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Jeffrey Zients Appointed To Fix Healthcare.gov
An anonymous reader writes with news that the Obama administration has appointed Jeffrey Zients to lead the effort to revamp Healthcare.gov after its trouble rollout earlier this month. Zients said, "By the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users." Obama created a position for Zients within the government in 2009, when he was made the OMB's Chief Performance Officer. The purpose of his position was to analyze and streamline the government's budget concerns. "Healthcare.gov covers people in the 36 states that declined to run their own health-insurance exchanges. About 700,000 applications have been begun nationwide, and half of them have come in through the website. The White House aims to have 7M uninsured Americans covered by the scheme by the end of March." Zients's appointment came after a contentious House Committee hearing about the healthcare website, in which many were blamed and few took responsibility. The government also said that contractor Quality Software Services Inc., a subsidiary of UnitedHealth group, would "oversee the entire operation" of Healthcare.gov. QSSI has already done work on the website, building the pipeline that transfers data between the insurance exchanges and the federal agencies.
Just reading his bio on Wiki, and he sounds like a management wonk who never wrote a line of code. A good management wonk, but still a wonk. There really doesn't seem to be a whole lot that ties him to the kind of companies that roll out web sites. So. The success hinges on his ability to pick the right underlings, which he may actually be very good at. We all get to participate in this experiment with our tax dollars and personal finances. Yay. (that's sarcasm).
It is implied that the writing is only conveying factual information. In reality, it is also delivering a subjective opinion about the plan by calling it a scheme. Similar to calling someone's intentions a ploy.
From the soaring triumph of the Apollo Project, to the sub-Hades goat-ropery Healthcare.gov in just half a century.
I, for one, am willing to confess that the U.S. won the Cold War, and is losing the sequel.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Sounds like a lot of mythical man-months to me.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I take it this appointment did not require a joint Democrat/Republican confirmation?
Is this unusual for the insurance industry? I deal with a large health insurance company whose web site sucks. It is impossible to find any useful information on it. There is no logical way to search for a doctor. None of the default choices apply to the client type( How many geriatric patents need to see a prenatal specialist?) There is NO way to contact anyone and their customer service isn't. I've been fighting this site for four years and they still haven't gotten it fixed.
There are more lines of code in Healthcare.gov (500m!) than Google Chrome, the Linux kernel, XP, Facebook, Mac OS, and the Debian 5 packages combined:
http://www.alexmarchant.com/blog/2013/10/22/healthcare-dot-gov-lines-of-code-comparison.html
Windows 8 supposed has 80m lines of code:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/
It would take a miracle of computing programming and program management that no governmental program has ever accomplished to get this epic cluster f*ck fixed in 2-3 months.
If they actually want it to work, it should be taken out behind the shed, shot in the head, hung, drawn, quartered, burned, and the ashes scattered to the four winds. And then everyone starts over. And then take 2 years (minimum) to recode it again with an almost entirely new team. But that's not going to happen. They're going to try and band-aid it, and it won't work.
So things are going to get interesting. It's unfixable in a politically acceptable way for the Democrats and the Obama administration.
His reputation precedes him. Tough, accept no excuses analyst. Site will be bulletproof when his team gets done.
The irony will be that the red states -- with their refusal to provide their own exchanges-- will end up having one of the best websites out of all the rest to use when shopping for affordable healthcare insurance. And they'll only have the red state politicians to thank (in addition to Zients' and his team). Not exactly cutting their constituents' noses off to spite their faces...
Zients said, "By the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users."
Yeah,November of which year?
At some point they will have spent enough time and money to fix the nice shiny bauble of a web site..... and they will trumpet their success...... but this will be used to distract from the fact that they will NOT undo:
1. The fact that hundreds of thousands of people have already been thrown off their insurance (so much for "If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance, PERIOD." - Barack Obama).
2. The fact that millions will have lost their doctors both by losing their insurance and also by having the new plans exercise very tight controls on their "providers" (so much for "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, PERIOD" - Barack Obama).
3. Nor will it fix the most-basic contradictions of the scheme which always meant it was unworkable: [1] it's "insurance" but you can wait to buy-in until you have had the failure it "insures" against (the pre-existing condition clause; it's like only placing your bet in Vegas after you win) and [2] it requires all the young-and-healthy to buy policies at high prices with high deductibles and high co-pays (in other words, policies they will get nothing from) in order to function but it lets all the young people stay on their parents' policies until age 26 in order to not piss-off Obama's young supporters.
