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

Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

"Honey, I'll be back by Christmas."

Odds are they're going to have to rebuild a significant the entire project from scratch.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming they succeed, that will be some pretty lipstick on the pig.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[smittyoneeach]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, those Germans died.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Ralph Wiggam]

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.

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

[Ralph Wiggam]

It was debated for 8 months. Everyone knew what was in it, regardless of what Rush Limbaugh told you.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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"

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:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[satch89450]

"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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[fizzer06]

"Everyone knew what was in it"

Prove it.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[slick7]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[NicBenjamin]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[guises]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Eskarel]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[mattb47]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[perpenso]

... 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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[DigiShaman]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[edremy]

Other than the original idea (Heritage Foundation is hardly a shill for Obama) and implementation (The last R candidate for president) of course.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[bogjobber]

That was an excellent post. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Ultracrepidarian]

I still haven't found the "death panels"

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[MichaelPenne]

It mostly replicates a system that is working well, with known failure points and workarounds.

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[guises]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since it doesn't work at all, umm, no miracle there. :)

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[localman]

> > "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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed!

Re: Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[stuntpope]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[smittyoneeach]

You can figure out for yourself whether this is exculpatory:

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[smittyoneeach]

And Princess Pelosi knows full well that, once the hook is set, there's no escaping it.
Far from a sympathetic character, that one.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Attila Dimedici]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re: Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

$60 million, FTFY
http://mediamatters.org/mobile/blog/2013/10/24/the-myth-of-the-634-million-obamacare-website/19658

Re: Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

Democracy in action. The people voted those congressman in, and that's how they represented their constituents.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[thoth]

What was debated and what was in the final draft are two different things.

So... it was like every law passed by Congress?

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Redmancometh]

"debate"
Isn't that kind of the point?

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Redmancometh]

Bipartisanship I mean.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[akinliat]

Well, it's not as if the Apollo project didn't have a few, ah, glitches like Apollo 1 and Apollo 13.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[guises]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[reboot246]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[smittyoneeach]

Nothing's prefect.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[nbritton]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[perpenso]

"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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[perpenso]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[huckamania]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[perpenso]

> > "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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[huckamania]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[huckamania]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[guises]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[Attila Dimedici]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[guises]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[huckamania]

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.

Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call

[guises]

I don't know what the not-ACA is, but this part (excepting the evil comment) is certainly true:

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.

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

#1

A management wonk all the way

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:A management wonk all the way

[craigminah]

So he was hired to "analyze and streamline the government's budget concerns" yet the government hasn't developed an actual budget for quite some time...keep up the good work.

Re:A management wonk all the way

[justaguy516]

So the first thing he is going to do is to offshore it?

Re:A management wonk all the way

[riverat1]

I'd just like to point out that Obama has presented all the required proposed budgets to Congress. Of course the Presidents budget is just a wish list and it's up to Congress to actually develop and pass one.

Re: A management wonk all the way

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition both Houses have developed budfet proposals but cannot agree on them. It's not lack of ability by govt to develop a budget, it's politics.

Re: A management wonk all the way

[craigminah]

Right, but the President has gotten things done due to him caring enough to push them to work through their issues. I think the budget just isn't important enough for him to dedicate his time towards. Lack of a budget and knowing what and where money will be spent may be exacerbating our problems.

"Plan" vs "Scheme"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"Plan" vs "Scheme"

[sumdumass]

Not really. Or not really in the sense of it being bad or good or anything. People hatch schemes all the time that are just plans with big pictures in mind. The problem we face is that schemes we hear about are usually the ones that either go wrong or do wrong to somebody. But there are a lot that do good or don't do anything at all.

In other words, I think you are reading into it too much.

And as a disclaimer, I'm positively against Obamacare on lots of grounds outside but including the hogwash presented as the federal exchange website.

End of November

[bondsbw]

Sounds like a lot of mythical man-months to me.

Re:End of November

[ark1]

He didn't mentioned which year.

Re:End of November

[Bite The Pillow]

Not really. It sounds like a position that should have been filled from the beginning is just now getting filled.

Until now, the Medicare agency, led by Marilyn B. Tavenner, was the quarterback, or system integrator, trying to coordinate the work of dozens of contractors.

I'm sure Medicare has things to do other than deal with this mess that wasn't even being written until spring. How they got to that point is a discussion we already had, I'm just pointing out that Medicare is probably not the best choice for driving the technology/solution angle here.

The mythical man month does not directly cover the case of being under-manned until a month after release, then bringing staffing up to where it should be. And certainly if that is the entirety of your contribution, I have to assume you mean the most recognized portions of the concept.

More on point is the difficulty of debugging a live system and making changes that don't cascade to cause more problems, which I don't see happening by the end of November. But an unrealistic schedule, again, is not the mythical man month.

Re:End of November

[cold fjord]

End of November ... Sounds like a lot of mythical man-months to me.

They've got an out. The article doesn't say what year that November is in.

Re:End of November

[Brian_Ellenberger]

Not really. It sounds like a position that should have been filled from the beginning is just now getting filled.

The mythical man month does not directly cover the case of being under-manned until a month after release, then bringing staffing up to where it should be. And certainly if that is the entirety of your contribution, I have to assume you mean the most recognized portions of the concept.

Under-manned because they hired one more person? I haven't seen any evidence they were understaffed or under-manned. And someone I'm skeptical that a CEO guy with a BS in Political Science and no Software Engineering background is the key to turning this around.

Re:End of November

[bondsbw]

The mythical man month does not directly cover the case of being under-manned until a month after release, then bringing staffing up to where it should be.

The primary message of The Mythical Man-Month is that adding people to a late project, counterintuitively, makes it finish later. I'd say that putting out an unfinished project, because you were "under-manned until a month after release", qualifies as late.

But an unrealistic schedule, again, is not the mythical man month.

I'm sorry, that's just wrong. The schedule has everything to do with it. The term "late" establishes that the schedule was unrealistic given all other conditions.

Now I would agree that those other conditions did not work in favor of meeting the schedule. I think this is the point Brooks was trying to make; you can't just tweak staffing levels to improve timeframes, but you must consider ideas like reducing scope of work, creating more effective communication channels between vendors, etc.

Re:End of November

[sumdumass]

lol.. Going old school Clinton style. That would depend on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

Oh the memories.

Re:End of November

[Anonymous Coward]

I could "fix" it in 5 minutes.

HTTP Error 404

Page not found.

Re:End of November

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

They're up against their deadlines though for penalties (which they've waived thru March, which is logical, but not legal, as there is no Constitutional authority for the president to flat-out decline to enforce laws.)

Interestingly, the left has tried using the courts in the past to force the Bush administration to do a better job of creating environmental regulation (forget merely enforcing existing ones), which, though they sound like laws, squirm through constitutionality by being treated as part of enforcement of laws, which is the President's job.

Re:End of November

[DavidTC]

They're up against their deadlines though for penalties (which they've waived thru March, which is logical, but not legal, as there is no Constitutional authority for the president to flat-out decline to enforce laws.)

