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Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website?
MarkWhittington writes "Glenn Reynolds, the purveyor of Instapundit, asked the pertinent question, 'If big government can put a man on the moon, why can't it put up a simple website without messing it up?' The answer, as it turns out, is a rather simple one. The Apollo program, that President John F. Kennedy mandated to put a man on the moon and return him to the Earth, was a simple idea well carried out for a number of reasons. The primary one was that Congress did not pass a 1,800 or so page bill backed up by a mind-numbing amount of regulations mandating how NASA would do it. The question of how to conduct the lunar voyages was left up to the engineers at NASA and the aerospace industry at the time. The government simply provided the resources necessary to do the job and a certain degree of oversight. Imagine if President Obama had stated, 'I believe the nation should commit itself to the goal of enabling all Americans to access affordable health insurance' but then left the how to do it to some of the best experts in health care and economics without partisan interference."
SIMPLE != LAWYERS
While not uniquely and American problem, this seems to be a recurring issue with the way our government operates. Other countries have managed to put together similar sites with, well, I do not want to say 'little' difficulty since any such undertaking is going to have problems, but 'less' difficulty might work.
Though it has mostly been smaller countries that have done such projects well, so what we might be looking at here is an artifact of having a large and diverse country with lots of competing philosophies, interests, and actual needs.
It's complicated because the insurance industry is complicated. It's complicated because we didn't have the political will to simply go for Medicare for all. That would have been simple. Instead, we have this complex cluge that has to work with an even more complex private insurance industry. It actually does make the market for private insurance simpler, but that really isn't saying much.
This is a function of the problems of doing anything with or for the federal government. The fact that a large state like California could pull off a similar system successfully demonstrates this to be true. The problem is the federal beaurocracy.
Now the question of why Apollo was successful when a seemingly simple website is not likely boils down to time. The federal government has had a long time to get worse in the 40 or so years between Apollo and today. Plus Apollo had a longer timeline.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We had affordable medical care once.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Do you really think the government could get its act together enough to put a person on the moon again? Have you been paying attention?
The more management feels they need to say about how to do something, the harder it is and the longer it takes.
Make me a website: easy.
Make me a website using WordPress and it must use this particular plugin: hard (since it's very unlikely that particular plugin is well-suited to the job; if it made sense to use it, they wouldn't have told you that you have to use it) (and for that matter, it's vanishingly unlikely that WordPress itself is going to be suitable for the application in question, for the same reason: if it made sense, then it wouldn't be a requirement).
I've seen things' time blossom by a factor of ten, due to stupid shit like this. Seriously, that's not an exaggeration.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
you expected a fucked up and broken government to not produce a fucked up and broken website?
Our efforts to land on the moon didn't go smoothly. Also we spent a lot more money to go to the moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13
Complex problems are complex.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
The Apollo program did not have one party actively trying to sabotage it. Can you imagine a party shutting down government July 15 (day before Apollo 11 launched) unless the whole program was scrapped?
If I recall correctly, the man-on-the-moon trip wasn't a very controversial political issue. The health care plan is. No doubt the political forces would have managed to screw this up even further.
Also; nobody feels responsible. Fuck up part of a lunar lander and you will get the blame if somebody dies. Fuck up part of a website and it's unlikely your company will be traced back from any deaths due to lack of medical service that might occur.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
This post makes it sound like NASA is a private contractor that takes the job out of "the governments" hands, so it can be done properly and efficiently. But that is not the case, you have just provided an example that government organizations can run things efficiently.
The blind leading the blind. Well spoken good sir.
it's a complicated system interfacing to lots of other complicated systems.
of constant testing, refinement and a series of more complicated missions. not like the first mission went straight to the moon. a few people even died in a fire during prep for a mission. they even had multiple crews training for the same mission at the same time knowing only one crew was going up
the obamacare website the contractors had to build in a few months and code hundreds of pages of law and regulations into logical business rules and a database schema. and no time was there testing or a ramp up of opening up the site to a few people and then allowing more people access as they work out the bugs
Yes, imagine if he or anyone had had the political freedom to leave such a choice to truly non-partisan experts... but he didn't have that freedom, because there are such corporate interests vested in the outcome, with tentacles all into both parties, that such freedom to do so does not exist. If back in Kennedy's day there were numerous huge wealthy corporations with interests in the moon landing NOT happening, or happening on different timetables with different agendas, *and* the liberty to corrupt politics with money had reached the fever pitch it has today, *and* politicians had already given up the idea of even posturing to seem like they had nobility and dignity above that of a Geraldo show, THEN the moon landing might well and truly have been f*cked.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-health-sticker-shock-20131027,0,2756077.story
"She said, 'I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,'" Kehaly said."
Of course we told you all this would be the case.
Sympathy? Not a fucking ounce. Suck it up and enjoy your tyranny dickheads.
Because you have a bunch of people who have zero technical knowledge and zero REAL project management experience calling the shots. They come up with bullshit specs and a bunch of pie-in-the-sky.
Because some greedy fuck of a salesdisck at a company sees "Gubmint Fundin'", performs a cranial-rectal insertion and promises shit his techs have NO way to actually deliver.
Because the American people have gotten out of the habit of tarring, feathering and lynching civil servants that pull stupid shit like this.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It is also called graft.
They awarded a 700M$ contract without bidding to a company with ties to the Obama campaign and to people high up in the administration.
As to be expected, the company was not competent and failed.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
Sorry, if this were all the Democrats, we'd have a single payer system. The monstrosity that exists is all Republican.
NASA had it easy. They only had to deal with Physics.
Social Sciences are messy, Social programs are messy and when it involves large groups of people, politicians get involved which makes a services program almost impossible to get right. Given current technology (at the time) there were just a limited number of ways the Moon mission could be completed. Creating a web site in a fractious, antagonist political world had/has too many variables to "get it right". It took close to 10 years to get a man on the moon, and somehow we're suppose to build a complicated heath management system in a few months...It is not a question of expertise, both environments have talent, but it was/is a question of Management, goals, and commitment. NASA employees were vested and proud of their work for they were a part of the whole. CGI Federal *contractors* don't give a shit about the whole, just their slice of the dollar pie. That is why we can put a man on the moon, but can't write a complex web site. (IMHO)
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Yup, just ask the UK how the NHS upgrade went, 16 Billion spent and then pulled the plug.
Why is there any website at all? What is preventing these people from going to the websites of the individual companies? It seems like a bill requiring health insurance for pre-existing conditions and subsidies for people that need them would have solved most of the problems. It seems many of the people who didn't have health insurance before the bill were just lazy junkies. Why does there need to be an individual mandate? Why not pass a bill that mandates any hospitals receiving government funds not give care to people without insurance. I bet many people would seek out insurance after that. The ones that don't are probably douche bags that we don't need in our society.
Anywhere from 30 to 70% of large IT projects fail, depending on who you ask. Why would the US Government be immune?
You realize the law has a lot of things in it to make Republicans happy right (such as dropping the government option from the plan)? And Republicans decided they'd rather make Obama look bad than make sure people have health coverage right? It would be like if during the Apollo mission Republicans ran congress and kept trying to sabotage the program to make JFK/LBJ look bad.
When you take into consideration what government is good at, it's now clear that we would have had that awesome lunar base by now.
They should totally privatize it. Look at successful launches like EA are known for. That's private efficiency at work.
If you want a project to fail (as some in opposition to Obama certainly do), you pad a simple, decent idea with enough B.S. to make it collapse under its own weight, and then blame the source.
I call it "Bureaucratic Sabotage". Agree to allow something to happen, and then Bury it in B.S. and layer on the Pork-Barrel extras to make sure it fails miserably, while claiming to be co-operative, all the while knowing what the results will be...
Bottom line is: Good Luck on getting any decent idea through "Government" without it getting totally Buggered (and otherwise mutated) from its' original form and function.
Putting a rocket on the moon is a purely technical problem; nothing social or political about it. Automating the healthcare industry involves several players:
1. The care givers
2. The care receivers
3. The insurance agents
4. Lawyers
5. Politicians
6. Software, platform and hardware architects
4 and 5 interfere with 1, 2, 6 and 3. Unlike in the case of NASA, there are more than hundreds of players providing (6); and they are answerable to their shareholders unlike NASA.
It is a complex social problem. To suppose that it is a mere technical and managerial challenge is a flawed assumption.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Those 800 pages were so Democratic congressmen could write payoffs and exemptions for every single one of their interest groups into law.
It's obvious from the way the bill was written that health care for the poor was a less important goal than, say, forcing Catholics to pay for abortions.
Simple answer, web developement is harder than rocket science!
Just for the sake of perspective, 'big government' didn't "just put a man on the moon", it was an iterative process going all the way back to the experience of the Nazi war criminals we hastily whitewashed, up through a variety of incremental improvements and test designs (along with various accidents, some fatal), until we get to the Apollo missions that everyone actually remembers (and some of those had Issues as well).
Apollo 1 didn't, exactly go so hot(well, it actually went pretty hot indeed), and at least 5 others were killed in jet-based training.
Gemini 8 almost went rather badly, Apollo 12 was struck by lighting, Apollo 13's multiple issues are well known, Apollo 15 had parachute problems.
An assortment of workers and techs have also snuffed it in ground based accidents while working on space launch hardware.
This is not to say that the healthcare.gov rolllout was a success (it wasn't); but website launch failures are pretty boring as failure goes, everyone from small-business intranets up to major web companies seems to fuck them up on occasion. The bigger question will be time-to-fix. To use TFA's own analogy, you could have written "Why can't big government launch a rocket?" when Apollo 1 rather embarassingly caught fire on the ground, reducing the entire crew to charred corpses, because it had been filled with pure oxygen and improperly passivated. As we now know, they can, just not on the first try.
This is a function of the problems of doing anything with or for the federal government. The fact that a large state like California could pull off a similar system successfully demonstrates this to be true. The problem is the federal beaurocracy.
Now the question of why Apollo was successful when a seemingly simple website is not likely boils down to time. The federal government has had a long time to get worse in the 40 or so years between Apollo and today. Plus Apollo had a longer timeline.
Eh, sort of. I'd say the problem was political, that is, the forces that are opposed to the law taking effect commanded their congress-puppets to scream bloody murder about "one penny!" being spent on "Obamacare!" before a court weighed in on constitutionality. Add to that two dozen states dragging their feet until the last minute to say "no thanks" to a Federal Exchange (to purposefully make the job more complex further down the line than it needed to be) what you have is a recipe of failure. Between stupidly kow-towing to people trying to create a failure (rather than acting despite of their complaints) and the actual active-efforts to create failure it's a small miracle it works as well as it does.
Who did what now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_project_Apollo
My back of the envelope calculation puts 4% of the US's 2013 budget expenditures at $150 billion. So an equivalent enterprise by the United States government would be roughly half a trillion dollars.
The failure of healthcare.gov to work properly shows what everyone here on Slashdot already knows: project planning is difficult.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
How do you rationalize that when the entire republican party was unified in voting against it?