The lesson here: No amount of IT (no matter the quality or expense) can make-up-for, or sufficiently hide from intelligent users, serious flaws in the underlying policies, business principles, economics, claims of the sales force and marketing dept, etc. But a bad launch of a shiny bauble can have a serious impact on reputation and imply incompetence. This lesson applies to business, non-profits, and governments alike.
Oh, and there's another lesson here for the young urban hipsters: The internet is not universally available, and many people do not even have/care to use it. My personal favorite anecdote thus far was from the farmer being helped to sign-up who responded to the navigator with "what's an e-mail address?" In the real world where systems are constructed to serve everyone equally, there must be good non-internet options that work - people who do not get this need to unplug for a month and get out into the real-world where this big bright thing called "the sun" rises and sets every day, something called "the wind" blows, people swim, fish, ski, fix fences, ride horses/motorcycles/etc, turn wrenches, use saws, dig holes, play with their kids, milk the cows, etc.
Good luck to Zients. He's a good guy and I don't doubt the code can be repaired with enough effort. A lot of effort, maybe, but it can be done.
But it might not matter. The Los Angeles Times had a story about how the real code running the show (the legalese in the ACA law) may have a fatal flaw in it. The federal government may not be able to grant subsidies to low income people in the states that did not set up their own exchanges. The law specifically says the states must do it in order for the money to flow. So 36 of the 50 may not be able to get the money. But they are still subject to the penalty for not signing up. This means the people least able to afford insurance get hammered. And since they are treated differently than people in the other 14 states that do have exchanges, you can bet an Equal Protection lawsuit will be quick in coming.
Federal judge is due to issue the initial ruling soon.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Maybe can cut half.
Well, those Germans died.
From the soaring triumph of the Apollo Project
I'm told enrolling on glitchy healthcare.gov is already easier than enrolling on insurers' own web sites was pre-PPACA. But at least healthcare.gov hasn't killed three astronauts, has it?
Why? The errors are pretty obvious. This was, perhaps not sabotage, but work done by people who have agendas that are counter to the success of the project.
That's why Zients said one Month, the errors are all known ways to make a database integration system fail.
If the few programmers with agendas are as dumb as I know they are though? They will be caught pretty easily by the end of November.
In reality, it is also delivering a subjective opinion about the plan by calling it a scheme.
Unless Zients's plan is to sprinkle parentheses liberally on the project.
Proclamation: All prior Federal health programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and stateside military programs are hereby repealed and the employees of said programs laid off. All insurance companies must reimburse for care provided by any licensed healthcare practitioner. No bulk discounts may be negotiated. All licensed healthcare practitioners must post price lists on the Internet. All anti-trust exemptions are revoked. If you can prove that you are in debt for more than 10% of last year's pre-tax income for health services, the government will reimburse the difference. Just submit your receipts along with your taxes, and we'll cut you a check. Note that this government reimbursement really makes private insurance useless. Good riddance. In order to pay for this, we'll tax all trades on Wall Street at one penny per order, whether it executes or not. Additionally, capital gains on stocks will be taxed as ordinary income regardless of term. That otta do 'er.
From the soaring triumph of the Apollo Project, to the sub-Hades goat-ropery Healthcare.gov in just half a century. I, for one, am willing to confess that the U.S. won the Cold War, and is losing the sequel.
Hey, we're still giving trickle down and job creators a chance.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The Apollo project cost 200 billion modern dollars. It's easy to accomplish a lot when you have the complete backing of every person in the government and a blank check.
Half of the people in the federal government are actively trying to sabotage the ACA.
Sounds like the primary planning for the data base access was done by a bunch of amateurs. I just wonder how much of piece of Swiss cheese the query structure is and how long before somebody hacks in and completely screws a vulnerable portion of it. If the primary .gov db is Oracle based then chances are it will survive assaults but if it is a mix and match POS combination with MS SQL links then most likely someone will find some holes and mess around with portions of the monster.
The 500 million loc story seems a little far fetched for the primary db and interface. But if they are including all the old corporate secondary code for the insurance companies that run the plan parts God only knows what SQL they are using and the task of fixing the beast might be more expensive than completely doing a re-write of all the secondary code that they needed to access with the primary servers.
Either way the system sounds like a coding fiasco fluster cuck that only a spin doctor from a consulting contract firm like CGI could have imagined would actually work.
Looks like they didn't check the proposals with experts yet again, just watched shiny powerpoint presentations in the bidding process and went on price. 300,000 users is not actually very many for a web based system, surely they did load testing and functional testing on a completely equivalent test environment as part of the process?
