised with new grads, and just kept collecting money.
A lot of private firms get fed up and just insource the whole thing, but I don't think the government has that option right now. Given the political climate, I'm sure every paper clip purchased is tracked by certain right-wing groups, and hiring hundreds of Federal employees certainly won't go over well. So, we'll just see the same consultancies who screwed up get rewarded to "fix" the problem. Just like in the private sector...
I think this might be the first goverment case of a large organization trying to execute a publicly facing software project and failing. For decades the goverment didn't do public facing benefit projects. If this all happened in the 90s you would have to sign up using paper forms and although it may have been slow and inconvenient by today's standards that's what the goverment had experience in doing, it probably would have worked just fine.
I think software/web centric failures like this are going to keep happening. Few organizations, especially those whose primary business isn't software, are good at implementing huge software projects. Most management doesn't know how to run software projects, budget departments dont know how to account for software projects. If the Social Security administration has a huge backlog of applications they just add more people to the workforce until they work through it. Now everything is different, it doesn't matter how many people and how much money you throw at it, it's going to talk a while to fix. Very few people in goverment, and very few members of the electorate understand how a software project is run, hence a "surge" to fix the problem. People understand that concept, they imagine tons of nerdy looking guys flowing into some building and typing furiously at a keyboard until the problems go away. Good imagery, not really accurate.
I'm actually really amused by all this, it's my job playing out on a national stage. Terrible software estimates, contractors failing to live up to contracts, unrealistic timelines, poorly understood requirements, angry management demanding all hands on deck, and unhappy users. Maybe now software management will become an academic subject and mandatory study for MBAs and such.
Honestly ? Probably. Federal Contractors have a salary ceiling, and unless brought in specially as consultants, pay tops off in the mid-150s or so. Which in DC Metro, isn't all that much.
Private star-quality talent, there's a much higher earning capability when NOT working for Club Fed. . .
Lambert Strether has a tremendous post-by-post analysis of what when wrong.
I guess you never thought about what "United States" means. We have a federal government, not a national one. (don't argue the semantics, I'm using the terms a bit imprecisely to draw a distinction) We are a country of United States, not a country divided into states.
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States", "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." - US Constitution. Don't be concerned if you haven't heard that last bit, not even the Supreme Court is aware of it.
The Articles of Confederation made this even more clear: "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The Articles of Confederation have not been in use since 1789... so I think we can safely discard them in any discussion about modern states. One of my professors pointed out an interested change in linguistics after the Civil War. Prior to the war, "United States" was almost always a plural ("The United States are...") but after the war, it became a singular noun ("The United States is..."). The Civil War was basically the end of the question of state sovereignty in the US. It's also one of the reasons the Confederate States were a confederation (and not a federation)... confederate states are independently sovereign and can freely secede from the confederation, but in a federal government, they have shared sovereignty with the federal government at best.
The Constitution limits the sovereignty of the states, but does not take it away completely. A state may not enter into a treaty with a foreign power, but they have complete autonomy with how they issue a building permit, or prosecute a murder case. So they may not be sovereign states from the perspective of the UN, but they have a great deal of sovereign power independent of the US Federal Government. If you look at it from a States' rights perspective, the Civil War was fought over how much autonomy the States had, specifically with respect to slavery.
A thousand time this. Price discovery is almost unheard of in the medical industry. If patients were told prices and actually paid for service themselves (to be later reimbursed by insurance) you would see an immediate change in behavior as people shop the marketplace and prices rationalize. These are basic Free Market principles.
Do this experiment: next time you go to the Doctor, ask them the cost as if you were going to write them a check. Seems simple, right? What is the cost of "x", where x is my medical service? In many/most cases they will not be able to tell you a number. If they do, many times it will be the net cost (after insurance, discount, etc) instead of the total cost as if you were writing a check then and there.
Why do Canadians often come to the States for treatment?
The number of Canadians who receive any health care in the United States for care is vanishingly small. In a country of 30 million people, it is relatively easy to find a few who do so, and who can offer a sound bite for a newscast or an anecdote for a blogger. The fraction of Canadians who receive medical care in U.S. hospitals and clinics appears to be around the 0.5% mark.--of whom roughly 4 out of 5 do so because they happened to fall ill while visiting the United States, and not because they travelled there to receive medical services.
For certain urgent care services, communities close to the Canada-U.S. border can and do make arrangements to share facilities. (If someone has an urgent need for specialized cardiac or neurological care, you want to go to the nearest major hospital, not just the nearest one on your side of the border. Patients flow in both directions under these agreements; there are regular transfers from northern Washington state to Vancouver hospitals.)
Why does the Elderly death rate in Britain start climbing, late in the summer, and start going down again after the new Fiscal Year starts ??
Because high temperatures combined with substantial swings in temperature - typical late-summer weather, and likely exacerbated by climate change - are physically stressful. The same pattern is observed in the United States.
For that matter, why are so many doctors from Single-payer countries practicing in the States, instead ???
I don't have all the data at my fingertips, but in every year since 2004, there has been a small net migration of doctors out of the United States and in to Canada. Further, doctors practicing in Canada (and in the UK) report being significantly more satisfied in their jobs that their colleagues in the United States.
~Idarubicin