As a federal worker I can tell you that trying to buy something for government use is an extremely byzantine process. An example, if I need to buy a monitor cable, I have to fill out 3 forms (one of them is 14 pages), get four _independent_ approvals, quotes (yes... quotes for a monitor cable), and then follow the documents to make sure nothing gets messed-up along the way. I have to do this for _any_ piece of equipment that is in any way related to information technology. I don't want to describe the process for anything requiring a contract and I can't imagine the amount of work that went into writing the requirements document for a project involving 55 (55!) contracting agencies. The REAL PROBLEM here is the desperate need for contract and purchasing reform in the federal government.
How do you rationalize that when the entire republican party was unified in voting against it?
He's likely basing the assumption on the fact that the individual mandate did originate from the Republican camp, but is forgetting that Democrats did their own part to write, pass, and half-assed enforce the law.
FWIW, and not absolving their guilt in this situation, but it wasn't a Repub who said "we have to sign it to see what's in it."
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I've had the priviledge to listen to Gene Kranz (the mission controller who got Apollo 13 back home) talk about the amazing leadership qualities that the tiger teams had at NASA. He was delivering the keynote at Surge - a conference talking about scaling of computer systems - and the attendees were highly appreciative what Gene Kranz had to say and teach them.
Gene Kranz stressed it was about teamwork, trust and empowerment. He stated many times how these were young men - early twenties - who were charged with making these life and death decisions and were supported across the board. Politicians were not allowed to influence these decisions - it was these tiger team leaders who were fully empowered and allowed to do whatever it took. He talked about trust, and how the team knew that the person in charge had the training to make the call in any situation and that once a decision had been made they would back it.
This seems to be the exact opposite of what has happened with these healthcare websites.
This whole thing is happening because of two reasons: 1) People are afraid of a word: socialism and 2) most of our population has bought into the debate being framed as a false dilemma argument and, so if we have single payer we are therefore a socialist country.
The republicans are right about something for the wrong reasons: we didn't really have a ACA or Obamacare debate. That's because the U.S. doesn't really have *debates* anymore. We allow someone to frame the debate (usually the Republicans, but sometimes the Mass Media) and no one discusses how that frame is causing a logical fallacy.
There is also a 3) many people can't get beyond their own ideologies. Off the record many of the biggest multinationals have told reporters that they have run the numbers and single payer would help them, but they come out because of bias at the boardroom level. Small business would DEFINITELY be helped by single payer as talented people would be more inclined to accept a small business job without the healthcare fear.
All our old health care.
Those without would still be going to ER's for treatment and not paying as usual. Those with insurance would still have their coverage and more of the money they earn in their pockets.
Instead we are left with a dysfunctional presidential legacy.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Your metaphor is off:
Rhetoric aside, it was more along the lines of, "NASA will put a man on the moon."
NASA was given both the responsibility and the authority to do it. This is NOT the case with the healthcare initiative.
i know this starts rather offtopic but bear with me. Glen Reynolds is a self described "libertarian transhumanist."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Reynolds#Political_views
libertarian transhumanists are unwittingly appropriating the theoretical legacy of Stalinist communism by substituting, among other concepts, the âoevanguard partyâ with the âoedigeratiâ, and the âoenew Soviet manâ with the âoeposthuman.â getting a brow-beating on healthcare reform from a man who loathes the human body as a 'meat puppet.' is like getting oracle support from a guy who thinks relational databases are a fad.
Name a website, any site, that was anticipated to have 50k simultaneous views at its inception that later managed to stand up to 250k hits (an obvious 5 fold increase.) without a performance impact.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/05/health-care-website-repairs/2927597/
"These bugs were functions of volume,'' Park said. "Take away the volume and it works.'' so essentially we've identified the common problem of most web-based services which is scalability. we're fixing it, and thats part of the software development lifecycle.
what no ones talking about is conservatives propensity to blow issues, be they real or imagined, entirely out of proportion when it comes to healthcare reform. saying the entire healthcare reform act is broken because the website is slow and unresponsive, is like saying the entire fucking iphone is broken because facetime is slow and unresponsive. Granted with the absolutely academic grasp of technology weilded by most conservative republicans its not hard to see where they might have problems drawing this distinction.
Good people go to bed earlier.
No one is going to die because the website doesn't work. Comparing this to the moon landing is so sophomoric it could only come from USA Today. But it's nothing like landing on the moon in scale, expense, or national achievement. healthcare.gov is a website. It's important for the ACA and it's important for individuals looking to purchase health insurance, but there are alternative ways to shop for insurance on the exchanges.
Not everything need be bandied about for political gain.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Lost interest in the analysis as soon as I saw that...
Close:
There are three layers of impossiblity. The first is that systems engineering is hard. Most "very large" software projects fail miserably. Government and industry both have similar failure rates, and they're well over 50%. The second is that the government acquisition system is so incomprehensibly complex that only large contractors with an entrenched management structure can meet the oversight requirements to be eligible to compete for large government projects. The third is that the requirements stated for the project changed faster than anythign could be accomplished. Each one of these is in itself fatal to a project. Getting the three together gives you thinks like the F-35, SLS, EMRs, etc...
1. Undefined requirements.
2. Unreasonable deadlines.
3. Continuing changing requirements and priorities.
I have to deal with this every single day. When a project doesn't work because we, the contractors, cannot perform a one week test in a single day the client/government gets mad, considers us a failure, we move to the next number 1 project (which is usually 3 or 4 because they cannot make up their mind), and repeat.
It's a unique problem combined with poor assumptions on the part administration. Had the majority of states agreed to run their own exchanges, this problem wouldn't be so exaggerated. Instead, thirty five states opted to let the federal government run the show. The administration did not plan for this.
So in essence, the federal government had to build a site that not only takes federal guideline but individual state guidelines into consideration while building a high traffic infrastructure that is essentially accessing systems not designed for such load. Mind you, last year states were given a November 15th deadline to setup their exchange with some states given an extension. That's less than a year to build this system, overseen by some legislators who are doing everything possible to prevent the law from moving forward.
I'm frankly surprised it launched at all.
Now ... I think the jury's out if they can fix this in a month, but good to luck to them on that front. I think the administration is being optimistic that all will be fixed by the end of next month, but regardless, these issues will be forgotten in time.
The headline could do without that loaded word "big" and the connotations it brings. An easy counterpoint is DNSSEC: The entire dotgov TLD has had DNSSEC deployed for years in stark contrast to the adoption rate among the general population. Complex projects in technology are not all alike.
Nobody said that. Pelosi said we have to pass the bill "so *you* can see what's in it." The normal quote is made to show that Congress didn't know what was in it; but Pelosi was addressing the constituency and trying to imply that they don't know what a bill is about until the changes start happening in real life--that we don't know how the bill will affect us until it's passed, and so all the media hooplah is just noise we shouldn't concern ourselves with.
Still an idiotic statement.
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Yes, even the space program had a political component, but ACA is all about politics and money - the money of individuals, hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and medical equipment companies, not just the taxpayers'.
There's no quick, brilliant answer to a messy political problem.
YEAH! We got a model! Just look at the success that Somalia has with that system!
Everyone looking to immediately blame this on government should think about what's involved and what probably happened:
1. The contract went to the lowest bidder and/or the firm that could do the most backroom political deals to win. This is not necessarily the team you want doing the work, nor are they necessarily the most capable.
2. It's a huge, monster systems integration challenge. There are probably thousands of XML data brokers, enterprise service buses, web services libraries, and wrappers of wrappers of wrappers of abstraction layers to get the exchange, the insurance companies, the tax records systems used for eligibility verification, the authentication, etc etc etc talking to each other. This is one of the things I do for work on various big systems projects, and it's hard when you have a competent team. When you're dealing with the "offshore delivery centers" of the firm in Point #1 above, it's an absolute nightmare.
3. Every outsourcing contract, public or private sector suffers from the same problem -- it's always more expensive, and the people involved don't have any incentive beyond a paycheck to see it work. I've seen that happen all the time as an FTE in companies overrun by consultants. The consultants don't care what happens as long as they're billing time. If they deliver garbage, so be it, as long as it can be shown that it does what the contract says it does.
4. Continuing with the "don't care" theme, there's also no incentive for the contractor to get it right the first time. Even contracts with penalties for failure or missed dates aren't a big deal because they can bill way more cleaning up the mess they made.
5. I'm sure the "outsourcing partners" weren't forthcoming when the RFP was put out and they saw red flags. Some outsourcers like to trap the customer and have them think everything's sorted, when there's really a huge problem with design/specs/whatever that will mean a very expensive rewrite later on.
6. Any project with a huge red target date on the calendar that is not flexible is doomed to failure. Problems like this lead to stupid things that PMs do like stuff more people onto a late piece of the project where it clearly doesn't help, and it leads to people taking shortcuts to rush it out the door.
7. There was probably immense cost pressure, not from the gov't itself, but from the outsourcer trying to squeeze every nickel out of the deal, and so it probably runs on half the hardware it needs, and has no DR facilities.
8. It was probably slapped together by hundreds of 24 year old new graduate business analysts, hundreds of 30 year old PMs, and thousands of offshore resources of dubious quality. Look at pretty much any bespoke line of business web application you have to use for your job. Chances are you hate it and it has maddening bugs that make it hard to live with. Now take that same code quality and put it in front of Joe Average, and I'm not surprised people are complaining.
I honestly think they should have done this in-house with supplemental hired gun contractors for the areas they needed it in. Despite the stories, I'm sure working for a government agency has its advantages. I would think that people (myself included) would welcome a more stable employment environment (at the expense of salary,) a stable retirement system, and the ability to work on a critical system that affects people's daily lives. The problem is that people see IT people getting rich at Google/Facebook/Latest Social Media Startup and think that they're going to be the next one to make the big time. Reality is that most people are mediocre coders/IT people and they're never going to get a big payday supporting the current IT employment model we have.
Also, this entire mess would have been avoided by extending Medicare benefits to everyone. Doctors would be happy because they would get paid without questions from insurers, patients would be happy because they wouldn't have to deal with insurance companies -- the only people who wouldn't be happy are insurance companies, which is why we have the system we have now. Seriously, the Medicare system processes payments for doctors with very little difficulty -- because we have the insurance companies involved, we had to build a completely new system.
Putting a rocket on the moon is a purely technical problem; nothing social or political about it. Automating the healthcare industry involves several players:
1. The care givers
2. The care receivers
3. The insurance agents
4. Lawyers
5. Politicians
6. Software, platform and hardware architects
Unlike in the case of NASA, there are more than hundreds of players providing (6);
Don't you mean 'more than hundreds of players providing (3)?'
I'm going to assume that. Makes more sense.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Imagine if President Obama had stated, 'I believe the nation should commit itself to the goal of enabling all Americans to access affordable health insurance' but then left the how to do it to some of the best experts in health care and economics without partisan interference.
Great job making it look like the President can introduce legislation like the Affordable Care Act. In reality the health insurance bill that created the website is a political frankenstein built by the Republicans as a joke and then buried never to see the light of day. It was revived by crazed Democrats desperate to get something that people across the aisle would vote on (IT'S ALIVE!) and what ultimately got signed into law is a monster that should not exist.