Firstly, you're confused. No one needed to waive anything till March. To avoid paying penalties under the law, you must have health insurance 9 months of the year, which means if you bought insurance by the last day of March, you were fine. And, 'coincidentally', the last day of open enrollment in the exchanges is, indeed, the last day of March. (The intent is also that most non-exchange plans will also eventually rotate their open enrollment periods around to be the start of the year, but that's not required by law.)

That was how the law worked to start with.

Secondly, Obama hasn't done anything at all. Some Congressional Democrats have asked him to extend open enrollment, but he hasn't. And, yes, he has that power under the law. (I don't know if he has the power to reduce the 'nine months' rule for penalties, but he doesn't need to do that..penalties are proportional to time. So if someone is a week or so late in getting insurance, their penalty is rather small.)

It's rather doubtful he will extend it. That would make insurance companies nervous, and they might end up hiking their rates. (If it was up to them, open enrollment would be a day, and you'd have to sign up a year in advance. They _really_ worry about people signing up the second they get sick.)

Re:End of November

[cayenne8]

I hope they don't vote for any extensionsâ¦and let this thing collapse and fail under its own weight.

The pain it causes will reflect on what a true piece of crap the Obama administration has foisted upon the US, and hopefully, that will be reflected in the next election cycle.

They _really_ worry about people signing up the second they get sick.)

That's what I'd do if I didn't have insurance. I don't think the penalties at this point, are worse than paying for the insuranceâ¦so, it would make sense to anyone that does the numbers for themselves, and for many, that is EXACTLY what is going to be the best for them expense-wise.

Re:End of November

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't mentioned which year.

True, but end of November 2014 (or '16) would be, in the words of Sir Humphry Appleby "rather courageous".

Re:End of November

[DavidTC]

The pain it causes will reflect on what a true piece of crap the Obama administration has foisted upon the US, and hopefully, that will be reflected in the next election cycle.

Yes, that piece of crap that will allow me, for the first time in my life, to actually purchase insurance.

That's what I'd do if I didn't have insurance.

Only you deserve to have insurance, apparently.

I don't think the penalties at this point, are worse than paying for the insuranceâ¦so, it would make sense to anyone that does the numbers for themselves, and for many, that is EXACTLY what is going to be the best for them expense-wise.

Which is, uh, why you can't do that. You can only sign up from January to March. (Well, you can sign up early, but you only get insurance Jan 1.)

Re:End of November

[Magius_AR]

Which is, uh, why you can't do that. You can only sign up from January to March. (Well, you can sign up early, but you only get insurance Jan 1.)

Only true of the government offerings. You can sign up for private health insurance anytime you damn well please. And none of them can turn you down.

Re:End of November

[DavidTC]

Only true of the government offerings. You can sign up for private health insurance anytime you damn well please. And none of them can turn you down.

Firstly, there are no 'government offering'. Everything on the exchange is private insurance.

Secondly, none of them can turn me down because of the ACA's preexisting condition ban. You know, the ACA, the thing you just hoped would fail.

The important part of ACA is the mandate and the ban on preexisting conditions. The only thing that can possibly cause the ACA to collapse is if the mandate doesn't work and health people choose not to sign up for insurance. Which would cause the ban on preexisting conditions to threaten to destroy insurance companies, as people would only sign up when sick.

The idea that you think 'none of them can turn me down' but you 'hope they don't vote for any extensions and let this thing collapse and fail under its own weight.' show you really have very little idea of what's going. The fact that none of them can turn me down is exactly what could cause this thing to collapse under its own weight, as it tries to insure only unhealthy people. So if it does collapse, I sure as fuck won't continue to be allowed to sign up!

The exchanges are basically a non-important part of the ACA. Every single aspect of it could have been the same without them. The exchanges are just to provide an easy place to purchase insurance, because insurance companies never bothered to set up any sort of place for people to shop before. (Because they did not particularly want individual customers.) And it provides an easy way for the government to verify subsidies.

Surprising

[Mitreya]

I am surprised that anyone got approved for such a post

I take it this appointment did not require a joint Democrat/Republican confirmation?

Re:Surprising

[slick7]

I am surprised that anyone got approved for such a post

I take it this appointment did not require a joint Democrat/Republican confirmation?

As surprised as when Obamanation was elected?
It required a Big Pharma/Healthcare Insurance sector approval with a CONgressional rubber stamp.

Re:Surprising

[NicBenjamin]

He was confirmed as Chief Performance Officer back in 2009. All Obama has to do to give him this gig is re-write the job description.

And he doesn't have to re-write much because the CPO is supposed look at government operations (ie: this clusterfuck) and figure out how to make work better. Fixing specific projects probably wasn't what the Senate had in mind when it confirmed him, but they probably won't complain. The GOP will figure he won't do it, and they'll want Obama to have some more rope to hang himself, the Dems will think he will pull it off and will save them all.

Purists who do complain don't understand the point of the system of confirmation. The point isn't that everyone always gets a vote. the point is that the Executive can't ignore the will Congress. In this case that will will be expressed by Congress not complaining.

Re:Surprising

[MichaelPenne]

Right, read your Constitution. Advise and consent is for Cabinet posts, not every freakin' job in the Govt.

Re:Surprising

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, the "advise and consent" provision is for every government job that the Constitution does not specifically specify how it is assigned, unless Congress has specifically invested some other entity with the power to appoint someone to the role without their involvement. Basically, whenever the Administration creates a new category of job, they either need to get the "advice and consent" of the Senate, or they need to get Congress to pass a law saying that they do not need such advice and consent for this particular job (the further down the chain of command the job is, the more likely that a law that can be read to give such permission already exists).

Is this unusual?

[ISoldat53]

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.

Re:Is this unusual?

[NicBenjamin]

Don't know about the industry, but it is unusual for Exchanges. Massachusetts has run fine for years. Cali and New York State went live on Oct. 1 with relatively few problems.

In Obama's defense he was not actually supposed to make any Exchanges. The people who were supposed to do that were the states, but a bunch of states bailed and the backup plan became the plan. Which meant a $1 Billion budget line that was basically an Oh Fuck option became the Exchange for something like a third of the country, and Obama had less time to plan then the states did.

Re:Is this unusual?

[Anonymous Coward]

36 states is "a third of the country?" Almost 3/4 of the country is using the Federal Exchanges.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it won't happen. It's already an actual failure, and now people perceive it will always be a failure. They won't get the signups they anticipated, insurers will pull out of the exchanges, and it will crater. Now, people also know that there is no possible way for the government to collect any fines unless you are expecting a refund. They either have to take it out of the refund, or force your employer to withhold it. Good luck.

This was always going to be a failure. The hubris that designed and implemented such a disaster of a law could only come from an Obama administration that is so arrogant and self-righteous they don't listen to anyone except yes-men and lackeys. Just read the comments from the insane head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Even Anderson Cooper thinks she's not part of this universe.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Hacker News has an interesting discussion about the 500m LoC claim https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

thats sounds crazy... oh yeah becasue it is crazy.
the source is some unofficial statistic from an unnamed New York Times source

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unfixable in a politically acceptable way for the Democrats and the Obama administration.

