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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."
"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.
you're confused. the whole reason we pay three times or more what more advanced countries do (yes kiddies, U.S. is not #1 for healthcare) is because of the big insurance and big healthcare full of fat cats lining their pockets. that system has to be destroyed. ACA just gives it more money. single payer might be viable solution but it will burn down some huge corporations. however, don't believe the lie that those big corporations are the main contributors or participants in our economy, people and small/medium business are the bulk of it.
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!
(former HMO IT guy) That 30% administrative cost is driven primarily by the hideous complexity of health care billing brought on by the mutli-payor insurance setup we have today. Every single line item on a hospital bill must be evaluated for who pays for it. That takes a lot of skilled labor in classification of each individual item. Then throw various mixtures into the mix of who allows what to be done, various contractual pricing schemes not seen by the individual consumer, etc. etc. etc. It's a God awful mess in there. THAT is where the administrative costs come from. Not from corporate profits. and seriously, do you think a government operated bureaucracy would have LESS overhead in its' operation? What planet do you live on if you think that?
Not say that is a bad idea, however you may not be aware that it has some very negative consequences within itself. Once the outcomes of all procedures are made publicly available, health care providers (such as surgeons) will start to refuse to perform procedures on patients who do not have a very high probability of success. In addition the general public will look for simple "pass/fail" information on the outcomes, when that is a completely unrealistic way of looking at it. The cold hard truth is that surgical outcomes have too many factors for the general public to be able to make a well informed decision on.
1: Nope.
2: Nope.
3: Contributes, but nearly as much as people think.
4: Nope. In fact the opposite. Hospitals can get away with charging more because the insurers act a a shock absorber, insulator, between your wallet and the true cost of care. they dispute some, but not all excessive costs, because they act more as a match maker between patients and hospitals than a representative of the patient. in fact, it can be argued that hte true commodity is the patients, and the customers are the hospitals.
5: Nope. Red herring. It contributes, but negligibly so.
6: Finally got one right. Lack of competition and economic pressure. This single factor is responsible for the majority of high cost of healthcare in this country. Quite simply, healthcare costs so much because it can. Because they can get away with it. Because there is a middleman between our wallets and the caregivers, that sheilds us from direct costs. Because healthcare isnt like a car sale...you're not going to walk away from life saving surgery because it's too expensive.
It's as a simple as that. Number 6 is the single most important factor, all others are either false or negligible.
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-us-health-care-system-so-expensive-introduction/
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-us-health-care-system-so-expensive-red-herrings/
We should have access to fairly priced health care that we can work out the details of paying for it. And choose whether or not it's worth the money to us as individuals.
Again: no one actually does that. No one is ever going to do that. If I tell you you need to take these pills, that cost 100$ per pill, or you will die, you're not going to walk away and just accept death. People just dont do that. and since you care to mention government...the single most cost efficient sector of our healthcare system IS the government run single payer segments: Medicaire/Medicaide.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.