Oh, maybe they didn't because the cost of doing so might have made the bid "uncompetetive" ? Seen it happen myself numerous times, seems a lot of people need to learn the expensive way still, that cutting costs this much enormously increases risk. And have they ever heard of "best practices"? Should make another chapter for the sadly overdue "why big projects fail" book that one day it will be a sackable offence not to know inside out and back to front (because you've read it so many times front to back of course).
For real.
Half of the people in the federal government are actively trying to sabotage the ACA.
Is that the half that wants to repeal it or the half that voted for it without knowing what was in the bill?
I don't doubt the code can be repaired with enough effort. [But] the real code running the show (the legalese in the ACA law) may have a fatal flaw in it
As you recognized, law too is code. Get enough Democrats into state legislatures and they might have a chance of reversing REDMAP, the RSLC's organized redistricting effort that produced the inkblot-shaped districts that turned a Democratic popular vote into a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, which should make it possible to patch this bug in PPACA.
those are one and the same.
the other half is the one that voted for it knowing full well what it was and that it would benefit our society.
those that didn't think the civil war was about "states rights"
There, that had to be said. Now, just redirect those healthcare.gov links to the insurance companies, as should have been done in the first place:-)
After doing software development in the healthcare field for over a decade, I finally made the wise decision to never work in that industry again. Government is even worse, because the rules the software have to follow change on the whim of elections and the rug is constantly being pulled out from under you. Now this mess? Well it's healthcare taken to the bureaucratic power (h^b). Sounds like a good way to shave 10 years off your life in stress.
Better known as 318230.
It was debated for 8 months.
What was debated and what was in the final draft are two different things.
Everyone knew what was in it, regardless of what Rush Limbaugh told you.
Lame attempt at character assignation, you've lost the debate. I'm neither a Republican nor a Limbaugh listener. I am however someone who was paying attention during the debate and drafting of the ACA, it was quite the bipartisan cluster**k.
"Everyone knew what was in it, regardless of what Rush Limbaugh told you." Strange, what I recall during the run-up to the passing of this piece of art was the Democratic Speaker of the House saying "We need to pass it to find out what's in it." And we are finding out.
Prove it.
But.. maybe you don't actually get to pick which two, and they tried anyway.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And pigs will fly.
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
It was debated for 8 months.
That gave the politicians extra time for bri..er..um..donations
Everyone knew what was in it,
Sweeping generalization that cannot be proved
regardless of what Rush Limbaugh told you.
As is he is the conscienciousnes of America. He is just another noise on the media stream with too much money, drugs, hot air, etc etc.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
The thing you have to keep in mind about the US Health System is that it's a series of kludges. Active Federal employees on the civilian side use a version of the Dutch system. There's a bunch of Federally owned hospitals (aka: the British system) for military retirees. To insure retirees in the 60s we stole Canada's system, even keeping the name "Medicare," and simply added the words "over 65" to the bill. Which means we have three entire countries worth of health regulations simply for retirees and Federal employees. Most people are insured by their employers , which is a fourth country worth of regulations. Roughly 10% of the country buys on the individual market, which is regulated at the state-level by 50 different regulators, for a fifth country. Medicaid for the poor is a federal/state mixture, which makes it sixth. The uninsured pay their bills a variety of ways, from charity care to sticker price. So we don't really have a health system, we have seven health payment systems.
If we were Canada or the UK, and we didn't have significant Checks and Balances in the policy-making arms of the government, we could do what any smart engineer would do in this situation and start a massive project to replace these seven systems with one system. But we aren't that country. Every American is convinced that his health insurance is great, therefore he will simply not believe your new system will be better for him, therefore he will bitch at his Senator if you try to (for example) let poor people formerly on Medicaid visit his VA Hospital. And getting 51 Senators (or 50 and the VP), and 218 House members to agree to do anything like that has proven to be damn near impossible. You can get them to agree to pour money into one section of the system or another, but they don't change people's health care very often.
So what Obama did was take the least popular one of those systems (the uninsured), and send half of them to Medicaid and half to the Individual Market in a manner reminiscent of the Dutch. He changed the individual market so it is more affordable. In other words the Affordable Care Act had to have the same amount of regulations in it as the entirety of Dutch law relating to Dutch health insurance. Since it kept five of the other six system it also had to include a lot of language/code to insure compatibility with those systems. For example a student whose dad (with custody) is on Medicare, Step-mom is eligible for insurance through her job and the VA, and Mom-mom (no custody) has a policy on the Exchange. Is the kid eligible for the Exchange policy, the VA policy, or does stepmom have to switch over to her job's insurance?
