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.

Comments

It's NOT going to happen

[mattb47]

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.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[fche]

They aren't customers if they're forced to buy.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[cmdr_tofu]

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

Alexmarchant cites a NYT article in which the author wrote:
"According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size."

I, for one, find this claim difficult to believe, especially when the actual source cited is "one specialist" who remains nameless.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

more than HALF of the country does not have health insurance,

I really hate to do this, because it always sounds dorky, but I'd like to know where you're getting that figure. Wikipedia says around 16%, which is much less than a half (and more like the remainder past a standard deviation). The NY Times gives about the same figure. Medicare covers another 16% or so, which is the other past-one-standard-deviation end of the curve, and the big lump in the middle (around 64%) has private insurance. If adults have a 16% non-insurance rate, children have an even lower rate of non-insurance, under 10%.

I'd contend that there is no crisis of the uninsured in America, but rather a demographic crisis, in which the elderly are living much longer (in no small part thanks to increasingly expensive medical care) and the younger generation is smaller, leading to a social affordability crisis for old age: the institutions set up to pay for old age (pensions, social security, medicare, private insurance) can't handle the output (payment) load with so little input. This is worsened by a zero-interest-rate environment that deprives those institutions of interest from bonds and a hyper-inflationary medical price environment (far above normal inflation rates and on par only with education prices). ACA seeks to prop up the support for a generation that will live far longer than their parents, at the expense of their children (who are being forced to sign up for insurance).

You're right that the insurance companies should shoulder some blame for the ACA; straight-up nationalization of the health-care industry would have been cheaper and more efficient in the long run than this bastardized not-quite-capitalist-but-not-quite-socialist hybrid, and the less southerly nations of Europe have made socialized medicine work well. But demographics are the elephant in the room, and the bankruptcies of municipalities by pension/healthcare costs is that elephant blowing his horn.

Something similar will have to happen with social security (and public pension plans too); it'll need some sort of prop before the decade is out, because it was designed with a retirement age higher than the mean life expectancy in the 30's but much lower than today's. Expect to see the retirement age raised and social security withholdings increased in line with European austerity programs. Or, confiscate private pension funds and make them part of social security (Poland just down that path).

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[perpenso]

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?

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[perpenso]

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.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[NicBenjamin]

You do realize your contradictions contradict themselves? If you don't have to buy until you get sick then young people aren't forced to buy either. What's really going on is there's a tax fine if you don't buy, so both you and your young people can choose between being uninsured (and paying the fine), or being insured.

If your first two points were actually valid, as opposed to conservatives talking themselves into a lather, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.

Re:Raft of failures

[DigiShaman]

http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/

Link says it all.

Re:Raft of failures

[svendog]

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.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[localman]

Or maybe... just maybe... it's because it's not as bad as you think.

Of course it's much easier to assume everyone else is wrong than to question your beliefs.

A suggestion for an easy fix.

[superdude72]

Pass single-payer, as we should have done in the first place, and send everyone to medicare.gov.