You know, Ann Coulter has told us that this was intentional. That the Democrats' plan is to make it unworkable and then replace the whole thing with Single Payer as a workable solution.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Em Adespoton]

The hubris that designed and implemented such a disaster of a law could only come from an Obama administration that is so arrogant and self-righteous they don't listen to anyone except yes-men and lackeys. Just read the comments from the insane head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Even Anderson Cooper thinks she's not part of this universe.

I'm not sure if this gets filed under rhetoric, hubris, or hyperbole -- or all three. The Obama administration hasn't cornered the market on arrogance and self-righteousness; that's part of what makes politics politics, and has been going on since before the Roman Empire. Obama's administration isn't unique; he just focuses on fewer "big things" and does it without a safety net (which is ironic, considering this is about insurance).

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[OzPeter]

They're going to try and band-aid it, and it won't work.

But the boss has already promised his customers that it would be ready by the end of November.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

The 500M lines of code is attributed to "one specialist".

Strange, but I would rather hear the number from the people who run the site, or at least someone who would use their name.

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

[xevioso]

And what, pray tell, will you do when it is fixed in 5 weeks as promised? When people, by and large, are signing up with few errors, by the end of November, what will you do?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[xevioso]

So, lets be honest about this. This is a web application. It is not software. It's a bunch of forms on a bunch of web pages that connect to a bunch of databases. And a whole shitload of that can be markup. FAQs, Privacy Policies, tons and tons of TEXT. Which can be called "code" if you stick a tag around it.

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

[xevioso]

Yes they are. And if you already have health insurance you aren't forced to buy.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[hsthompson69]

I suppose at that point, I'll be busy enjoying having a harem of all the most famous starlets of the past 200 years, and taking occasional trips in my time machine for fun around the early Babylonian period.

What will you do if God comes down from heaven in 5 weeks, and personally offers you a latte?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Entropius]

What I'm wondering: how did they spend 600 million bucks on this?

I bought health insurance from an "exchange" a few years ago; I was between jobs and wanted gap coverage. I went to a website, ran a search, picked a plan, and enrolled -- it was pretty simple. The website didn't look that complicated, and I'm sure it didn't cost $600M or even $60M (and it worked). Now, maybe the government wants to do something a little more complicated, but $600M is roughly 10,000 developers' salaries for a year. What were they all doing?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Entropius]

Wouldn't people be somewhat less likely to do that, given that giving the keys to the car to the kid who just wrecked his tricycle seems like a bad idea?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they are. And if you already have health insurance you aren't forced to buy.

A "customer" forced to buy a product is like a "consenting party" forced to have sex with his or her rapist.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Jeremi]

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:

You're looking at the wrong metric, because not all of those 500m lines of code have to work perfectly before the site is minimally usable.

The correct metric to look at would be the number of lines of code that are (a) currently broken, (b) actually executed in the common cases, and (c) cause painful or fatal consequences to the process. Those are the parts that actually need to be fixed sooner than later, and it's likely that that number is significantly smaller than 500m.

I've worked on a number of projects that seemed hopelessly buggy; the only thing to do is keep on diagnosing and fixing the next bug, and sometimes you find out that that one bug was causing a massive cascade of errors, and now that it's fixed, a whole swath of other symptoms that you thought were unrelated go away with it. The magnitude of the symptoms is often uncorrelated to the difficulty of fixing the bug.

That might not be the case, here, but then again it might.

To sum up, it doesn't need to be perfect in the next few weeks, just good enough. Once the flaws are reduced to a level where people can reasonably put up with them, there will be more time to polish out the rest.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[onkelonkel]

Tell Him - No Foam please.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[cold fjord]

It's hard to say. It is pretty typical for the government to create a problem, and then someone proposes a big new government program to fix the problem that wouldn't exist if not for the government. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Spy Handler]

how many lines of code did the Jurassic Park UNIX system have?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[zippthorne]

Obama told us it was intentional in his stump speeches before he even became president. Something about wanting single-payer, but you can't get there overnight. You have to do it in stages.

One of those stages is the collapse of the free-market insurance industry. It is a necessary condition to single payer that there can't be any other payers.

One thing I don't understand is why they didn't make the individual mandate severable. They could have done a lot of damage if that specific part of the law was struck down, but the requirement that insurers accept pre-existing conditions left alone.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Goetterdaemmerung]

Right. His customers aren't the people seeking insurance. His customer is the Obama administration.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[CrimsonAvenger]

And if you already have health insurance you aren't forced to buy.

If you already have health insurance, you probably don't care when, or even if, the site becomes functional.

Except perhaps in a "hey, look at the train wreck" sort of way....

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Velex]

Yeah I know man! I hate paying for roads I never use! Communist bastards!

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Velex]

(That being said, Romney^H^H^H^H^H^HObamacare is pretty much crap. We just need single payer already.)

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

more than HALF of the country does not have health insurance. And they are forced to buy now.

I am forced to buy now. And what do i get. Not fucking much. If anything major happens to me my life is still fucked beyond belief. Just like before.
Unlike before tho i am out a few hundred a month and gain pretty much nothing good.

And if i refuse to buy. They take the money from me. And i get even less.

The entire system is bullshit unless you are already a. well off. or b. dirt fucking poor.

Everyone in the middle is fucked and they are pretty much stealing money from them and handing it to the insurance companies.

Looks like all that money that got donated to the campaigns finally paid off for the insurance companies. Big. It's a good scam. wish i was on the other side of it.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Only 1: it was a really long line, though, and the intern who wrote it was the first person off the island.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[HiThere]

Well, if it's true, then one of the problems with the site is that there's too many lines of code. (Even if, as someone suggested, you are counting every line between two html tags as a line of code.)

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[NicBenjamin]

You do realize that California and Massachusetts have Exchanges that work?

Which means that an awful lot of this code can be brought in from those states.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[NicBenjamin]

$600 million is not a lot in the world of government contracting. There are several models of Jet in the Air Force that cost that much. Moreover this was a really big job. They need enough servers to complete 15 million orders, they need to talk to the IRS (mostly for income data), several other agencies, fairly sophisticated GIS systems (many plans aren't available in all counties), and insurance company computer systems.

Your little exchange probably had to handle talking to the insurer's computers, but it didn't care what percent of poverty you were, it may not have cared which County you lived in, and it probably didn't care as much about security. It's a small target, at least compared to a Federal Exchange. Hack it and you screw a few thousand. OTOH if you hack the Federal Exchange you could theoretically steal 15 million people's everything. SSN, name, address, IRS info, every fucking thing.

What I personally don't get is why they didn't just steal a bunch of servers from MA. I get maybe they wouldn't have scaled up, but the MA system worked at a scale of 5 million residents so you just set up 20 or 30 of those, and put up a splash page that tells people which one of those to go to, and you're golden.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[NicBenjamin]

More importantly this is not inventing the Apollo Program. California's Exchange is serving 10% of the country's population fine. Build six of those and Obama's golden.

I doubt it can actually be done in 5 weeks, but in theory they should have the hardware to do it (that $600 million went somewhere), so installing the right software could do the trick.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they counted the lines of machine code?
They only had a few months to do the actual coding. What kind of super-programmers churn out 500 million lines in that time?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[VerdantHue]

What were they all doing?