What I think you're suggesting should have happened is that Obama could have simply pushed for Congress to give the Secretary of Health broader powers to regulate healthcare, and then give that poor sap the mandate to unify (in the next ten years) the country's healthcare systems into one broad state-managed-but-federally-accountable program that would work like flood insurance--not required, but a good idea to sign up for. In which case the Republicans would have stuck their fingers in their ears and started screaming "SOCIALISM!" and the Democrats would start complaining that it doesn't go far enough.
You just can't win.
The moon shots were not managed by an old school friend of Michelle's who got a no-bid contract.
Subject says it all. Our government does not currently possess the capability of putting a man in space, let alone putting a man on the moon.
Private industry is close to making space travel routine, but government just can't do it, because it is too focused on other things, and tends to pollute science missions with political bias.
"Let's put a man on the moon! No wait, should it be a man, or a woman? Should it be someone who is best suited for it, or someone who is politically connected? What color should their skin be? Should the vehicle be built by the best capable company, or should we focus more on the diversity makeup of the company's employees, and whether the company is owned by a minority person?" etc etc...
Government is paralyzed by the Political Correctness movement.
if this were all the Democrats, we'd have a single payer system
I agree, but it's a shame sightings of real Democrats these days is rarer than sightings of Sasquatch.
If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time
-- Harry Truman
From TFA:
A couple of years back I came across a document from the late 1960's outlining the processes for determining if an item could be, and then should be, carried in the crew cabin... the flow chart giving a high level overview of the process alone covered a three page foldout. The rest of the document (a high level overview remember) ran almost a hundred pages. ( I suspect that if I had all the references listed at the end printed out, as it would have been back in the day, it would have filled a good sized shelf.) IIRC, there were over a dozen major Offices, Boards, and contractors involved in setting and certifying the requirements, overseeing the procurement, documenting the item, testing the item, ensuring it met the specs, ensuring it was on all the relevant drawings, ensuring it was in the appropriate training syllabuses, etc... etc...
I've studied many NASA internal documents of the era, and they all point to what any competent space historian knows well - the management and bureaucracy of the Apollo program was mind numbingly complicated. In fact, pretty much all of the paperwork, management, etc... that people blame for the failure of the Shuttle originates in the Apollo era.
little governments (states) didn't setup their own.
...at building complex, database-driven websites.
Repeatedly.
Red tape impedes development. Film at eleven.
Off the record many of the biggest multinationals have told reporters that they have run the numbers and single payer would help them
Sometimes even on the record. One time Toyota had a choice between putting a factory in the US and Canada, and flat out said they chose Canada in large part because of their health care system. And you wonder how Toyota beat GM. Hint: they think with their wallets instead of their country club buddies.
Government mostly got out of the way and let it happen. When this place called The United States of America is alowed to run unrestrianed amazing things happen and most always for the best. Get the best a brightest and let them do their thing but don't tie their hands. That is the way our federal government is support to work, be there to support not to dictate, protect, not overpower. Set a goal for the nation and then watch it happen, force an idea on this nation and watch it become so mired in so much red tape it will never function correctly.
I also think that Apollo has been successful because the specifications (bring (at least) one man to the moon, and safely back) were mostly fixed, there were restrictions due to engineering limits, and most important of all, a lot of components could be developed and tested separately. Additionally, there was a number of integration tests, starting with unmanned flights, docking maneuvers in earth orbit (the earlier ones not using Saturn V rockets), up to orbiting the moon but not landing).
FWIW, and not absolving their guilt in this situation, but it wasn't a Repub who said "we have to sign it to see what's in it."
Nancy Pelosi is definitely NOT a Republican. She is the one who said "You have to pass the bill to see what is in the bill".
"... without partisan interference."
Oh wow! Good one. You had me going there for a minute.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
The linked article is subtitled "Medical Care Before the Welfare State, 1900-1930". In other words, medical care before even antibiotics had been developed. It was probably affordable in the 12th century too. What's your point?
I think the Democrats fucked up. They tried throwing in all sorts of sweeteners for the Righties, because they foolishly thought that the Republicans would act in good faith, and exercise some bipartisanship, especially given that Obamacare was invented by Mike Huckabee.
The Dems fucked up because they were naive and didn't count on the Tea Party, who are just hell bent on anarchy and watching the world burn.
If it were me, I would have introduced a very slim, very simple law: introduce single-payer for all, funded out of the federal budget. And then let people go out and buy gold-plated private insurance if they want to choose their doctor. Like every other civilized country on Earth. The conservatives would've hated it, but the Dems could have just rammed it through (abolishing the filibuster if necessary), and one signed into law, it would have been absolutely impossible to wind back.
The individual mandate is not the law. What does it matter who had an idea if the idea was never implemented? (not to mention single-payer was around in other countries long before it was "debated" here)
I suppose a really logic-twisted person could say it was an evil plan to suggest single-payer, which was rejected by Democrats. We all know anything suggested by Republicans must be evil - therefore it prevented adoption of the single-payer solution.
Wow. The Republicans really outsmarted the Democrats with that one. LOL.
Yes let's imagine that President Obama had said, 'I believe the nation should commit itself to the goal of enabling all Americans to access affordable health insurance so i propose we create a committee of unelected experts in healthcare and grant them the authority to rewrite huge sections of federal and state law, override company policies for the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries and thus shift around about two trillion a year to where they think it is best'. Do you think it would have gotten a single vote in congress?
Look at the success Europe had...
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If you can look it up a service in the yellow pages, then then government shouldn't be doing it.
They shouldn't be doing their own web sites. In fact it begs the question why the Feds are even involved in health insurance at all.
Ted Cruz opposes both the manned space program, and the ACA. The difference is in his level of opposition.
Umm, that's just talking about clubs (they called them lodges, but same thing) providing medical coverage. They still do that. Nothing's changed there. For example, I can get access to medical coverage by joining the ACM.
However, by the very defintion of a club, some people are not allowed in. If your "solution" leaves some folks out (sick) in the cold, I'm not all that interested.
This department is highlky active in every big company and government. They like it this way. That's it.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
But doesn't this just show that there are very many people against the bill as passed?
(And before I'm modded down for stating a personal opinion, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have healthcare reform. Quite the contrary. I'm saying that many people like me believe the ACA did little to help. And because the political atmosphere at the time was ignored, now the partisanship has been ignited like never before and we have little chance for real, good change to occur.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
They have three plants in Canada and six in the U.S.
I'll leave it up to you to reconcile the facts with your rhetoric.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Or Belgium?
But generally your point still stands.
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
As far as I know, the project leads, designers, engineers, and techs responsible for the moon landing were all NASA employees - they worked for the government. We don'y do that anymore; everything now is outsourced to private contractors, because they are more "efficient".
"Big Government" didn't launch the website, private enterprise did.
The Apollo program nearly missed JFK's deadline because it was taking so long to devlop the < 100K of code for the flight computers.
The first moon landing was nearly scrubbed seconds before landing because of a bug in that same few kilobytes of code.
Now computers hold millions of times more code, and computer science has made few genuine advances in actually writing that code. It's no surprise that they've run into problems.
In my experience, large amounts of bugs in a site are due to poor planning, limited testing until features are declared "complete", a siloed IT group which is not involved in the very beginning of the process, and the chronic inability of team leaders to keep senior managers with ideas from disrupting the work that teams are doing.
(Yes, I drank the scrum/agile kool aid. It's not a panacea, but it's a good tool that leaders can use to reduce process and interference while providing a better view of the state of the project for everyone. It's also just as open to abuse as waterfall is without good managers on both sides)
Off the record many of the biggest multinationals have told reporters that they have run the numbers and single payer would help them...
Fascism definitely helps giant companies that partner with the government. That which benefits a few large corporations doesn't, as a rule, benefit me as an individual. I agree with the sentiment that Repubs only oppose big government when the Dems want it. I believe that the corrupt bastards are happy when they can loudly oppose massive Democratic government growth and then inherit that power later.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
They have three plants in Canada and six in the U.S.
Here's an inconvenient "fact" for your rhetoric:
Canada has 1/10th of the population of the United States, all other things being equal, if there's three plants in Canada, there should be THIRTY in the US. Yet there are only 6? So, by population you have 1/5th of the number of plants as Canada; go ahead and reconcile THAT...
-AC
They have three plants in Canada and six in the U.S.
There are about 35 million people in Canada, and 300 million in the US
Recently a bunch of political hacks have started trolling slashdot. We desperately need an option for moderating the articles. Look at this one. Just reading the title should have given the editors big enough clue. "Why can't big government launch a website?". Really? Unless you lived on Mars in the past 30 years, you should be well aware of large number of government web sites. And what is it with the "Big" qualifier. Big relative to what? The size of the country? Do you have a specific branch of the government that you think is too big? Say for example is the parks service sucking the life blood of the economy (I will give you the defense department though). May be the original article should have privoded some more detail on this particular website. For example how the website has to implement all the requirements of a law that has become increasingly byzantine due to bickering from one particular party and the insurance industry. How it requires interfacing with databases which may or may not have suitable API (IRS for example to determine eligibility). How there was not enough time to properly plan in part because of the delays in passing the law and defending it in court, in part due to its complexity and in part because of the desire of the current administration to prevent future repeal by having it implementing and running before its term is over.
First of all, you're suggesting there were experts in the field of putting people on the moon. I think that even today, that's questionable as we're infants at best regarding space travel.
Second, the U.S. spent more money putting a man on the moon than we can even imagine. It was insanely expensive and fiscally more than likely a disaster at best. Look at the movie Apollo 13 and think about the genius involved with simply deciding an intelligent way to scrub air. We put astronauts on the moon by throwing insane amounts of money at the problem and we did it, but did a half assed job of it. In fact, the first attempt at the ACA website is probably 1000 times better than our first attempts at getting a rocket to the moon. I don't know if you recognize this, but we blew up more than a few of those rockets in the learning process.
Now, instead of being an idiot and thinking this is a partisan related issue, this is a government related issue. The government themselves seem to hire companies to do projects in the dumbest ways. If you'd have asked me how to do it, I'd have awarded a $10 million start-up budget to three different companies with the promise that if they can establish a well knit team which met certain requirements, they will receive the next $20 million. The worst of the three would be tossed out on their asses and the remaining two would keep running. Then, so long as deadlines were met and budgets were kept and requirements were met, they would receive an additional $50 million.
At that point, the two websites would be put side to side and would be evaluated for functionality and an assessment would be made as to which would have the highest likelihood of fitting the needs of the program. The winner would then also score the maintenance contract which would be worth probably hundreds of millions over a period of 10 years.
So, the problem is simply that contractors are chosen through classic forms of government nepotism. Honestly, the money spent building that site was utterly criminal. I don't care which party would have been in charge, the problem is that those guys can't handle things like this.
I wish I had mod points.
How can anyone use the word "simple" in this discussion or somehow be surprised at the dog's breakfast that is healthcare.gov?
