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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
"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.
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.
Which platform did they use to implement this ?
Having worked for the government in the past, I can only assume it's a combination of Ada, and a proprietary language written by an intern at IBM in the 1980's, and Welsh.
That's not insightful. The problem is lots of us who have insurance have been getting a raw deal. Including getting dropped when you get sick, having coverage capped, losing a job for being sick and being unable to afford a new plan after you get well (preconditions). The ACA isn't about just those 30 million, or they would've just expanded Medicaid.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
I like how if you complain about government overreach, it's now fashionable for somebody to suggest somalia, as if there's nothing in between this mess and that mess.
Really you have to be a total moron to not be able to understand the difference between anarchists and libertarians. Libertarians want a government, the difference is they want a government that protects you from others rather than you from yourself. Liberals want the later, such as banning trans fats and soft drinks.
And this change for the sake of change is stupid. Personally, when I look at the prices for services that people pay for out of pocket, I notice how cheap yet good they are. Two months ago I paid $40 to get a full dental exam, x-rays, cleaning, and scaling. Meanwhile that same place bills insurance companies $250 for the same service. Why is that? Because when people shop around, they save. Insurance gets rid of the shopping around part because you don't even need to concern yourself with the cost.
Look in other areas traditionally not insured as well - some places offer Lasik for less than it costs to get a new pair of eyeglasses in some cases. I'm not eligible for Lasik (due to keratoconus) but an eye exam usually runs me about $30, whereas insurance companies typically pay about $50.
This is why health care costs are so expensive in the US - and the solution, according to people like you, is more insurance?
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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