Lobbying?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[mattb47]

The Obama administration hasn't cornered the market on arrogance and self-righteousness -- the Republicans have their fair share as well.

But the Obama his cronies can clam more here than any Presidency since...FDR? Nixon? And has almost nothing to show for it other than the ACA -- which appears to be collapsing from a combination of logistical impossibility and breathtaking incompetence.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[mattb47]

No.... I like Ann Coulter, but she loves hyperbole. I'm going to apply Occam's razor here and go with the much more likely explanation: utter incompetence and managerial indifference. Yes, Obama and friends want to control a large swath of the US economy, but couldn't rip themselves out of a wet paper bag. (Although they're really, really good at running a campaign. Especially if the IRS can slap down opposing groups and prevent them from raising money...) Obama's utter lack of any management experience prior to the Presidency is completely telling.

Thank you, America for your well though out electoral choices!

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[pspahn]

Even in a template heavy system such as Magento (which I work with daily), I'm not this many lines of code is necessary. I mean, really, the number seems grossly absurd at its face value.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, they are slaves, or worse. Willing participants in the theft of other people's money.

Re: It's NOT going to happen

[JWW]

I will eagerly look forward to buying the epic tome on software engineering that will finally reveal to us all (after over 40 years) how to really get it done....

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

The best thing I see there is the "coincidence" of the $500,000,000 price tag being assumed and the 500,000,000 lines of code. Just a guess, and a cynical one at that, but I'd venture that someone leaked the latter 500M LoC figure because they knew the former $500M figure and were afraid that the actual LoC, something much more reasonable, but still bloated, was going to get subjected to a rhetorical cost analysis where Senator X asks a subpoenaed contractor, "We paid you $500M, and you delivered 5M LoC, so are you telling me that each line cost a hundred dollars?"

When you inflate your LoC so that each line costs a dollar, you sound less like a thieving crook and can plausibly start blaming change orders (usually the most realistic blame there is) and task complexity. When each line of code costs a hundred dollars, then people start comparing your LoC/$bottom_line to Facebook's or Microsoft's, and then they accuse you of theft.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I can't even understand the flawed precepts that would lead to that statement. I hope you're just partisan and lying through your teeth, because then I wouldn't have to think that somebody can have a moral compass that screwed up.

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:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

If only the guy who championed the MA system was in charge...

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, people also know that there is no possible way for the government to collect any fines unless you are expecting a refund. They either have to take it out of the refund, or force your employer to withhold it. Good luck

That's why the IRS is involved. They have all sorts of ways to make your life hell until you pay up if they decide you're the next ant under the magnifying glass.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Lines of code is a BS measure anyway. As one of my instructors put it, anything can be 1 line of code with enough semicolons and any code can be 1,000,000 pages with enough new lines.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Except perhaps in a "hey, look at the train wreck that my tax dollars paid for" sort of way....

is that what you meant?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[phantomfive]

The Obama administration hasn't cornered the market on arrogance and self-righteousness; that's part of what makes politics politics, and has been going on since before the Roman Empire.

Very true, the one thing you can be certain of; if this somehow goes so badly that Obama gets voted out and Republicans seize control; you can be certain then, Republicans will over-extend their advantage, and do something equally crazy that makes people want to vote them out.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unfixable in a politically acceptable way for the Democrats and the Obama administration.

You know, Ann Coulter has told us that this was intentional. That the Democrats' plan is to make it unworkable and then replace the whole thing with Single Payer as a workable solution.

that's just crazy.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[MichaelPenne]

Especially because he said 'the website'. Imagine counting every line of HTML in wikipedia as a 'line of code'.

Things get pretty big pretty fast when you do it that way.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[svendog]

They didn't spend $600m on the website. That figure comes from an open service contract with CGI that predates the ACA by a considerable amount of time. The amount of the contract spent on developing the healthcare.gov site is estimated to be between $70m - $125m; still not cheap, but definitely not on the order of half a billion dollars.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[riverat1]

As far as I can tell Ann Coulter's gig is to be controversial so she remains in the public eye and to sell her books.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[riverat1]

The 500M lines of code is attributed to "one specialist".

I don't care who you are, writing 500M lines of code is impressive. ;)

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

#include /*redirect stdout to a file for a 500 million line web program*/
int main()
{
printf("");
for(long i = 0;iLine of Code: %u

\n",i);
printf("");
return 0;
}

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot interpreted the HTML tags. I'm sleep deprived and forgot about that. It basically prints the standard stuff, loops 500 million times printing a line with a number between paragraph tags.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people are being forced to buy new plans because their current plans do not meet the minimum standards of ACA, much to the contradiction of Obama a few years ago stating that if you liked your current plan you'd get to keep it.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, no one is forced to buy, they can choose to pay the tax instead. Or, for that matter, they can make sure that they are not due a refund on their taxes and not pay the tax either (the only authority the IRS has to enforce the tax for not having health insurance is to withhold any tax refund which an individual might be due).

Re: It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

So you consider all the code on the backend that interfaces with all the insurance companies just forms and markup? I could easily see there being a ton of code going into This project.

The number of lines is irrelevant for something large and encompassing as long as it's organized well. That's the real issue here

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Redmancometh]

Sorry I dislike Obama greatly...but Nixon has him beat on arrogance.
Didn't he have trumpeteers for when he made an entrance or something?

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Because: Communism has worked out so well for so many for so long.

Oh, wait...

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[rubycodez]

You hopey-changey dreamers are amusing. see you at the end of November. bring tissues

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[rubycodez]

you are spewing lies. go look up the insured percent figure for the USA instead of pulling random shit out of your ass.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the Department of Homeland Security.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

and that's before you see the product they are forcing you to buy

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

when the employer mandate kicks in you will worry some more

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

One of those stages is the collapse of the free-market insurance industry. It is a necessary condition to single payer that there can't be any other payers.

This is the biggest load I've heard all day. Every single UHC system also has a private option. If you as a citizen wish to forego the single payer system, you are free to pay an exorbitant fee (which is what it becomes when it's strictly a luxury) for private health insurance.

Of course, only the megalomaniacally wealthy will actually do so, as the cost actually approaches the TRUE cost of private healthcare, which is much, much more than what the US's subsidized system represents.

Re:It's NOT going to happen

[jwhitener]

Lines of code involved is a meaningless figure if tests have revealed specific areas that are causing bottlenecks.

And many of the bottlenecks may have nothing to do with the healthcare.gov site code at all. It may be back-end database issues, or even hardware related, or not the new code at all... it could be slow to answer third party servers that healthcare.gov had to interface with.

If all the web, app, db, and integration code is properly broken out in different servers or virtual machines, it is probably somewhat easy to see where the bottlenecks are, and to focus in very specific areas for further testing.

Good choice for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Good choice for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.. it looks like Obama has found slashdot!

Re:Good choice for the job

[quantaman]

But he's not analyzing something, he's trying to fix a broken incomplete project. He might be brilliant in his field but that doesn't mean he's an expert project manager or knows enough about software for his "end of November" prediction to have any credibility.