Obama and his advisors must have been asleep in 1993 and missed the last immense failure of cockamamie Democrat special-interest-friendly "reform".
Arrogant, inept, and insane.
While the software rules are dictated by the laws of Congress.
The rules governing the management of these projects (The FAR) is set up for waterfall style management, but the requirements were closer to an agile timeline and the government project managers live in fear of the court battles that just about any minor change can cause. Many contractors have figured out that if they underbid the project, they can make up for it in changes due to "unforeseen conditions" that in actuality, they have already seen and priced out.
ACA was passed by Democrats without a single vote from the Republicans which has politically doomed it from the start. Other large government programs were passed with significant bi-partisan majorities, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The ACA was passed without any Republican support and with lots of back room deals as well as the famous use of "reconciliation" to get it passed in the Senate after Massachusetts voted in someone to the Senate who opposed it and upset the filibuster proof majority.
In that light, why would you be surprised that there was a lot of political fallout?
No matter where you go, there you are.
Another bullshit headline designed to gather hits. Big government launches websites all the time. Why doesn't "big news" cover it? Because it isn't sexy. How many times has the slashdot effect crashed or rendered a site otherwise unreachable. So what do you think the effect of millions upon millions of hits to a site wouldn't cause problems? Everybody who seems to "know" what the problem is should reach out and help fix it. Otherwise keep it to yourself.
Canada has 1/10 US population. Not 1/2.
This is a function of the problems of doing anything with or for the federal government. The fact that a large state like California could pull off a similar system successfully demonstrates this to be true. The problem is the federal beaurocracy.
Not to mention the belief that you can find a "one size fits all" solution for the entire United States...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
But doesn't this just show that there are very many people against the bill as passed?
(And before I'm modded down for stating a personal opinion, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have healthcare reform. Quite the contrary. I'm saying that many people like me believe the ACA did little to help. And because the political atmosphere at the time was ignored, now the partisanship has been ignited like never before and we have little chance for real, good change to occur.)
Frankly, that's hogwash.
The "political atmosphere" at the time was created for the purpose of blocking this reform. It didn't "pre-date" the reform effort. The propaganda efforts kicked into high gear to "break" this Presidency--to undo the public's will by neutering a popular President so as to limit his ability to do the people's work. They started screaming he was a communist because a bill modeled largely on their own response to Hilarycare in the 90's had been proposed by a Democratic congress and administration,
And I recognize that "being against the ACA" isn't automatically a guarantee you're "against all reform," but the problem is that the brigade of dumbshits leading the charge against "Obamacare" have injected so many poisonous lies into the debate that they salted the earth for any chance of compromising on anything. They called this tyranny, and some of them called Obama "Hitler" over this: That's not the debate tactic of somebody looking to "compromise" on common ground, that's an opponent who wants to politically destroy you to prevent you from acting with a mandate the public gave you.
That may not be your personal point of view, but the wider "Anti-ACA" movement is not nearly as enlightened as you. And because the "antis" who went overboard have gone so insanely-far that they've made a compromise now into appear as if it were the same as caving to anti-government extremists. At this point there's no way he'll give in.
Who did what now?
I'll bleed you for a fraction of the price of a "Doctor". Leeches for a fraction of the price of "medicine" too!
Remember that JFK challenged the US to put a man on the moon ‘before the end of the decade’. And it took almost that long. Constantly changing specs and a short deadline are not good bed fellows. Most large Govt projects fail.. I remember 10 or 15 years ago the IRS tried to rebuild its tax system. 5 years and 6 billion past the budget the IRS threw up its arms and gave up - Handing the project to EDS. What annoys me most is the post failure armchair programmers screaming this should have been and agile project. One size doesn’t fit all and often agile really means ‘too lazy to do your systems analysis’.
The partisanship is the cause of the ACA's problems, not the other way around. Obama could have entirely ignored his base who wanted a single payer system and taken a Republican plan as the basis of his health care reform and the Republicans still would have opposed it because of who he was. We know this is true because that's in fact what happened.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Toyota has more than one plant in 6 different countries - 4 in Brazil, 3 in Canada, 2 in Colombia, 15 in Japan, 4 in Thailand, and 6 in the USA. Looking at the ratio of population:plant, Japan obviously has the most favourable one (about 8.5 million people in Japan for each plant), and then it goes Canada (11.7 million), Thailand (16.5 million), Colombia (23.6 million), Brazil (50.3 million), and trailing the pack is the USA, with 52.8 million people of population per one Toyota plant.
When Toyota says that they chose Canada over the US because of health care reasons, I'm heavily inclined to believe them. After all, with its larger population, surely the US has a higher number of highly skilled technicians to work for Toyota. But instead, they chose to add another plant to Canada. I'll leave you to reconcile the facts with your rhetoric.
Cynical Idealist
It doesn't necessarily have to do with "big government". A few years back I was engaged in talks with a local ministry, speaking to the head of an office directly under the minister, about running a service for her office. The service would provide some real value to the community and had the potential to have a significant and visible impact. Overall I had spend about 40 hours talking with them and probably another 100 hours researching solutions and drafting proposals and what not. Since I was personally interested in the service, I didn't even think of charging for all this otherwise billable hours. For something that was going to take between four and six months, I wasn't going to get rich with the project, as I would have to pay other people to do parts of it and with some luck I was going to come out with a very modest profit out of it (and by modest I'm talking low thousands). As we were in the final negotiations, out of the blue came this company, who keeps an ongoing relationship with other ministries and government offices. They say they can leverage their existing relationships with other offices to lower the cost of the project and deliver it faster. In a matter of hours the whole thing goes to them and I'm left out in the cold. It turns out the project didn't achieve all the stated goals, it didn't have the impact it hoped for, and it ended up costing almost four times what I would have charged. And it wasn't delivered faster, either. It's not a matter of "big government" or "small government" or all that nonsense. It's a matter of people and relationships. The project went to the other guys because they were friends with someone in the government, they got a recommendation and the person I was talking to chose to either pay or collect a favor by giving the project to those guys. For me it's simpler to imagine that the same thing went on with healthcare.gov, than to try to pin it down on a "too big" government that doesn't communicate well internally.
Canada has more Polar Bears than the US, so they should have 10 times the number of manufacturing plants than does the U.S
That would even make sense if manufacturing plants were staffed by polar bears.
See what a stupid statement I made?
Yes, yes I do.
If someone else is paying for it, then they decide what health care you get, and when you get it. Not you.
Single payer means the government has 100% control of all health care, regardless of what anyone says differently. You have 0% control. Your doctor can do what he is told or quit being a doctor. If you need life-saving health care and the government says "no", you die. Period. If you have cancer and need pain medication to avoid horrible suffering for weeks or months, the government can just say "no, sorry ... budget cuts".
Not to mention the problems with giving the government access to everyone's confidential medical records.
"But businesses like the cost advantages" isn't really an interesting argument.
Imagine all the people,no lawyers beneath their feet.
No, it wouldn't:
1. Those involved in the negotiations have stated that the Obama administration got the plan it wanted.
2. My congressman at the time, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), threatened to vote against Obamacare unless there was the option to choose the US Government as your health insurance provider. Obama took him on Air Force One and personally lobbied him about it: I have no idea what happened on that plane, but I do know that Kucinich changed his vote as a result of that ride.
3. Look at the plan that Hillary Clinton put together back in 1993: It also included private insurance companies as a key part of the system.
4. There were some Democrats who supported single payer systems. They were basically laughed out of the room in presidential primaries, congressional committees, etc.
I am officially gone from
If you're not careful, you'll be labeled a Republican with ideas like that - less regulation and all.
... it turns the government does have an Apollo program for health care - Medicare. And guess what, it works great.
You should talk to Doctors. They seem to have a quite different opinion of Medicare.
Aha I get it - it's Republican's fault.
Check.
-Styopa
Google readily finds a downloadable PDF of The Saturn V Flight Manual.@misc{Howpublished = {Marshall Space Flight Center},Title = {Saturn V Flight Manual},Year = {1968}}
In other words what exactly *does* happen when NASA "lights that candle"? At 243 pages, the answer ain't simple!
This makes a lot more sense if the moon landing was faked. (Puts on tinfoil hat).
I'm regularly amused and annoyed by the attempt to compare healthcare.gov to pretty much any technological achievement. First, the comparison to Apple iOS (or anything else). In the first place, nobody is forcing people to buy an Apple phone. Nobody is forcing owners of iPhones to upgrade. Nobody is fining people (oh, 'scuse me, taxing people) for not buying an iPhone or upgrading the OS. This entire comparison is bogus.
Next, the Apollo program. Much of the technology to make the Apollo program work hadn't been invented at the time that Kennedy made his "we choose to go to the moon" speech. And Apollo wasn't the beginning either. The Mercury and Gemini programs were key proof-of-concept steps needed to show that docking, EVA, and long duration spaceflight were possible. We also had to not just do those things once but over and over again.
Third, high-traffic websites are nothing new. Lots of companies have been doing this for a decade without a hitch. HHS could have easily contracted with Google or Amazon to make this work but instead they chose a Canadian company, which is baffling on its face, that had a documented lousy track record.
Because fuck you thats why!
No really. Why can't big goverment do ANYTHING without fucking it up?
Name one thing the united states goverment has done in a competent and complete way as planned. Just one fucking thing.
Bonus difficulty: In the last 100 years.
Ok... Rob us all blind. They're pretty good at that... But what else?
Bombing the shit out of brown people? Not exactly the goverment. That's the military.
What has the goverment ever done without turning it into a complete clusterfuck?
One of the biggest hurdles I always face as a software developer in private enterprise is upper management coming in and dictating not just what they want done but how it must be done and what technologies to use. Since they're not just unfamiliar with software development and technology in general but with the internal architecture and details of the systems the company has, the end result is the complete and utter mess you'd expect from say someone with no clue about cooking dictating how much of what ingredients a Cordon Bleu chef must use in a dish and how it must be cooked (as opposed to just telling him what dish you want and then getting out of the kitchen and letting him do the job you hired him for).
I'm sure health care is the only difference between those countries. It couldn't be that governments offered better subsidies to make a plant in a country, or that a cheaper Canadian dollar makes it more favorable to pay people in cad and export to US, or a variety of other factors. Health care must be why they chose Canada.
DNSSEC is mostly about having the will to bother to do it. In that respect, private industry has very little patience for anything that is hard to tie to bottom line. telnet is *still* widely in use in private companies because of the same deal.
This endeavor is very much complex by being bolted on to an existing complicated mess and trying to unify things. DNSSEC is amateur hour next to trying to corral all the health care cats. Still very much doable, but it has the misfortune of also being at the center of an extremely politicized situation. So prudent careful progression is cast aside in the name of needless urgency combined with some political shenanigans of a no-bid contract.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This exposes the two reasons America is falling behind on practically every metric there is for an industrialized nation: we aren't collecting enough taxes from the ultra-wealthy (in corporate or personal structure), and we don't invest in government institutions to perform government duties so there is no effective cost management for projects since they are all outsourced, and the government has no qualified parties to manage anything.