It possible that in China the technocrats who run the Communist party could all have learned a proposal this complicated in a year or so's debate without majorly neglecting their other duties. But we aren't China. We aren't led by nameless suits whose entire role is to exude policy confidence. We are led by us. And it turns out we aren't smart enough to learn a half-dozen slightly different versions of the Dutch system in eight months. Frankly I don't blame us.
What we are smart enough to do is learn the outlines of the ideas, to a surprisingly high level of detail in many areas; and then muddle through the rest the best we can. This is what happens in a democracy with Checks and Balances, entrenched interests (ie: people calling their Congressman in panic when their insurance changes), and an independent legislature whenever anyone tries to fix any major problem.
Yeah, Malkin, I'm sure she's unbiased. And the "wretched Obamacare website failures" were due to a wonderful private sector company. The feds didn't design the thing in house. Maybe they should have?
Actually hiring government employees right out of college and giving them pensions and benefits would be 'socialism'. And Reagan said that was bad...
Even nationalizing the health insurance companies into one big government run agency like other countries would be socialism, but it seems to work in every other country.
The White House aims to have 7M uninsured Americans covered by the scheme by the end of March.
They will. That's 7 million Medicare enrollees. Surprised? Was this worth messing up the health insurance of the 85% of people who are covered? May Obama burn in hell./cP
an ill wind that blows no good
That little clip that they belabored on Fox News was: "But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it," (my emphasis)
Of course, that's from Fox News so not only is it out of context, it's not even the full sentence: “But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.”
Politifact has a little write-up on it, if you'd care to educate yourself.
People keep saying this, but they really don't understand the scope of what healthcare.gov actually is.
This system integrates every health insurance company, in every state. Each health care company will be using a different, internally developed proprietary system, potentially more than one, each state will have different laws which affect the manner in which healthcare can be offered. It then attempts to present all that data to the consumer in a meaningful and comparable way. The fact that it works at all is a miracle.
OMB's Chief Performance Officer
Now there's an oxymoron if there every was one.
There was ***NOTHING*** bipartisan about the Affordable Care Act. It was passed without a single Republican vote and lots of dirty parliamentary tricks.
The Democrats and the Obama administration own this.
... the debate and drafting of the ACA, it was quite the bipartisan cluster**k
There was ***NOTHING*** bipartisan about the Affordable Care Act. It was passed without a single Republican vote and lots of dirty parliamentary tricks. The Democrats and the Obama administration own this.
I'm referring to the entire process, not the final vote. The whole process brought out lots of idiocy from both political parties.
So, if I'd mentioned some article by Paul Krugman, you would have objected "Yeah, Krugman. I'm sure he's unbiased"? And obviously the feds (the ones in charge of this debacle) shouldn't have developed the website. Because, if they couldn't even oversee its implementation and kick-off any better than this, then what hope did they have of producing every line of code?
Why anyone would believe that number from the NY Times is beyond me.
If you have any experience with even medium sized software projects, you will realize it's a typo. They started coding this spring, of 2013, I doubt they even have 5 million lines. Maybe 500,000.
Once in awhile I'll listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio during lunch hour. It's a talk show, why not. Anyways, he said something that stuck with me. Basically, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) wasn't just drafted in one week. It was drafted years in advanced and stuffed in a drawer just waiting for the opportunity. And that go me thinking. What other fucking legislative bombs are lurking in the deep dark corners of an office someplace? This piece of shit of a bill needs to die; in fire!!! But it's not going to be the last. No, this sets an encouragement to draft and pass bills in a similar manner. You must pass it first, then play cleanup later. Only cleanup will never fucking happen.
Life is not for the lazy.
Other than the original idea (Heritage Foundation is hardly a shill for Obama) and implementation (The last R candidate for president) of course.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/
Link says it all.
Life is not for the lazy.
If you'd read the ACA you'd know it gives the executive branch(namely the IRS and the HHS Secretary) so much regulatory authority that reading the bill itself is useless in determining it's eventual scope.
Anyone that wants to know what we're really in for should look at the original legislation authorizing the creation of the IRS and compare that with the mix of laws, regulations and 'guidelines' that govern revenue collections today.
That was an excellent post. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
I still haven't found the "death panels"
Do we know what the server architecture for healthcare.gov looks like? Websphere or Weblogic? What RDBMS are they using? Hardware and OS?
From the conclusion of your cited article:
"But it accurately quotes Pelosi as saying people will find out what's in the plan after it passes."
This is clearly the point the GP was making. You're needlessly nitpicking.
why do i need to create an account before i actually signup for an insurance plan?? i still can't sign up after weeks. still can't fin a job after sending out resumes so don't call me lazy. even if i did find a job i would have to pay for my own expensive insurance. sorry for the rant but i'm tired of people calling me lazy because i'm 27, i live with my parents and have no income.