Of course that's not really a bad thing, if your priority is simply to get it up and running the current team who bungled it is still the best bet. Zients might just be shuffling deckchairs in an effort to satisfy critics while they try to fix the code.

What you're missing...

[Bill Dimm]

Zients said, "By the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users."

Yeah,November of which year?

Re:What you're missing...

[Sponge Bath]

November of last year. Jeffry and Captain Kirk use the slingshot effect to send the Enterprise back in time to rework the website with an M-5 multitronic unit.

Re:What you're missing...

[Delarth799]

I believe you misspelled century

Re:What you're missing...

[trout007]

I used that in a meeting once when management asked how we can get the project finished by the arbitrary deadline. I said we could build a time machine. The great part is that it doesn't matter when we finish that project because all of the other ones will be on time.

That reminds me of a design review I was in. The "safety" engineer asked me what the backup was if a primary structure failed. I said it's a primary structure it's designed not to fail. They responded "What if it magically fails?". I said "We roll for damages".

I don't get invited to meetings often.

Re:What you're missing...

[Fierlo]

Lots of things are designed not to fail. Arguably, everything is designed to not fail, however, everything that is designed well is designed to fail gracefully or in a predictable fashion (or at least, not catastrophically).

The reason you don't get invited to meetings is that you demonstrated arrogance (or misplaced humour) when asked a legitimate question.

Not that being in meetings is particularly pleasant, but there is sometimes value in being present.

Re:What you're missing...

[trout007]

You may have missed or misunderstood what I mean by primary structure. In my line of work primary structures are ones that if they fail do fail catastrophically because there is no way to build in redundancy. The way we mitigate these risks is by performing a comprehensive analysis, material testing, proof loading, and regular maintenance and inspections.

We use the term secondary and tertiary structures in regards to those that can have redundancy and backups should they fail

This will only fix the shiny object

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:This will only fix the shiny object

[phantomfive]

, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.

This is a fascinating point. His approval rating is actually increasing. Maybe most people aren't aware of how bad the situation i yet.

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.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[NicBenjamin]

, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.

This is a fascinating point. His approval rating is actually increasing. Maybe most people aren't aware of how bad the situation i yet.

My best guess on Obama's number is pretty simple:
People don't actually care about ObamaCare that much. It's a change to health insurance, which worries them, and Republicans they trust just enough to give 48% of their votes have been bitching about it for years, but it hasn't actually hurt them (or anyone they know) yet.

OTOH those silly Republicans just shutdown the government to stop it, which did hurt them. According Matty Yglesias a lot of people he met blamed the websites failure on the shutdown, which isn't true but makes sense in a weird sort of way. The GOP shutdown the government on pretty much the exact day the website failed to launch claiming that the program the website represents was the reason they were shutting the government down. I can see how a reasonable person, paying a normal amount of attention to politics, would reach that conclusion.

If this website, or a workaround, doesn't work soon Obama's gonna lose in the polls. Probably not much. Dems will mostly blame the failure of the website on a GOP refusal to support the law, in this case a) by forcing the national exchange to exist by refusing to set up the state-level exchanges they were supposed to set up, and b) by funding a national-website that's supposed to serve 15 million customers in tqo months in an ultra-secure way with $100-$300 million a year. But he'll start to lose even the most fanatical if he can't report on major progress come Nov. 1.

I suspect he'll have something to report. As I mentioned there are multiple state-level exchanges already working. Some of them are for pretty big states like Cali. So in theory all this ZIents guy has to do is get permission to use Cali's software on the hardware he's already got, and then get it configured. I doubt he can pull that shit off in 5 weeks, but I also doubt it will take three months.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[NicBenjamin]

Shut up!

This is America. Voices of reason are not allowed. Everything is either a) the only reason the country will make it through the next week, or b) the thing that will kill everyone within the next week. And nobody agrees on how to tell whether something is a) or b). That's why our news media only reports on one story at a time, while giving it literal 24-7 coverage on three national cable networks.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[phantomfive]

I've never seen a project that was remotely a success when it failed to pass QA for serious reasons and was released anyway.

I have seen products that were released, failing similar QA tests that Healthcare.gov failed, and they took 8-12 months to fix.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[phantomfive]

According Matty Yglesias a lot of people he met blamed the websites failure on the shutdown

That is fascinating.

So in theory all this ZIents guy has to do is get permission to use Cali's software on the hardware he's already got, and then get it configured.

If that's the path he chooses, and it's reasonably well written code, I would estimate not less than 6 months. Remember the California software wasn't designed to be modular that way, so you are definitely going to run into some hidden roadblocks.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[DavidTC]

According Matty Yglesias a lot of people he met blamed the websites failure on the shutdown, which isn't true but makes sense in a weird sort of way. The GOP shutdown the government on pretty much the exact day the website failed to launch claiming that the program the website represents was the reason they were shutting the government down. I can see how a reasonable person, paying a normal amount of attention to politics, would reach that conclusion.

There are very few times the phrase 'epic fail' is actually correct. Especially in politics. The Republican's shutdown is one of them. And not just doing it, but every single part of it.

1) Scheduling it right as the ACA exchanges opened, completely drowning out the failure of them to work. Wow, really? Just...really?
2) Scheduling it two weeks before the debt ceiling and threatening that, so that all the corporate interests woke up and said 'Uh, no.' and started pushing back.
3) Running about talking about national monuments being closed, while head start programs closed and government workers sat at home without a paycheck. (This happened to me three times: 'And Obama's shutting down the monuments out of spite!' 'Right, only unimportant things should be shut down, like military contractor sitting at home and police officers working without pay! How dare Obama take away the national monuments!'. Republicans always became _very_ quiet after that.)
4) Had literally no plan at all. I mean, no plan at all. And no escape plan if their first...uh...'plan' failed?

They tried for something that any rational person could have told them couldn't be obtained, and they did it such a way to drown out the actual problems in the thing they would attacking, and they did it in such a destructive way that even their own party hated it, and they had no idea what to do when the impossible thing they wanted did not happen.

'Epic fail' doesn't even start to cover it. It is quite possibly the dumbest conceivable thing they could have done.

...unless you're Ted Cruz or some other Tea Party Republican, of course, in which case it was a great fundraising opportunity.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[NicBenjamin]

The current GOP is in a very weird place. They win whites, they win older people, and they win rural areas. The geography means that voting base would give them the House without any work. But the same geography dooms them state-wide in most states, and nation-wide. They consistently get 45% of the national vote with that base. Any GOP pol who tries to grow that base by appealing to anyone not white/rural/old gets killed in primaries by the white/rural/oldsters who actually show up for primaries.

Thus when Ted Cruz had his idea, and white/rural/oldsters loved it everyone else had to go along with it. And kept going along with it until the polls got really bad.

I suspect that's gonna happen again in January. Altho if the Federal Exchange still isn't working in January the political environment might be better for a shutdown.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[DavidTC]

The geography means that voting base would give them the House without any work.

If by 'work', you don't mean gerrymandering.