All of the wailing and gnashing of teeth by so-called conservatives amounts to a rather pathetic attempt at killing this program with hysterics. There are dozens of nations who pay less than half of what we do for health care per capita and have far better outcomes. They're not perfect, but they do accept the basic reality that unless you're willing to allow people to die on the street or in hospital parking lots, providing a basic level of preventative care in a single payer system for free or very cheap is better for everyone in the long run -- except for the healthcare and insurance industry parasites who are trying to attach profits to basic human needs, and the bought and sold members of Congress who have been hired to keep the money rolling in.
Fortunately, their childish plot to shut down the government when they don't get their way was a complete failure and a political disaster. However, we should prepare for more lunacy if the gerrymandering in the House is allowed to continue.
Seriously. You're complaining about a website being slightly over budget and a bit buggy? Don't Americans have bigger fish to fry?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/f35-budget-disaster/
Which one is a bigger failure? You tell me.
Hint: It's not the website.
When the HTML programming goes to a firm with a college classmate of Michelle and that firm is a subsidiary of a Canadian outfit AND it is done on a NO BID basis well you can guess what is going on in Obamacare.
If you knew this in the beginning, you would have predicted something like this.
I'm not so sure he's the one making "stupid" statements.
He makes a valid point about looking at things on a per capita basis, and you respond about polar bears?
What do polar bears have to do with manufacturing plants and how did you determine it should be 10 times?
You dont think his per capitca comment has some reason/logic to it vs what you wrote?
You have just confirmed everything I was saying. There was a political atmosphere against the ACA, and the Democrats pushed it anyway despite the fact that the result was completely predictable.
Just remember that those same people who pushed against the ACA in the first place were elected by real people who care about these issues. And they were reelected after the fact. And reelected again. Agree with them or not, they were elected (and FWIW, the same argument can be used about Obama).
Just because the public will was to put Obama in office, that doesn't mean the public will was health insurance reform that just makes everything worse for the majority of people. Obama should have made it abundantly clear during the campaign that his presidency was going to push single payer, and then he should have done so. At least then he would be doing things that have the backing of the people and not something that few really like, all in the name of compromising with a group that was sure to never compromise.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
And that made sense to you? Sweeping legislation essentially crafted in secret to take control of 1/8th of the economy?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
ACA was passed by Democrats without a single vote from the Republicans which has politically doomed it from the start. Other large government programs were passed with significant bi-partisan majorities, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The ACA was passed without any Republican support and with lots of back room deals as well as the famous use of "reconciliation" to get it passed in the Senate after Massachusetts voted in someone to the Senate who opposed it and upset the filibuster proof majority.
In that light, why would you be surprised that there was a lot of political fallout?
Other large government programs were passed with bipartisan majorities, yes, but that was back when we had two functioning political parties that both had an interest in governing effectively. The GOP is now a reactionary, neo-confederate interest, seeking to monkey-wrench the government and hasten its failure. Why should the rest of us be hostage to their insane whims? The ACA isn't a great bill, but it was the only game in town, and it is marginally better than what we had. There are plenty of better systems we can point to, but critically, our "loyal opposition" didn't point to any of them during the debate, instead choosing to howl incessantly about non-existent death panels. Instead of "leading" when the, as they continually jabber, the President "failed to lead" they merely put out talking points about leadership failures in others while failing to recognize the blemish on their own face.
And here we are.
It would be a stronger argument you were making if any Republican had shown any interest in governing during the debate of this law, but the only thing even remotely approaching genuine participation turned out to be strategic stonewalling by "moderates" who were so terrified of being "primaried" they simply backed away from talks with the Democrats. So the bill is 100% Democrats-written. Whose fault is that? The GOP offered no workable solution of any kind that I know of. We heard platitudes about "free market solutions," but when you try to nail down what that means there was no coherent plan that could be sussed out of the responses.
Who did what now?
Romneycare is a *failed* republican invention. That's the real problem with Obama the sockpuppet and Biden(D-MBNA)
If you search you will find that Obama and his people delayed the rules for Obamacare so they would not come out before the 2012 elections. That delayed the writing of the code for the website and they continued to issue changes right before the site was about to be released. There is no doubt that the site has architectural & coding issues, but it was doomed to fail from the beginning and the blame belongs with Obama & the secretary of HHS.
I propose the A.C.P.Q.C.A. (Affordable Contract & Purchasing Quality Control Act), anyone know who to build a website?
Getting to the moon was a technical problem, with a specific goal.
Paying for healthcare is a political problem.
It also doesn't have a specific goal.
1. Does providing health care mean emergency care is available when you're in a major population center?
2. Does it mean you can get some doctors services at an "affordable for you" rate?
3. Does it mean that you can get every available procedure, without a waitlist, at an "affordable for you" rate?
4. Does it mean you're followed 24/7 by a medical team just in case?
Most people agree that the first is met in most modern countries, most "public" systems offer some variant of #2, none offer #3, and most people think #4 is ridiculous, but some people do exercise this option too.
The whole US plan is to bump from #1 1/2 to #2 for "everyone".
There was a political atmosphere against the ACA,
to clarify my remarks, the "opposition to the ACA" predated the existence of the ACA, or, indeed, the decision to pursue health care reform. The GOP held a meeting a day after the inauguration, before any of this was decided, and announced afterward their goals of "making this a one-term presidency" and "breaking" Obama.
I do see that I omitted the part about "predating the ACA"--my point was the opposition was ginned up with an eye on attacking whatever Obama brought to the table--it was built around the ACA once the ACA existed, but they would have attacked anything he presented just as vociferously.
Who did what now?
The frustrating thing - and this is specific to the website - is there are already other websites doing functionally similar tasks.
Every evening you will see Flo and Prudential Auto Insurance commercials. Or the green muppet telling you how you can shop for mortgages while wearing your underwear. There are many websites that act as one stop shops for other services, shopping for health insurance. They collect a few basic facts and then provide you with a handful of companies to suit your needs. A gov't insurance website should not be re-inventing the wheel.
I'm quite certain the commercial services helping you shop for loans, mortgages, insurance and other services didn't have $600m startup costs either.
You realize the law has a lot of things in it to make Republicans happy right (such as dropping the government option from the plan)?
It does? That must explain the fact not a single Republican voted for it - they were so happy with the things in it!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Unfortunately, the argument doesn't hold any water. The Apollo program wasn't going to store and/or process sensitive information about, potentially, every citizen of the U.S.A. The only actual sensitive information involved was the engineering data created by the engineers and aerospace industry. To boil it down, less money was at stake overall. Also, ~50 years ago the "America! [Darn] yeah!" (modified for the time period, heh) was pretty prevalent, as opposed to nowadays.
NASA also didn't outsource nearly 100% of the development of the space program to private contractors (sure there were some). Also, we were more about getting stuff done back then and not about making sure we couldn't be held accountable if something went wrong.
The "political atmosphere" at the time was created for the purpose of blocking this reform. It didn't "pre-date" the reform effort. The propaganda efforts kicked into high gear to "break" this Presidency--to undo the public's will by neutering a popular President so as to limit his ability to do the people's work. They started screaming he was a communist because a bill modeled largely on their own response to Hilarycare in the 90's had been proposed by a Democratic congress and administration
That is a bit revisionist. The reality was that candidate Obama promised an open, transparent, bipartisan process while he was campaigning. Once in office President Obama turned over health care reform to the Democratic party leadership who promptly went into the back room with their lobbyists and began drafting health care reform legislation in a very partisan fashion. In those first couple of week of the new administration the Democratic attitude was that they control the White House, the House of Representatives and and the Senate - so f' the Republicans we'll do whatever we want. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel literally said this in public in this first week or two. Completely contrary to Obama's promises on the campaign trail. This poisoned the well of bipartisanship. Tossed away the opportunity to get moderate Republicans involved in the drafting. Even in the hyper partisan atmosphere that followed there were a couple of Republicans who were peeled off at times. This indicates some would have probably come on board is there were seats at the table.
If we had the open, transparent, and bipartisan (seats at the table for Republicans) process promised then things would have gone quite different. The Democratic leadership and the White House are equally responsible with the Republican leadership for the current hyper partisan atmosphere. The Democrats locked the Republicans out, the Republicans respond by becoming obstructionists. Bipartisanship was not given a chance by the Democrats. Again, this was all in the first week or two.
It is mind boggling that President Obama, who knew health care would be his signature issue and his legacy, would give up leadership to his partisan party leaders, remain largely silent as they took the process into the back rooms, and merely became a salesman for whatever they came up with. He should have used his bully pulpit to pressure his party to stick to his campaign promises for an open, transparent and bipartisan process. His silence, and Rahm Emanuel's comments, suggested he was OK with the business as usual process his party leadership took. Again, this was all in the first week or two, the Republican obstructionism that you refer to came after this.
BTW, I am an independent disgusted by both parties.
You're an idiot. 90% would be paid for a "guaranteed" 5 years, except the guarantee is only as good as the polical will to keep paying it, the bullshit math behind the cost, and the party in power having no better way to buy votes with it.
Because its neither a simple system or is it "just" a web site. This is a false equivalency (propagated by whom, I don't know) that seems to 1) imply that a 'website' is equivalent to Bob's geocities html page from 1992 and 2) thats all that is going on with it.
I have to really wonder if any of the 'concern trolls' have actually tried to deploy a database drive web portal in which 1) all parts are under your control and 2) without other regulatory overhead, and 3) has to handle more than a few hundred people.
But hey, if it really is that "simple", then the market is ripe for your technical prowess. Seize the opportunity.
Sadly, we are all out of really smart NAZI's to run the program. Instead we are substituting a bunch of half witted socialists (don't underestimate the socialists, they have done at least as much damage as the NAZI's, they are just underrated for their abilities.) I am told, that collectively, their IQ's will come close to equaling Von Braun's.
It's complicated because the insurance industry is complicated.
It complicated because of the changes dictated by the President's administration at the last minute.
Its simple to just show plans and prices for your state. It became complicated when the administration decided that people will get sticker shock if they see the actual cost of their health plans. So the administration, at the last minute, decided that the system must collect all necessary information to compute a person's subsidy so that only the subsidized cost is reported. That is the sort of political decision that screwed up implementation of the web site.
The population of Canada has squat to do with whether it is a better place to site a manufacturing plant.
Tax policy, availability of transportation (Ports, trains, etc.), raw materials, labor rules, etc. are what matters. As far as the labor pool goes, Canada has more than enough skilled labor to host host all 9 North American manufacturing plants.
So the population of Canada is about as relevant as the number of Polar Bears.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If they had only retained Hermann Göring instead of executing him, they would not have lost decades to catch up to the Soviet Union regarding totalitarianism.