In Mass. but the Netherlands uses a similar system also. They spend less, have lower mortality, and greater life expectancy than we do.
It's totally true that the ideas underlying the ACA have been hashed about since they were first proposed by the GOP in 1993's HEART act, tested in the real world, and proven.
The idea of making people register in order to view plans though, that was just bad web application design, no argument there. PHB wins that one.
Michelle Malkin is a conservative blogger and TV "personality" with a bachelors degree in English, while Paul Krugman is a nobel laureate in Economics. While both may have their biases, I would most certainly give the analyses put forth by the latter infinitely more weight than those of the former.
No, the point that the GP was making, incorrectly, was that Pelosi and the people in congress didn't know what was in the bill. They did know what was in the bill, they had been debating it for months.
The point that Pelosi was making was that the debate had become so politicized (death panels) that what was actually in the bill wasn't really known by the public. She was trying to say that once the bill was passed and the hysteria died down, people would find out that death panels had never been part of it.
It possible that in China the technocrats who run the Communist party could all have learned a proposal this complicated in a year or so's debate without majorly neglecting their other duties. But we aren't China. We aren't led by nameless suits whose entire role is to exude policy confidence. We are led by us. And it turns out we aren't smart enough to learn a half-dozen slightly different versions of the Dutch system in eight months.
If only that were true. But the reality is that laws are largely written by lobbyists and Congressional staffers. Now, those people do have the time to figure out how the laws work.
Well, since it doesn't work at all, umm, no miracle there. :)
> > "Everyone knew what was in it"
> Prove it.
Prove they didn't.
Oh, is that a stupid reply? Yes it is. You can't prove either thing in a meaningful way but you can look at the situation and draw a reasonably solid conclusion.
1. The basic structure of the law was fleshed out a more than a decade earlier by the Heritage Foundation. It was a well known idea.
2. The basic model was put into effect in Massachusetts years earlier. People knew how it worked in practice.
3. The ACA was discussed for months in congress and even hours on live TV, with all the key players on both sides of the aisle in attendance.
4. For the public there was a easy to comprehend, footnoted summary PDF provided by congress online many months in advance, as well as a nationwide town-hall campaign that completely backfired because of loud-mouthed reactionaries.
5. The people who claim that nobody knows what's in it apparently know more than enough to criticize it.
There was more open public discussion and understanding of the ACA than any other law I can think of in my whole life, and I ain't young. If you want to make the case that some people were willfully ignorant of the contents (i.e. death panels), I'll agree. But that is not the fault of the ACA.
Suppose that were true (I don't know) ... who could fix it?
1) The states by setting up exchanges. I mean, they wouldn't be so spiteful as to punish the poor because they don't like a federal law.
2) The house by passing legislation that fixes this gap. Representatives from states without exchanges wouldn't want to punish the poor in their states, and most others should also be willing to fix the unescapable slight gaps in large legislation.
Oh wait ...
Pelosi was not speaking to Congress when she said that. It is hardly supporting evidence of Democrats passing the PPACA without reading it. Sloppy thinking.
ObamaCare “adopts the ‘individual mandate’ concept from the conservative Heritage Foundation,” Jonathan Alter wrote recently in The Washington Post. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews makes the same claim, asserting that Republican support of a mandate “has its roots in a proposal by the conservative Heritage Foundation.” Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and others have made similar claims.
The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through “adverse selection” (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.
My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid “with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy.”
My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.
But the version of the health insurance mandate Heritage and I supported in the 1990s had three critical features. First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on “catastrophic” costs — so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.
Second, we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage, rather than by a stick.
And third, in the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the “mandate” was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement.
Complexity sucks.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And Princess Pelosi knows full well that, once the hook is set, there's no escaping it.
Far from a sympathetic character, that one.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
There are two things I want to point out. First, you are claiming that the Democrats passed the ACA even though they knew what a mess it was. Second, there is indeed a "death panel" in the ACA. Oh, it is not called that. It is called the Independent Payment Advisory Board, but it gets to decide what care will be paid for and what care won't be paid for, regardless of what your doctor may think is the best treatment for you. That means that it will decide that lifesaving care will not be paid for some people because of their age, or other health issues, or some other, as yet undetermined, criteria.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/
Link says it all.
Very interesting little tidbit indeed and if true it only goes to show how bad the crony back scratching is getting in both Canada and the US. This same bunch of college grad mba powerpoint gurus dominates much of the contracted IT work up in Canada as well. They code nothing, they sub contract everything and all they do is scmooze their contacts for lucrative government work.
for those who do follow links here is the gist of the story;
First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.
Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.
Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.
Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998
George Schindler, the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract.
As reported by the Washington Examiner in early October, the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI’s bid for the Obamacare account. CGI was one of 16 companies qualified under the Bush administration to provide certain tech services to the federal government. A senior vice president for the company testified this week before The House Committee on Energy and Commerce that four companies submitted bids, but did not name those companies or explain why only CGI’s bid was considered.
On the government end, construction of the disastrous Healthcare.gov website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of longtime failed website-builder Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services.
Update: The Daily Caller repeatedly contacted CGI Federal for comment. After publication of this article, the company responded that there would be “nothing coming out of CGI for the record or otherwise today.” The company did however insist that The Daily Caller include a reference to vice president Cheryl Campbell’s House testimony. This has been included as a courtesy to the company.
OR YOU CAN WATCH what Cheryl Campbell's testimony was on CNN they blast it out every half hour or so.
So, you are saying that we should not be criticizing the project, we should be thankful that it only cost $600 million and works as well as it does?
$60 million, FTFY
http://mediamatters.org/mobile/blog/2013/10/24/the-myth-of-the-634-million-obamacare-website/19658
Democracy in action. The people voted those congressman in, and that's how they represented their constituents.
What was debated and what was in the final draft are two different things.
So... it was like every law passed by Congress?
"debate"
Isn't that kind of the point?
Bipartisanship I mean.
This is Howard Hughes trying to defend government funding of his unflyable plane. The paralells to healthcare.gov are myriad: "The Hercules was a monumental undertaking. It is the largest aircraft ever built. It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. Thatâ(TM)s more than a city block. Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if itâ(TM)s a failure, Iâ(TM)ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it."
Why does the White House need a private-sector "tech surge" to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures?
Didn't the private sector build (or fail to build) the website in the first place?
It doesn't decide individual cases, also... What do you think your insurance company is doing when it declines to pay for really expensive procedure for cancer ridden 80yo grandma?
Well, it's not as if the Apollo project didn't have a few, ah, glitches like Apollo 1 and Apollo 13.
I am claiming that the Democrats knew what was in the bill, yes. The bit about it being a mess is your opinion - as someone who lived in a single-payer country for a number of years and who knows what healthcare can be, I think that this bill is a desperately needed step in the right direction. I only wish it had gone further.
As for your hyperbolic nonsense about the Independent Payment Advisory Board: someone has to decide what should and should not be covered, and that person can not and never has been your doctor. Right now it's your health insurance company, seeking to maximize its profits. In the future it will be a panel appointed by the president and subject to senate confirmation. This is an improvement.
That's because you're not looking hard enough. Search for "IPAB", the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It's essentially a rationing board. Believe it or not, that's how it's going to function. "Death Panel" may be hyperbole, but it's not really too far off the mark, especially if you're the one being denied the care you need.
Pass single-payer, as we should have done in the first place, and send everyone to medicare.gov.
Half of the people in the federal government are actively trying to sabotage the ACA.
Spies! Wreckers and Saboteurs! Enemies of the People!
When Joe McCarthy accurately indicates that Soviet agents infiltrated govt, he's a totalitarian nutjob.
When someone claims that the failures of Papa Barack's 5 Year Plans are due to the government being half filled with wreckers and saboteurs, he's just a Progressive.
Really, the federal bureaucracy is filled with wreckers working to gum up the dreams of the central planners? Ah, if only it were so. You're just trying to cheer me up.
Nothing's prefect.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And the current "free market" insurance system doesn't get to decide what care will be paid for and what care won't be paid for?
ask the foreign contractor to whom the work was outsourced
Then things are much better than I thought. You can't have 2 successful people who when to prestigious schools not have connections all over the place. I mean "classmates"? That's it?
You say that like it really matters.
Simple fact is, people need health insurance, and the US healthcare industry is an absurd mess. The ACA was 'some' step into making it cheaper (assumption..) across the board for everyone. I don't know if it intended to better care to be provided. I doubt it... That the ACA is a clusterfuck for implementing is just more mediocrity from the people in charge we elect. Even if Republicans were in control of both the Executive and Legislative, and got the ACA removed, we would still be in a clusterfuck situation for healthcare.
So yes. Keep score with the parties. It's a great way to drum up party morale, all the while ignoring this glaring issue we're facing. And then not proposing solutions in the interim.
Kudos to you for being a cheerleader on the sidelines! And getting rated +5 Informative!
LOL. Are you serious?
Do you have any idea the sheer levels of nepotism and cronyism on the right?
President Bush, under the direction of VP Cheney, awarded contracts to the company Cheney previously was CEO of.