If districts were assigned randomly, or groups by political boundaries, or even deliberately grouped evenly...the Republicans would lose their majority.

They win whites, they win older people, and they win rural areas.

Actually, there real problem is that they actually aren't winning whites and older people so much anymore. They still have an advantage, but it's fairly weak. (Especially you include 'white women', which the GOP is losing by droves.)

They are still winning rural areas, but the secret that no one wants to talk about is that rural areas are massively losing population, while urban areas are gaining. This has always been a general trend, but has now been accelerated by recession. (Just like it was during the great depression.)

Hence the requirement to gerrymander.

Altho if the Federal Exchange still isn't working in January the political environment might be better for a shutdown.

I have no idea what you mean by 'the political climate'. You are correct in that the exact same Republicans might want a shutdown again. (Although I actually think we're all good until February so that's when it would happen, but that doesn't change your point.)

This would be even more of a disaster for the GOP, though.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[NicBenjamin]

Gerrymandering doesn't help Dems, but it's only part part of the problem. Much of the problem is that Dems live in areas that vote Obama at ridiculous rates, whereas Republicans tend to live in areas that vote GOP at high rates (but not overwhelming rates). In gerrymandering terms Dems tend to pack themselves into highly Democratic districts, which means that they have a lot of wasted votes in their urban core, whereas strongly conservative rural districts waste just enough votes that Dems shouldn;t bother campaigning there.

Here's a made-up example that shows how the math works:
There's a state with 2.25 million people. 750k live in the big city, 1.5 million live in rural areas. That's worth three Congressional districts. It's a D+10 state, which means it usually gives 55% of it's vote to the Democrats. That means there's 1.65 districts worth of Democrats in the state.The natural district lines are one for the Big city, and then cut the rurals in half.

But Big Cities are very, very Democratic. This one votes 80% Democratic. This means that there's only .85 districts worth of Democratic voters to spread out among the two rural districts, which means in a strong Democratic state two of the three Congressman are Republicans who always get 57.5%. Basically the only way to get a state Congressional delegation that represents the will of the people of the state (ie: one Dem district, one district leaning Dem, and a GOP district) would be to gerrymander the big city in half. But in most states that would technically be against the rules.

You can fiddle with the numbers some, but as long as the truly big cities vote more strongly Dem then vast amounts of GOP real estate vote GOP the GOP is gonna have an edge in House districts.

As for political environment, I meant exactly that. A big part of the GOP's problem was that nobody was particularly unhappy with Obama, or worked up about ObamaCare. o Democrats, not even the ones who ran on an anti-Obama platform (ie: Manchin) were biting. The GOP were being major pains in the ass, and the mushy middle didn't see a good reason for them to be major pains in the ass.

In mid-January if we don't have 7-8 million people signed up on the exchange ObamaCare could look like a total disaster. The GOP could look like saviors for a) getting that annoying website news off our damn screens and b) having a potential solution to the website problem. Moreover in January if the problems aren't fixed Manchin/Landriue/etc. will be under intense pressure to throw Obama under the bus. The GOP will need six Dems to force Obama to veto a plan that solves the debt/budget problems while gutting ObamaCare, and under those circumstances they could get it. Especially if they do a brilliant thing and include some bribes like immigration reform.

OTOH the Exchange could be fixed. Or some new thing (like that Syria mess from August) could blow it off our TV screens. Maybe by January the media gets bored of blaming Obama, and starts blaming the various Governors who chose to give Obama the job of setting up their state Exchange. California and New York, for example, are doing fine.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[DavidTC]

You can fiddle with the numbers some, but as long as the truly big cities vote more strongly Dem then vast amounts of GOP real estate vote GOP the GOP is gonna have an edge in House districts.

No. What you're saying was true, in the past.

However, at this point, Democrats are so far ahead it wouldn't actually give the GOP enough of an edge to retain the majority. 'Rural' counties have cities also, and right now cities are being chopped up..by Republicans. They draw a vast rural area, and then a single tiny line into the city to 'eat up' some of the city's Democrats...and do that over and over.

If the districts were actually as compact as possible, following pre-existing political boundaries as much as possible, than the GOP would, indeed, have a slight bias towards them (Both from urban vs. rural and from the fact each state has at least one Representative)...but they'd still lose their majority.

In mid-January if we don't have 7-8 million people signed up on the exchange ObamaCare could look like a total disaster. The GOP could look like saviors for a) getting that annoying website news off our damn screens and b) having a potential solution to the website problem. Moreover in January if the problems aren't fixed Manchin/Landriue/etc. will be under intense pressure to throw Obama under the bus. The GOP will need six Dems to force Obama to veto a plan that solves the debt/budget problems while gutting ObamaCare, and under those circumstances they could get it. Especially if they do a brilliant thing and include some bribes like immigration reform.

ROTFL.

Sure, the 2007 Republicans could do that, no problem.

In 2013? Fuck no. That would be compromise and compromise is, I believe, actually unconstitutional at this point, according to the Republican base. I'm pretty certain just speaking to Democrats can be considered treason.

In mid-January if we don't have 7-8 million people signed up on the exchange ObamaCare could look like a total disaster.

A lot of the 'failure of people to sign up' has been completely exaggerate by the simple fact that insurance companies don't count people as 'enrolled' until people have already paid. And, of course, no one is going to pay now for health insurance they don't get until January. They're going to pay for it a few days before the deadline to get insurance by Jan 1, which is December 15th.

This why 'enrollment is in the single digits' and nonsense like that.

And, on top of that, low enrollment is only a disaster if the people who don't sign up are the healthy people. Interestingly, young people are a higher percentage of early signups than predicted. If only 1 million people sign up, but half of them are young health people, I'm sure the right will try to paint that as a failure, but they're going to do that regardless. It sure as hell won't be a failure in any objective sense, as it will drive rates down.

And, uh, 7-8 million is too high in the first place. There were only 50 million uninsured, and a large portion of those are supposed to be covered (But won't in many states) by the Medicaid expansion, and another few million by their employers. And 11 million are undocumented, who deliberately aren't covered.

There are only about 25 million who are supposed to be covered by the health care exchange, and assuming that a full third of them will already have signed up for insurance by the first day it's provided is a bit silly.

Re:This will only fix the shiny object

[NicBenjamin]

You're wrong on the gerrymandering math. In IL we did the gerrymandering and we won 12-6. In OH they did the gerrymandering and they won 12-4. PA was 13-5. That 72-75% of the seats when they gerrymander, vs 67% for us, AND we have more votes to play in IL then they did in OH or PA. Gerrymandering is part of our problem, but it's not like Jesus coming down from heaven and redrawing all the districts in a fair manner would magically solve our problems. If he did un-fair, pro-us districts like they have in IL that might do something. But fair districts lose us a couple seats in IL, and don't solve the problem of our huge pile of wasted votes in Cuyahoga, Lucas, etc. in OH.