Beyond the fact that they were both directives from the government, there are no similarities
Moonshot:ACA Exchange
Regulation:
Whatever NASA thought was a good idea:Three extremely technical laws, plus various state laws
Interoperability:
Everything done in-house by NASA:Interacting with dozens of different providers using different systems that don't talk to each other, plus data verification from a few more agencies
Public Support:
Viewed as way to get one up on those darned ruskies:Extremely bitter partisan divide, was a major contentious issue in two elections
Government Support:
Willing to throw money at NASA to get it done:Part of the House of Representatives shut down the government and threatened default in order to build anti-ACA support for the next election
Actual Work Done:
Mostly in-house NASA work:Lots of contractors
Not that the exchange's launch hasn't been a complete disaster, but comparing the two is extremely tenuous.
That analogy would work if we were all legally required to signup for Slashdot.
But we aren't, so it doesn't.
But all other things are not equal and that is what makes y9our argument fail. You completely ignore every other variable in location choice and in doing so make a completely asinine statement.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Population has nothing to do with manufacturing plants unless the population is low enough that there might not be enough skilled labor...not an issue with Canada.
So in this case, Polar Bears and Population have the same impact. And the ten times is just made up, like his assertions.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Actually, he's right, and in more ways than one. The original question dealt with the website. The feds had to put up a website to pick up the slack for a bunch of GOP-run states. The ACA's problems at this point are almost entirely the result of GOP obstruction and sabotage. And yes, that goes all the way back to the original bill: despite the fact that GOP'ers voted against it, they had a significant hand in writing the bill and the ideas behind it.
Kythe
The GOP is now a reactionary, neo-confederate interest
As in, douchebags who paint the confederate flag on their cars because it looked cool in the remake of Dukes of Hazard?
That's nothing compared to the reactionary original confederate interest: the racist Democratic Party.
The premise of the question is wrong in the first place (considering the source, not terribly surprising). The ACA website is not a "simple website". In fact, it's extremely complex, and has to interface with many other disparate federal IT systems. The federal government puts up "simple" websites all the time.
And if you're looking for a reason why this fiasco happened in the first place, look no farther than the GOP-run states who, in a deliberate attempt to obstruct the law (likely an extension of their explicitly-stated intent to obstruct anything President Obama did), chose not to meet their responsibility under the law and put up state-run exchanges.
Funny -- usually conservatives LIKE it when things are left up to the states. I guess that premise goes out the window when a chance to undermine President Obama presents itself.
Kythe
The general form is "Why Can't Big Government Do ?" The answer is always the same. There is no incentive for efficiency or quality for government workers. You think the website is a mess? Take a look at how HMOs worked to see the future of ObamaCare for everyone. Decisions are made by govt drones not doctors.
So you're saying it isn't because of socialism (health care), but it's because... of... socialism (government offering subsidies, central bank controlling the value of the Canadian dollar)?
shut up, glenn reynolds, conservative hack.
Actually what was said was, "The constituency doesn't understand legislation. You can't read a bill and understand it. When it's passed, you will understand because you will see what happens."
In other words: Pelosi said you're all too stupid to understand the law until you see what you actually get from welfare and what people get arrested for. Essentially it's the same as saying that women don't know how to read and so need to be shown--an accurate statement hundreds of years ago in many societies--and thus that the women should butt out of government because they can't understand all the important things going on, which are mostly argued in small breaths over vast things that are written down. It's so much the same because the argument is that the lay person is illiterate to legalese and cannot understand written law--or at least cannot carry out the written law in thought to what its consequence will be (i.e. oversight, agencies, forms to fill out, benefits paid out, costs to the government, tax impacts, etc.).
The government does not do "crafted in secret." They do "the common man is too stupid to self-govern; we are the shepherd, the watchful big brother."
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for some Demwit to blame George W. for this failure.
Do you really think the government could get its act together enough to put a person on the moon again? Have you been paying attention?
On the other hand, the government is nowadays much better positioned regarding checks, balances, dedication, diligence, vision, integrity, technical capabilities and determination for faking another moon landing. Because we can.
Yes and no.
This website was completely in the Democrats' hands. However, the only reason the national exchange is even necessary is because the Republican governments of some states refused to build their own exchanges the way they were supposed to. These kind of specifics work better on a state level, and Republicans of all people ought to understand that, if they were really trying to govern conscientiously according to their viewpoints rather than just sabotage Obama in every way they can.
So every person living in a state where they have to access the badly implemented national exchange site is living under a Republican government that completely failed to implement any site at all. In other words, under this Democratic failure is an even bigger Republican one.
the latest news that I heard about healthcare.gov is that part of the system or network crashed. hope someone fixes the website soon.
, and it's not "simple". Glenn Reynolds, on the the other hand, is apparently quite simple, in a webbish sort of way.
The primary one was that Congress did not pass a 1,800 or so page bill backed up by a mind numbingly amount of regulations mandating how NASA would do it. The question of how to conduct the lunar voyages was left up to the engineers at NASA and the aerospace industry at the time.
There is some truth to this. Reports say that the requirements for the website were changing, even as late as this summer. Constantly changing requirements will make a project late for any of us.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That may not be your personal point of view, but the wider "Anti-ACA" movement is not nearly as enlightened as you.
You can say that again: a Kaiser poll last year found 36 percent of people believe that death panels are part of the ACA, and 20 percent weren't sure. And people like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are still talking about them.
You have just confirmed everything I was saying. There was a political atmosphere against the ACA, and the Democrats pushed it anyway despite the fact that the result was completely predictable.
Hindsight is 20/20. Was it really predictable back then, when Democrats were cutting major provisions out of Obamacare like the government option and making it more and more like Romneycare, trying to appease the Republicans? Sure, it seems obvious to us now, but who could have predicted that they'd change their minds about things like the individual mandate and insurance exchanges?
"Imagine if President Obama had stated, 'I believe the nation should commit itself to the goal of enabling all Americans to access affordable health insurance' but then left the how to do it to some of the best experts in health care and economics without partisan interference."
Because anything those people would come up with would immediately have been shot down by Republicans simply because it was Obama's goal. That, and the fact that any serious discussion would have to raise the specter of increased regulation.
Stake Holders are the major problem.
For example (ignoring the whole question of gun control for a moment) a way back the Canadian government started a a Long Gun registry and budgeted a couple of million dollars for it. I knew chaps who were in on it from the start. It was essentially a second year computer science database project.
However, once underway and all the stake holders got involved and the turf wars started and the pro pr campaigns started to counter the anti government registry campaigns it eventually ballooned to a couple of billion dollars.
Then because of the major cluster frak it turned into it did not really work so after a few years of operation and bad publicity it was canceled.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Anyone who claims this kind of thing "happens in the private sector" is either stupid or just lying. Of course slashdot is so full of statists and other goverment supporters that I am not surprised someone can make such a rediculus claim and get away with it.
Yeah, let's blame the republicans for not obeying the unconstitutional requirements of the ACA (the ones that the supreme court really did strike down.)
*giggity*
I don't understand; if the will of the people was to stop Obamacare, then why didn't the majority vote for Romney at the last election?
I must say it was a brilliant and very fair tactic of the Republicans to postpone Obamacare until after the elections: very reasonable to say "well, Obamacare is such a big change, allow the people to vote for it first, and if they vote Republican, then they don't want it".
On the other hand it smacks of total disrespect for the will of the electorate what happened last few weeks. In any other country, the people wouldn't vote anymore for a political party that did that kind of tricks (nothing wrong with doing it, but there would be new elections ASAP, a caretaker government, and the Republicans would be reduced to 10% of current size).
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
It was voided by the courts, but they dd try to ban private insurance. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/international/americas/10canada.html?_r=0
Medicare for all would have been *much* simpler... and you could sign up the way you do now.
But the extreme-right Heritage Foundation designed this system - the one Romney let come in in Massachussetts when he was governor, and which was pushed by the huge inusrance industry lobbyists.
Then, of course, they outsourced everything, rather than hiring folks in-house to do it (horrors! bigger government (but paying consulting companies, and their layers of management, and giving them profits, that's ok, y'know).
And, of course, the Republicans and the right want to do the same outsourcing to Social Security (yep - you, too, can invest your retirement in tech (oops, sorry, that was *so* 2000), or real estate (whoops, sorry, so 2008), and they wind up with it all....
mark
That's what happened: Obama's experts wrote down their rules and regulations as laws and that's what he passed. "Partisans" didn't have a chance to "interfere" with it, they just voted against it. They voted against it because they thought it was going to be an utter failure. ACA is Obama's baby: he and his economic and health experts designed it. If it fails, it's entirely his fault.
What were the states thinking when they chose to not follow the parts of Obamacare that the supreme court struck down. Or maybe this is what happens when you write laws in secret, aided by extreme special interest groups and don't include the opposition in any part of the process.
It's ridiculous to count "plants". The number of people employed total is the key factor. A plant could employ 250 people, or 2,500.
There are certainly other factors involved besides healthcare as to why Toyota built plants in Canada. Tax breaks are a huge incentive, and I'm sure Canada is willing to offer much better breaks than the USA (which has its own auto industry to protect).
Better known as 318230.
People in Cuba pay less than $200/year and end up getting as old as we do. Effective health care is not expensive. The reason it costs $7000/person/year is because corporations and doctors push unnecessary and costly drugs and procedures on gullible consumers. And with ACA, Obama, the crony capitalist in chief, forces us to hand these corporations our money; we can't even opt out of that nonsense anymore by not buying.
"then left the how to do it to some of the best experts in health care and economics without partisan interference."
If he did that, the system wouldn't exist. Obamacare is predicated on partisan interference in the private business of insurance companies and the personal choices of citizens. Everything from the website to the govt shutdown is because of the simple fact that people didn't want Obamacare in the first place, and we only have it now because of partisan interference with our lives.
The ACA had tons of deals in it to get members to vote for it - that is how anything passes and given the level of corruption today there is no way anything significant and important can pass without meeting the demands of the long list of corrupt politicians. Large bills and looming deadlines forcing the situation are the new norm... sure not much different than the past, but everything bad has gotten worse.
The core of ACA was created by the Heritage Foundation and worked on by Bob Dole before Hillary stole 90% of it from him; and that old fool wanted to run for president so he shot down his own plan instead of negotiating over the 10% that differed from his plan. Only an idiot would give up after winning 90% of what they wanted.
Clearly the parent doesn't know jack about the issue or has a memory of even the limited reporting the mainstream press has done for decades on the issue.
Partisans were trying to kill anything even remotely good for decades and anything that did happen was WEAK plus it was undermined as well. Attacked from ALL sides and ALL the time. The only reason Obama got this thing passed was a miracle: he got the insurance corps to back it (later after the 20% profit margin cap was added they were not as happy. Expect them to unleash millions against Al Frankin for sneaking that line into it!)
This just ignores the large public outcry against this law. It certainly true that there is a large movement in support of this law. However the people who are against this law do not constitute a small cadre of anti-government extremest. A majority of the House, all of whom were elected after the ACA passed and many who ran specifically on the mandate to gut the law indicate that the opposition to this law consists of a large number of citizens. One should not forget that during the time before the law was passed Massachusetts, hardly a bastion of Conservative anti-government citizenry, elected a Republican to replace on of the most liberal members of congress specifically on the platform to stop the ACA from becoming law. Only a shady, probably unconstitutional, procedural move allowed the passed senate law to go to the House for a vote to make the ACA law. Proper procedure would have been for the house to pass its own bill and then for both bills to have gone to committee, and then sent back to both houses for a vote once a single version was agreed upon. This was not done because both Pelosi and Reed knew that it would never pass.