CGI Federal, while apparently rather incompetent, has actually been a government contractor for decades.
Not to mention the completely idiotic 'fact' that the president of CGI Federal became a donor to Obama after he got the contract. Yeah, and he became one to Mitt Romney also. Obama, apparently you got scammed there, he's playing both sides!
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000048534
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The thing you have to keep in mind about the US Health System is that it's a series of kludges. Active Federal employees on the civilian side use a version of the Dutch system. There's a bunch of Federally owned hospitals (aka: the British system) for military retirees. To insure retirees in the 60s we stole Canada's system, even keeping the name "Medicare," and simply added the words "over 65" to the bill. Which means we have three entire countries worth of health regulations simply for retirees and Federal employees.
Don't forget about TRICARE. Tricare, formerly known as the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services (CHAMPUS), is a health care program of the United States Department of Defense Military Health System.
"debate" Isn't that kind of the point? Bipartisanship I mean.
Except it didn't really happen in a bipartisan manner. For example one night I watched CSPAN and republicans were suggesting quite reasonable amendments and the democratic controlled committee voted each proposal down immediately without debate or further consideration. It seemed that the democratic party leadership had negotiated something in the back rooms between themselves and their lobbyists and no changes were permitted.
This demonstrated the most fundamental problem with the health reform legislation. The President had promised open, transparent and bipartisan debate and drafting during the campaign and then once in office turned control over to the Democratic party leadership in the House. Who then adopted a very partisan attitude and also went behind closed doors with their lobbyists to do the drafting. If there had been any opportunity for bipartisanship or peeling off moderate Republicans it had been discarded. The House, and the White House to a degree, adopted a "screw the Republicans we won the election and have control of the House and Senate. Rahm Emanual, the President's Chief of Staff publicly said something like that. Pretty much the opposite of what the President promised on the campaign trail, and poisoning the well of bipartisanship and setting the stage for the extreme partisanship of the last 5 years. This was all in the first couple of weeks of the new administration, long before the tea party had any significant presence in the House. Sure there would have been Republicans that would oppose anything, but there would also have been some that would have cooperated. There were a couple at times in spite of the highly partisan atmosphere the Democratic leadership created, if things had truly been done in a bipartisan manner its a pretty safe bet there would have been a number of moderate Republicans who could have been peeled off. Both parties are responsible for the extreme partisanship that exists today.
No, the point that the GP was making, incorrectly, was that Pelosi and the people in congress didn't know what was in the bill. They did know what was in the bill, they had been debating it for months.
And what Pelosi and the House debated was thrown out. What was passed what the Senate's bill, unmodified. There was no merging or editing of the Senate's bill. The Republicans took over Ted Kennedy's old seat in the Senate immediately after passage of the Senate bill, the Republicans now had enough votes to sustain a filibuster. Any modifications and it would have to be voted on again in the Senate and it would fail. The House voted on the Senate proposal exactly as is.
As for knowing what was in it. Last minute edits like the Cornhusker Kickback (or whatever the hell that payoff to one state was called) prove otherwise.
I just talked to my doctor and he confirmed that he is in fact 'my doctor'. I asked him if maybe he was confused and that it was actually BCBS, but no, it turns out, they never went to med school and aren't licensed in my state.
> > "Everyone knew what was in it" > Prove it.
Prove they didn't.
They claim they didn't know about the "“Cornhusker Kickback", the "bribe" to the Nebraska Senator to get his vote. They claim it was something slipped in at the last moment.
Its the mandatory coverage levels that will sway most Americans to abandon this. Retirees don't need birth control. Most people don't need psychiatric care. Most people won't be seeking gender reassignment surgery. But now everyone has to pay for it and it isn't cheap.
Central planning sucks, no matter who is at the top.
4 is a lie. They didn't even have a finalized copy of the bill online until after they had passed it. It's a bad law. Mainly because we have a bunch of crap politicians who wouldn't recognize a good law if it bit them in the butt.
But go ahead and live the fantasy, but the ACA is nothing more than a fraudulent name placed on a poor piece of legislation.
Your tone is clearly sarcastic, but I don't quite follow the point that you're trying to make. Yes, your doctor is your doctor. What does that have to do with anything? Are you claiming that your doctor can dictate to your insurance company what they will and will not pay for? He can't. Your doctor makes decisions based on your level of coverage, not the other way around.
I'm disgusted by all forms of corruption. I don't dispute what you said, but as a voter, what are you doing about it?!
Life is not for the lazy.
running our life.