As for the political situation in Jan. 2012, don't make the mistake of assuming the other side will always make the same dumb mistake. In particular don't assume that a lot of GOPers who want cushy jobs from industry when they retire won't calculate that screwing the tea Parties on immigration reform is a good risk to take in exchange for actually ending ObamaCare. In principle I'd agree that you're probably right, and they probably won't risk a compromise, but a) if healthcare.gov doesn't start working soon they won't need to offer much, and b) this isn't the lottery. If I'm 75% sure we win, that means there's a 25% chance we lose everything and never get it back.

As for the 7-8 million number, keep in mind that the start-date in the American people's mind isn't Jan.1. It's October 1. The number they're thinking of is the 15 million who were supposed to sign up on HealthCare.gov. If we aren't don't have a significant number from that site months after the website was supposed to go live the American people's response is not gonna be "it was a nice idea, it's good that they're trying, let's spend the next six months being tolerant of their mistakes." It's probably gonna be something along the lines of "Obama is goddamned moron and I never should have voted for him.

It may all be for naught

[Tiger4]

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.

Re:It may all be for naught

[Brian_Ellenberger]

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.

Here is the Equal Protection Clause:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Note that the boundary of the clause is the State. Different states have different laws all the time. Massachusetts has had statewide healthcare for a long time, and Vermont passed a single-payer healthcare. Oregon has vote-by-mail. Minnesota abolished the death penalty while it remains in the majority of states. Some states have legalized marijuana, while in Pennsylvania you can only buy wine and spirits from state owned shops. Taxes are different, environmental laws are different, etc.

Statehood wouldn't mean much if states weren't allowed to have different laws.

Re:It may all be for naught

[NicBenjamin]

Two points:

1) They have lots of servers, presumably enough for the load. What they don't have is software. California has software that's working. I don't know how easy it will be to port Cali's exchange to the Feds, but I do know this is a lot easier then the media are making it out to be. I will be surprised if they make their November date, but I won't be surprised at they get it done pretty close to that.

2) The legal argument is BS.

Even if it wasn't, how long do you think Bobby Jindall will remain Governor of Louisiana if half of Louisiana knows the only reason they aren't getting cheap health insurance is that Bobby didn't pass a law? He's up for re-election next November.

Re:It may all be for naught

[davide marney]

States rights won't survive gay marriage.

Re:It may all be for naught

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if it wasn't, how long do you think Bobby Jindall will remain Governor of Louisiana if half of Louisiana knows the only reason they aren't getting cheap health insurance is that Bobby didn't pass a law? He's up for re-election next November.

They are going to even more angry when "free" turns out to be not free.

Re:It may all be for naught

[Tiger4]

1. ACA is Federal law. The fine / tax/ whatever is Federal, imposed on the residents of the states.

2. You might look a bit further up, to Amendment 16, where it says

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; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

Re:It may all be for naught

[Anonymous Coward]

well... it is Louisiana, and they did elect Jindall to tell Washington where to go. So, it's likely he will be reelected if things continue as they have before.

Re:It may all be for naught

[localman]

States rights survived the civil war. Or maybe you feel they didn't. In either case, that was the point at which we decided the scope of states rights. Gay marriage is nothing compared to that.

Re:It may all be for naught

[DavidTC]

I'm not sure that actually matters.

Who has standing to sue that the government can't offer tax credits to people? I don't see any standing at all, either on part of the states or individuals. (Individuals who don't get the tax credit are irrelevant, individuals who do can't sue over something they can just refuse.)

Also, there are people arguing that the Federal government can't give health insurance subsidies to people because the law doesn't say it can, but somehow the Federal government can just ignore the mandate, which the law actually says?! That makes no sense at all. If the government doesn't give them subsidies, then they're _possibly_ excluded from the mandate because they can't find insurance cheap enough, but it still exists as a general rule and people will fall under it.

And, as an aside: Wow, Republicans really are determined to bring the building down on themselves, aren't they?

1. Do not let people in Republican-lead states have Medicare.
2. Do not let people in Republican-lead states have subsidies.
3. ????
4. PROFIT!!!

<sarcasm>That is a really good way to stay in power. It's completely impossible that people without insurance in said Republican-lead states will notice an adjective phrase in common and work to change that.</sarcasm>

Here's a hint, Republicans: You could just ignore the law, or attempt to replace it. But this is the point where you have to stop fighting it, because people can already see how helpful it is.

Re:It may all be for naught

[ALeader71]

I read the same thing on Wonk Blog. However the law also allows states to default to the Fed's exchange. That's what happens when you rush a Bill through the system instead of writing and tweaking the Bill while you run for office.

The problem with healthcare.org's site is implementation. Any moderately trained person can build a web site. A skilled artistic type can make a pretty website. To build something with the size and scope of healthcare.org, you have to set a few rules. First, you create an API for insurance companies, and you base the API around the ACA's rules and whatever federal rules already exist. Then you publish that API using whatever open source license you prefer. Let interested coders make better mousetraps and propose the improvements via GIT. In order to sell health insurance on healthcare.org, require some sort of long and difficult to crack encryption system...currently certificates are popular. If a poor encryption scheme is adopted, the self-interested coders will point that out and the more motivated ones will propose a solution.

So how do you keep the trolls and the bots at bay? Require proof, say Captcha and a sample code submission. Let the community identify the paid posers and kick them out of the system.

How not to do it? Develop the system in a vacuum. Give insurance companies an out by delaying their entry into the site as a provider. Worry more about governmental oversight and less about the end product. Develop the front end, but don't focus on the back end. Keep the Administration in the dark so it turns in to a big fiasco.

When the ACA was a Bill I often asked people "Why do you think the Government would do a good job providing healthcare or insurance?" The answers I got depended on political affiliation. Obama supporters looked at me like I asked a good question, but they refused to process the information as it was easier to respond with "well, the have it in Europe and I believe their system is perfect." Non-Obama supporters answered with their own talking points: Obama's a socialist/communist, Obama's not a US citizen, Obama . Now here we are with a half baked site and a lot of disappointed people who were already disappointed with Obama's adoption of Bush's platform, lack of openness, and the number of scandals that were suddenly popping up all around him.

Well, the ACA is law and it won't be repealed any time soon. The question I really want an answer too is: Does anyone think the government has it in them to do a good job now that the site's failures are impossible to hide from the public?

yeah, fix it with another 600M

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe can cut half.

Re:yeah, fix it with another 600M

[Anonymous Coward]

That flushing sound we hear... more tax dollars heading for the black-hole of government waste. Can't imagine what the fuck they did for the first 600M, what if ... they used that to help offset existing healh care costs.. I know... too simple of an idea.

Sigh, more Obama bashing

[Anonymous Coward]

By talking about these few perceived problems, you people are hurting the only person that is trying to help us. Please stop talking about this. The racist right wingers don't want minorities to have health care so they'll do anything to stop it. The most effective tool they have right now is talking about this.

Apollo 1

[tepples]

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?

Re:Apollo 1

[Richy_T]

It's early days yet.

Re:Apollo 1

[MichaelPenne]

Now thats a freaking good point. I've had UnitedHealthcare and BC/BS and their websites have always been horrible. Just suxors.

Re:Apollo 1

[CaptainLard]

Aren't astronauts government employees and already have health insurance? They won't be needing healthcare.gov.