During the run up to the vote Democratic members of congress actually stopped having town hall meetings with their own constituents because the opposition to the law was filled with so much vitriol. Barring specific minor parts of this law (pre-existing conditions and extended coverage of adult children) and except in the most liberal circles, this law is vastly unpopular. Were it put to a plebiscite it would easily be defeated.
the best people to build that website. Certainly, Obama did not interfere; he was never around that much for anything.
Certainly, the system in Canada would be superior to Obamacare. Unfortunately, that's not politcally tenable in this country infested with right wing "free market" fanbois such as yourself. So you get what you get.
That's no defense against your callousness and shifting position. However, if cursing me helps you avoid any introspection that might upset you, please continue.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Yeah cause its obvious that every member of congress who voted for this monstrosity actually read it in the 46 hours between when it was completed and when it was voted on. Give us a break.
The republicans didn't vote for this thing because they were completely frozen out of the negotiations on putting it together. They had heard from their constituencies, that is the people in their own states and districts, on how much regular people, business owners and medical professions were against this thing and so they voted against it. It didn't hurt that every time you opened the law to an new section there was something objectionable in it.
No successful government program has ever been successful without bipartisan support. Not the New Deal, not Medicare, not the Space Program.
Private industry would have done no better putting up the same site in the same time with the same funding.
Incompetence is a failing of people. It therefore shows up in government, in corporations, in families - basically, wherever people are.
"So the bill is 100% Democrats-written. Whose fault is that?"
I get the point. It is the Republicans fault for not supporting something they didn't like.
No matter where you go, there you are.
to the experts in INSURANCE? NOTHING except the mandate with Penalty for non-compliance.
That's like asking "Why not let the oil company 'experts' write the safety regulations for offshore platforms". They did. you saw the result. Or "Why not let the engineers decide how safe a 50 year old reactor design has to be?" Fukushima Dai Ichi and don't whine. A 9.0 was a REASONABLE expectation there, given the history.
Or "Why not let the engineers design a monomer isolation reactor safety system at Bohpal?" We did.
No, without regulation, Capitalists order their drones to build for the lowest price with the least 'wasted capital' in the form of passive and active safety.
And they will do it.
The federal government didn't make a website-- they outsourced the whole thing! Nobody is talking about that!
Government contractors usually cost too much and deliver too little; rarely do they have any real accountability. At least government workers have no incentive to screw things up so bad that politicians (usually a big source of the problem) go around looking to shift blame and sacrifice people and departments in idiotic ways to keep up appearances but not actually repair any real problems; if it existed in the 1st place.
It doesn't matter if the government workers are brilliant or lazy, they don't have an incentive to screw up in ways that have REAL repercussions. Contractors HAVE incentives to screw up and even in criminal ways - they don't get hurt and quite often they come back and get contracts shortly after being caught defrauding the government... or just go find work elsewhere while they grease the wheels of government.
Result: Contractors only add opportunity for more government corruption. Short term savings/benefits are almost always offset later even if you ignore the cost of undermining democracy. Political oversight is focused on the short term as is the corporation. Public workers are usually thinking in the long term, at minimum for their own interests. Plus they are not managed by people looking to squeeze every penny out for themselves before they jump ship in their golden parachute. If a government manager gets too much money they risk prison... and we always have upcoming political wannabes looking to sacrifice them for political gain -- to the point scandals are manufactured for grandstanding... and for future contractors looking to steal tax payer money.
Case point: USPS has been attacked and undermined for years. The inventor of mail service: the UK has privatized the royal mail after years of successful attack. Just watch how much it'll cost their people and under perform... but unlike the royal mail service, they'll budget a good dose of marketing so people feel good about eating more and more shit.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Wow, 500 comments almost and not a single one seems to mention the natural disgust involved in this. Too bad I didn't have time to post until lunch break because of WORK... And that's really the issue. Every single developer, manager and such on this project makes a good living - and most of them by work hard. Very hard. And those are the ones that are being punished the most by Obama for their hard work. Few people like that and guess what, moral is really low... I can't count the number of times I heard "And now I have to do overtime so my taxes can go up and I can not only provide free food but also free health care for some retarded stoner who can't be bothered to go out and find a job or some trailer trash who just had her 16th child living on wellfare" ...
Yeah - its a real surprise that those people didn't work harder and do a better job...
Peter.
Whitehouse.com works just fine!
See Government Website at its finest!
The problem is not technical, it is political. Have you ever done IT? Some of the biggest problems are political there as well.
We just had government shutdown and a terrorist threat to wreak the global economy if this wasn't stopped. If that doesn't convince you how many politically connected powerful people are highly motivated you are just not worth the bandwidth.
Aside from that, the project was heavily outsourced which has a lot of political problems involved as well. If it was entirely in-house like NASA was, it would have been done properly and for less money and would be cheaper to maintain. Just like all the other outsourced potential money pits, there is going to be a rush of vile corporations trying to bribe contracts for them to maintain and update it for as long as the law is active. Every 10 years they'll revise/upgrade the website for a huge amount of money and their screw ups will cost even more money in "support" until they lose the contract... re-incorporate and get the contract back again... or bribe another contract elsewhere while waiting to return again after the next crook is done.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
They can't even support ideas they like! The idea, the individual mandate, came from the Republican party. Then once the Democrats started supporting it, the Republicans were against it. Now, this is mostly because the GOP has changed so much since the 90s. Republican leadership can't control the Tea Party wing. There are a few sane, moderate, Republicans but they are terrified of primary challenges and breaking ranks. So you end up with, as the GP elegantly put it, a reactionary party which can't actually propose any idea because their core belief (really just the core belief of a small minority holding the rest of the party hostage) is that anything the government does is by definition wrong.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Don't mess the DPRK! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEaKX9YYHiQ
Requires following rules, standards and using logic. You expected this from our FEDERAL government? lol.
The big one was the religious exception for contraception coverage and the prohibition on abortion coverage.
Both of which they still aren't happy about. The right is outraged because the contraception exception only applies to openly religious organisations, not private companies that happen to have a religious CEO, and they are equally upset because even though the government coverage can't include abortion some government money still goes into collective pools which are in turn subsidising programs by private insurance companies that do.
Social conservatives. Give them what they want, and they'll take it - then deny you gave it to them at all, and demand more.
The comparison made between the NASA Moon landing and the Healthcare.gov website development are bogus, since they are not analogous in any form of logic, technology or concept.
Of one thing that Glen Reynolds alluded to is possibly true. Over the years since the Kennedy era Moon Landing, graft and corruption, as well as ever bloated bureaucracy has brought any efficiency in a government operation to a halt.
I am aware of a similar project of monumental proportions - The European Agency for Health and Safety at Work - https://osha.europa.eu/en/ - was very successful in creation, configuration and maintenance using Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) of Plone/Zope, that supports more than 400 million citizens in 27 countries for 18 plus languages. It has been equally successful for running most major portals for the entire government of Brazil and several other South American and other country governments. Experts with this software technology have knowledgeably estimated that the US Government could have probably saved about eighty percent of current expenditure (to-date) using Plone/Zope as compared to known plethora of disparate software technologies deployed.
Only two or three contracting companies can actually be bothered to jump through the hoops required to do business with the Fed, and they all suck. So you can go in there and pitch a Citrix/Winframe solution that was all the rage in 1993 and they'll just eat that shit up! And the thing about the Fed is they're so damn easy! No matter how many times they get burned, they never tie payment to any sort of acceptance criteria! You can just tell them your 14 Indian subcontractors implemented a shining beacon of code that reads your mind and does exactly what you want! And they'll believe you every time! So you take your 6 billion dollars and retire to the Bahamas, leaving behind huge shit sandwich for everyone else to eat!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't understand; if the will of the people was to stop Obamacare, then why didn't the majority vote for Romney at the last election?
Because they were given a choice between Obama and Romney? Animated liar or emotionless cold not quite human thing?
I'm not sure you get the game yet, but here is a nice quote from the head of the Republican Caucus in Iowa which was stated on public radio. "We don't care what the public wants, Ron Paul will not be on the ticket in Iowa.".
The democratic republic has been dead since at least the time Ross Perot ran, you have just not been checking for a pulse.
Why didn't a company like Google, Salesforce or Netflix who are experts at big data systems win the contract to build the Obamacare? Or even a tech startup with a bunch of smart project managers and engineers?
Possible reasons:
1. Not Interested even though there is a lot of money in it. They know its too painful or boring or destined for failure.
2. They are not good at lobbying for government contracts.
People in Cuba pay less than $200/year and end up getting as old as we do.
So you're saying, that an authoritarian government running a centrally planned economy (let's see from wiki... 76% employment are public sector in 2000, price controls, rationing...) may not be so bad after all? I suppose dropping the pretense of two viable political parties can save a lot on bureaucracy and costs too.
For all the technical prowess on this list all I see is ideological parrots.
Am I the only one that has always thought "register before browse" to be a design error ... purely from a technical perspective. Call me foolishly old school but I go by the mantra less is better.
The reality is that the project was a failure for the same reason most projects fail; piss poor leadership.
And I'm not talking about a leadership 'team'. That's a bullshit term designed to deflect blame. You start with a leadership "team", you are already taking a big step towards failure. You need one person in charge who's actually in charge; able to have complete dictatorship control over the project who will be held responsible if it fails.
If you don't dilute responsibility, and find the right person to put in charge, you will probably wind up with a successful project. It's really that simple.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
There are some excellent points in this blog post, yet we should never forget the last progressive administration (the Kennedy administration) was responsible for initiating the NSA/moon project, and the Internet, and many, many other items (Peace Corps, US Navy SEAL program, etc.) many of which were severely compromised after the murder of President Kennedy.
About the only thing which didn't come out (including incrementally) of the space program was Velcro (invented in 1948 by a Swiss engineer, George Mestral), which the mindless American CorporateMedia is forever claiming did originate from the space program (although those whorescum somehow miss out on all the other innovations which derived from it such as advances in digital electronics, computer technology, satellite communications tech, earth resources remoting sensing, biomedical engineering, polymer chemistry, materials science, etc., etc.,etc.
"Classmate" is rather open-ended. Ted Cruz also went to the same university around the same time. Does that in itself make a conspiracy?
Table-ized A.I.
Witty, maybe. But not an argument.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
So the population of Canada is about as relevant as the number of Polar Bears.
Ahhhh! The Stupid!!! It Burns!!!
Yeah, neither of these "simple" things sound simple at all. I've seen "Apollo 13" (the movie) and their controls looked about as complicated as a 747's, i.e., VERY. Hell, just the fact that they had 11 missions before we landed on the moon says something, doesn't it?