I bet jews take turns buttfucking obama with an apple in his mouth
The difference is that if a doctor makes too many decisions that the insurance company doesn't like, he just does not get paid. If he makes too many decisions that the IPAB does not agree with, he can lose his license to practice medicine.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That isn't true, I have no idea where you're getting that from. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, as implied by their name, is strictly about money, they have nothing to do with licensing.
In fact, when I searched for this the only related thing that came up was the interesting point that under the current system your health insurance provider can exclude your doctor if he doesn't match their performance goals. Medicare and the IPAB doesn't do this. Though as you say, in both cases this is about money - regardless of your insurance provider and regardless of the policies that the IPAB sets, you can still see your doctor if you are willing to pay out of pocket.
This is not to say that doctors aren't subject to ethics and competence review, but that has nothing to do with the IPAB or with your health insurance provider.
My point is that even a U.S. government program considered a "soaring triumph" had its growing pains.
Do about what? The untrue allegation the CGI Federal was the sole bidder on a contract?
You want to reform the actual problems government contracting, feel free to propose something.
You want to stop this idiotic gibberish of subcontracting out every single fucking thing the government does, count me in. I'll bring the posterboard and stapler to the protest, you bring the markers and wooden sticks.
You want to pretend that the fact that someone in government contracting went to an elite college and happened to be in the same year as the first lady?
Well, first off all, you better have some sort of evidence that that is even statistically relevant, considering that over 1000 people a year graduate from Princeton, and I suspect that rather a lot of them are vice presidents of something or other, and the US government issues a fuckload of government contracts each year.
And just as many graduate from the other colleges and high schools that the president and his wife go to. Together, the president and his wife have been in three colleges and four graduating classes, probably with a total amount of 'classmates' somewhere near 3000. Care to guess how many of those elite college graduates of Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard Law are vice presidents at some company or another?
Care to guess how many of those vice presidents are vice presidents of the tens of thousands of companies that are federal contractors?
Statistically, this is a coincidence. It is noise. It's like Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore being roommates, except not actually interesting.
And then second, you have to demonstrate that somehow the president actually did influence that decision in some way. (If that is true, I won't even make you prove that this was at his wife's urging.)
It might be fun to find those four contractors who supposedly didn't get a chance to bid (Which is completely unsubstantiated, and not how government bidding works anyway.) and figure out they link to Obama. I bet at least once of them has as close a connection as 'one of their CEOs happened to go the same college as a relative of Obama's'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I was responding to the idiot who said my insurance company is my doctor and pointing out how stupid a statement that is to make.
You make it sound like my doctor can't treat me. That there is some procedure he would recommend but can't because of the evil insurance company. Is this some argument in favor of the not-ACA? Because the not-ACA doesn't eliminate insurance companies. They are really happy about the not-ACA because now they can get rid of all their low-cost, low-margin plans and replace them with Gold, Silver and Bronze plans that have lots of things that most people will never use. Things like psychiatric care and birth control and gender reassignment surgery are now required to be covered.
And that's just the medical costs that America will pay. We are already seeing companies adopt 28 hour a week work minimums for part-timers, not to mention cutting back on full-time staff. Genius stuff this not-ACA, named after another genius. It's been almost a year since he was re-elected. Still waiting for that laser focus on the economy he promised during the election. Still waiting on the Buffet rule he really liked the sound of. Or does he just like the sound of his own voice.
You make it sound like my doctor can't treat me. That there is some procedure he would recommend but can't because of the evil insurance company.
It happens all the time. In fact, it seems to be so unextraordinary that most of my search results are turning up questionairs about how to deal with it rather than news stories about how outrageous it is. A good doctor will consider your coverage when they make a recommendation, so they'll try not to recommend something that you won't be able to pay for, but it doesn't always work out that way.
This is how it's been for a long time, and it won't change with the Affordable Care Act. The only difference is that private insurers are required to provide a certain level of coverage. So there'll be fewer surprises.
Speaking of that level of coverage, there's also this. One of the biggest features of the Affordable Care Act is the requirement that people with preexisting conditions can't be excluded.
Your other points are supposition. What I've seen so far are stories about how the health care exchange is cost-effective (once you can get past the technical glitches), and stories like this one. But these are just anecdotal. The Affordable Care Act is expected to save us money in the long run, but we won't know exactly how much for a while.
Paul Krugman has repeatedly said that the destruction of wealth (Japanese tsunami, theoretical alien invasion) is a good thing, in utter ignorance of the broken window fallacy. Count me unimpressed by his Nobel.
Besides, the interesting parts of Michelle's piece were the facts that she illuminates. You, of course, don't address those, because they are simple facts and are independent of her biases and credentials.