It wil be easy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Calling it a thcheme

[tepples]

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.

Re:Calling it a thcheme

[nschubach]

Obviously, it won't work. Every law I've read refuses to use parenthesis and instead use liberal amounts of footnotes and redirections.

Dictator for a day

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

As CGI runs for cover

[Anonymous Coward]

You can bet that as the performance bonds get eaten up CGI will be heading back to Quebec to lick their wounds. I doubt the company will be getting anymore work from .gov or .gc.ca for that matter, that is work that the public actually hears about. You can bet that when they get any new contracts it will be under one of their subs and not use the company name.

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.

Another big triumph for outsourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Open source the project

[Anonymous Coward]

For real.

Reversing REDMAP

[tepples]

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.

Re:Reversing REDMAP

[phantomfive]

Get enough Democrats into state legislatures

How likely do you think that is?

Re:Reversing REDMAP

[tepples]

It depends on how well Democratic marketing departments can spin "I can't afford health insurance because $REPUBLICAN refused to take free Medicaid money" sob stories into campaign ads for state legislators.

Obama Blinded Me With Zients

[theodp]

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:-)

Re:Obama Blinded Me With Zients

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop blaming Obama. He didn't have anything to do with this fiasco that was underfunded by the Republicans that want to make damn sure that minorities continue to not have access to healthcare. This entire thing is caused by racism.

Re:Obama Blinded Me With Zients

[Lucky_Pierre]

This entire thing is caused by racism.

Hehehehehe!

Nightmare

[Dan East]

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.

Re:Nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

healthcare taken to the bureaucratic power (h^b). Sounds like a good way to shave 10 years off your life in stress.

or even (h^b)*UNDER_REPAIR

Who could walk in and say "it will be working by the end of November" with a straight face?

It would take much longer than 6 weeks to just finish slides from the first meeting.

Re:Nightmare

[localman]

So here's a serious question... why can so many other countries do it well? They combine healthcare and government and it's fine. So is the US functionally retarded? I don't think we are, but if this is really the undoable task that half this thread implies, what's wrong with us?

Re:Nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

Please describe countries that combine healthcare and government "well"?

Re:Nightmare

[Dan East]

I'm not talking about healthcare. I'm talking about EMR and other software involved in healthcare. By other countries do you mean like the UK's multibillion pound fiasco where they attempted to create a single centralized EMR system for the country? They started that 7 years ago and are basically giving up on it at this point.

Re:Nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US you have a large portion of the population who believes government is the problem. They work to undermine public institutions and then point and say 'See, government can't do anything right!".

Re:Nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

its fine when you can go to the US when your health care lets you down.

not sure that will be an option in the future. actually i am more worried about the slow down in innovation and research

Re:Nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

why can so many other countries do it well?

Define "do it well". Additionally, keep in mind that, as a country, we've got the 3rd largest population in the world, and the top two don't have anything close to the health care system of the countries I *think* you're referencing.

Re:Nightmare

[Anonymous Coward]

So here's a serious question... why can so many other countries do it well?

In some cases, because they don't let business dictate government policy quite as much as in the US.

So is the US functionally retarded?

I'd say intertwined, rather than retarded. Corporations have way too much influence on government policy in the US. A free market is fine, but that's not the reality. Too many stakeholders looking to make a buck at far too many places and levels. Another effect of this unhealthy mix is the great variety in legislation between the states, further complicating efforts to roll out country-wide programs, let alone develop them in the first place.

I don't think we are, but if this is really the undoable task that half this thread implies, what's wrong with us?

Too much business worship, to put it bluntly.

First: Make businesses follow the rules instead of making them. Level the playing field and promote actual competition over financial bribery muscles. Erect higher barriers between legislature and corporate management.

Second: Harmonize crucial legislation over the whole country. Some things simply are of national importance, including foreign policy, federal tax, federal justice, military expenditure, intelligence services and, dare I say it, healthcare. Sickness affects everyone equally, and there is no personal choice whether to get sick or not. Thus, it should be handled in a nation-wide manner.

Third: Win, after a fair amount of gnashing from current leeches within the system.

Of course, the above won't happen, since anyone taking steps in that direction would immediately be labelled communist. Incorrectly, but that matters not. That's how media and politics work in the US at the moment. To the detriment of the vast majority of the people.

Re:Nightmare

[Magius_AR]

So here's a serious question... why can so many other countries do it well?

If I had to guess, it's because the other countries are smaller and more homogenous.

So is the US functionally retarded?

Yes -- it's actually a testament as to why more programs should be shoved down to state level. Look at the dysfunction in the EU right now, with each of the member states trying to do it's own thing while Germany tries to order them around. That's what the US is like. I have no idea why half the country is so insistent on telling the other half how to live their lives (both ways...)

Cheap, Fast, Good, you can get two.

[zippthorne]

But.. maybe you don't actually get to pick which two, and they tried anyway.

Re:Cheap, Fast, Good, you can get two.

[Anonymous Coward]

They only got one of those three. That is the impressive part, well not that impressive. I could have gotten it done quickly and crappy for much less and they would have gotten two at least.

"healthcare.gov will work smoothly"

[Lucky_Pierre]

And pigs will fly.

Raft of failures

[RoccamOccam]

Michelle Malkin has an interesting take on this same story:

'Why does the White House need a private-sector "tech surge" to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren't all of the president's myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology for their money? '

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/10/25/what-happened-to-all-of-obamas-technology-czars-n1731775/page/full

Re:Raft of failures

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Raft of failures

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Raft of failures

[RoccamOccam]

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?

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:Raft of failures

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Raft of failures

[thoth]

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?

Re:Raft of failures

[DavidTC]

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

Re: Raft of failures

[DigiShaman]

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?!

Re: Raft of failures

[DavidTC]

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'.

Re:Raft of failures

[caldodge]

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.

Re:Raft of failures

[RoccamOccam]

But you didn't attack her analysis, you simply dismissed her because of her biases. With your approach, Paul Krugman's credentials are to be completely ignored because of his "biases". Your "after-the-fact" identification of his credentials throws your original argument back in your face.

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.

A"WESOME fp

[Anonymous Coward]

more. If yo0 feel that support of open-source. T4ese early

7 million medicare enrollees

[amightywind]

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

OMB's Chief Performance Officer

[Anonymous Coward]

OMB's Chief Performance Officer

Now there's an oxymoron if there every was one.

It's not 500m LOC

[raftpeople]

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.

Do we know what the server architecture looks like

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we know what the server architecture for healthcare.gov looks like? Websphere or Weblogic? What RDBMS are they using? Hardware and OS?

still can't sign up

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Easily fixed

[Bananenrepublik]

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 ...

This is the latest "spruce goose" episode

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

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.

Re:Do we know what the server architecture looks l

[rubycodez]

ask the foreign contractor to whom the work was outsourced

If that's the only link you found...

[kervin]

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?

Another filthy jew

[Anonymous Coward]

running our life.

I bet jews take turns buttfucking obama with an apple in his mouth

Growing pains

[tepples]

My point is that even a U.S. government program considered a "soaring triumph" had its growing pains.