And rolling out a website to interface with pretty much all medical insurance systems across the nation can in no way possibly be simple either. Methinks whoever came up with this article is neither an engineer nor a programmer.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
If government says: "Here is a couple of billion dollars. Can we get a website please?" What do you expect happens?
Big companies jump in and sell something JUST TO GET THAT MONEY. Nobody is interested in the final product. If they screw up, they get paid EVEN MORE to fix it. If it then still doesn't work, NOBODY CARES. NOBODY EVER GETS SUED.
Big companies can just walk out of the door with a lot of money. It happens ALL THE TIME. In EVERY COUNTRY.
"They can't even support ideas they like!"
That they voted unanimously against the ACA would indicate that they don't like the idea.
That said, how can the way it ended up be in any way their fault? When it was clear that they wouldn't vote for it, why go with it and not something the Democratic Party wanted?
No matter where you go, there you are.
No, that they voted unanimously against it indicates they were playing politics, it's what politicians do. The individual mandate was a Republican idea, but they weren't going to support it if they weren't going to get credit for it like they would have in the 90s when they were the party putting it forward. Now that it has a Democrats name prominently attached to it (Obamacare) they had to look like they hated it to remain popular with their constituencies. The Tea Party wing of the GOP held the rest of the party hostage, and there's not the political will to defy them and risk a primary challenge or fracturing of the party.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
> 'If big government can put a man on the moon, why can't it put up a simple website without messing it up?'
I'd posit that big government can no longer put a man on the moon. The amount of waste and cronyism in the process precludes success at a big venture like that. There was a time when we could do it, but that time has passed.
As the process becomes more and more broken, smaller and smaller tasks become impossible for the government to achieve.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That's a huge non sequitur. Toyota apparently needs only 9 plants total. Not 30. They don't need 230% more plants.
All other things being equal? They're never going to be equal. Their strategy may be based on energy and or raw materials needs-refining, smelting, and casting aluminum wheels and engine blocks, for instance might be 5% less expensive in Canada. That alone might be the one and only reason they have three plants in Canada, and not two.
I am a transplant patient. I have had a liver-kidney transplant as the culmination of a genetic condition. I have, obviously, had the condition my whole life. When I got out of college into a job with medical insurance, there were no "pre-existing condition" questions at all. As a salaried employee, I was immediately eligible for benefits on day 1. I was told this by an HR rep, and so it proved to be.
When I got the transplant (years later), I did get a letter from the insurance company - but they were checking to see if there was someone they could sue for the expense (there wasn't). A little seedy, but not refusing to pay.
The stories I've heard of insurance companies refusing to pay after years generally have 2 criteria: Not part of a group plan and failing to disclose a condition upon initial application. The deal is, if they give you a questionaire, the rates are dependent on your answers. So, if you say your perfectly healthy, you get a lower rate. If they then find out that you weren't perfectly healthy, and you knew that, then you're going to be in trouble. Group plans typically don't have the questionaire - I've only ever been asked if I smoke, for example. If I did smoke, and lied about it to get a lower rate, I should expect that to catch up to me when I get lung cancer.
is that when the US government put a man on the moon, it was a whole lot smaller than it is now.
Lawyers are a big part of it, but this failure to launch a website is nothing new to government either.
It has to do with how contract bids are handled by the government. Process of lowest bid and equal-opportunity bidding rarely ever guarantees that the company under contract is most capable or qualified to do the job. If you don't believe me? Check out some of the bullshit that passes for public education textbooks these days, or perhaps when you're stuck in traffic look at the half-assed road construction that still isn't completed even though it's almost winter already and isn't even going to last two years when they do call it "done". That's government business wating tax dollars for ya, so a website is the least of it.
So a lot of times you have the clueless doing make-work projects when they really shouldn't be. Of course the health insurance industry must really love this gift horse, because few others do. And it's definitely not the kind of socialized health care that we saw in other countries which most people were asking for.
their contractor doesn't know how to build high traffic websites. duh.
"The individual mandate was a Republican idea, but they weren't going to support it if they weren't going to get credit for it like they would have in the 90s when they were the party putting it forward."
So that would be the same reason the Democrats fought against the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit under Bush?
No matter where you go, there you are.
It's actually true.
It was a joke.
Yup, probably a lot of the same feelings and motivations there. You're not going to upset me by attacking the Democrats. I'm a Green.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Actually what was said was, "The constituency doesn't understand legislation. You can't read a bill and understand it. When it's passed, you will understand because you will see what happens."
...
In other words: Pelosi said you're all too stupid to understand the law until you see what you actually get from welfare and what people get arrested for.
I'm not giving her a pass on that statement, but I could read it as: "The constituency doesn't understand [the legislative process]. [Nobody can] read a bill and understand it['s effects]. When it's passed, you will understand because [we all] will see what [actually] happens [in terms of real-world effects, not what the legislation states on its face]."
One way to spin her statement is that other than legislative analysts or historians, due to the effects of unintended consequences, nobody can really predict the results of passed legislation until it's been implemented for a while.
Which is not an excuse for keeping the text of the bill out of public view, in any case.
That would even make sense if manufacturing plants were staffed by polar bears.
Yes, but to be fair, the employees work like Japanese beavers.
We heard platitudes about "free market solutions," but when you try to nail down what that means there was no coherent plan that could be sussed out of the responses.
Do you know what a "free market solution" is? I'll tell you what it isn't, a solution designed by a politician.
Regardless of all the partisan bullshit on this thread, the ultimate fact is that it was a private company that developed the website. This is not a government story, it's a story about private company.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Please, even giant massive gaming companies can't get their servers in line for when a big AAA title launches. Why would you expect the government to do what a billion-dollar gaming company can't?
Stop making an issue out of something that's not an issue. Shit happens. Get over it.
Let's face it...if you put the government in charge of the desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
How is ObamaCare like a turd?
You have to pass it to find out what's in it.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I'll grant that...the developer is a magnificent bastard.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Canada may simply be a healthier environment to live in. Perhaps its less crowding, less pollution, healthier lifestyles, etc?
Or because meat doesn't spoil as fast when it's kept frozen.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Because they acted like small government and contracted out to a group of people who did a less than mediocre job.
Who is assuming anything about exactly what went wrong, and what the reasons were for launching at that time. The question is loaded. It should be, why is the government at this particular time having problems with the ACA website? Obviously they weren't ready when they launched. Oh THAT's never happened in the private sphere!
In my first career as an engineer working in Oak Ridge in the 60's I did some contract work for NASA. We had a bit of tech they needed for a small part. We at the K-25 were amazed by the money NASA could toss around. Getting into the moon did not seem so easy or cheap while we were doing it. Now I'm a retired ER physician, most of the time in direct patient care but was also involved in managing an ER staffing corporation. I can say with certainty that if you left finding the solution to current "best experts in health care and economics" you'd wind up with even more money in the hands of health care brokers with precious little more health care delivered. I have not a clue how to improve health care delivery in the USA. The website issue is much ado about nothing. I'm no coder now but did some 40 years ago and was always impressed by how easily someone else could find my mistakes. Error trapping is hard.
You mean they're all blurred and pixelated?
This is a case of the US Gov getting what it pays for. When the gov procures anything, including contractors to program a website, the regulations are geared towards best (least) price. And so, they usually get what they pay for. The gov should be trying for best VALUE. Also, some gov people can get around the best price regs and get who they want: their buddies, pals, whom they've worked with already. But those people are more concerned with GETting the work, not DOing the work.
is both the admirable goal and potential millstone around the neck of any public agency: unlike the private sector, than can afford to use customers as guinea pigs with beta releases and go through cycles of improvements until they get it "right", public agencies forever fear the blowback of not serving the (potentially, entire) public from the get-go and of being accused of wasting taxpayers' money if it isn't right, out of the box. Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Although it is expected that many private sector undertakings fail - and profit is the reward for those that succeed, the same logic is not afforded the public sector: if it fails (Solyndra), it's a waste; if it succeeds, it should be privatized.
Yeah, like you're taking it for granted that they went to the moon. Mug.
The NSA and IRS spyware interrupted each other calling home and causing a Denial of Service.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Q: With over 100 contractors building the web site, of those thousands of people what is the likelihood that at least one individual (if not the contracting company) wants, for whatever reason they heard on Fox News, for the Affordable Care Act to fail? A: Pretty damn likely.
Occam answer? Putting TWO men on the moon is easier than insuring 30 MILLION people. Also maybe it would have been better if government actually had done the work. Instead in our mania to privatize EVERYTHING we privatized it out to a Canadian firm. Maybe if we had used our best computer and health people (as we used our best scientists and engineers for Apollo) it would have been better. Besides we need to look at the long view, not the 30 seconds of fame. A lot of people have died in the space program.
I worked at a company that lived off it's US government contracts, and they were all HHS. And maybe it's just HHS, but the whole way they do contracts is messed up, in my opinion. If it wasn't for a few people in the contracting community the abuse and waste would be so bad nothing would get done. And everyone knows it, but no one says anything because rocking the boat is the easiest way to get tossed out. I saw a web site developed with no technical oversight of the subcontractor, no milestones set, very limited testing, and then days before being turned up, canceled by the government. Development, equipment, facilities, all for nothing. But everyone got paid. The preceding is my opinion and in no way represents anything...
Already the excuses and looking for others to blame on it's failure. It was a democratic majority congress and the president that created passed and that continues to execute this bill. It was his dream team of experts in health care and economics that created it.
* Adaptec - Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired. (forward caste)
* AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009) (forward caste)
* AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot). (forward caste)
* Apple - R CLOSED in India in 2006. (forward caste)
* Australia's National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in 2007, nationwide ATM and account failure in late 2010). (forward caste)
* Bell Labs (Arun Netravalli took over, closed, turned into a shopping mall) (forward caste)
* Boeing Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL, banned by FAA) (forward caste)
* Bristol-Myers-Squibb (Trade Secrets and documents stolen in U.S. by Indian national guest worker) (forward caste)
* Caymas - Startup run by Indian CEO, French director of dev, Chinese tech lead. Closed after 5 years of sucking VC out of America. (forward caste)
* Caterpillar misses earnings a mere 4 months after outsourcing to India, Inc. (forward caste)
* Circuit City - Outsourced all IT to Indian-run IBM and went bankrupt shortly thereafter.(forward caste)
* ComAir crew system run by 100% Indian IT workers caused the 12/25/05 U.S. airport shutdown when they used a short int instead of a long int (forward caste)
* Deloitte - 2010 - this Indian-packed consulting company is being sued under RICO fraud charges by Marin Country, California for a failed solution. (forward caste)
* Dell - call center (closed in India) (forward caste)
* Delta call centers (closed in India) (forward caste)
* Fannie Mae - Hired large numbers of Indians, had to be bailed out. Indian logic bomb creator found guilty. (forward caste)
* GM - Was booming in 2006, signed $300 million outsourcing deal with Wipro that same year, went bankrupt 3 years later (forward caste)
* HSBC ATMs (software taken over by Indians, failed in 2006) (forward caste)
* Intel Whitefield processor project (cancelled, Indian staff canned) (forward caste)
* Lehman (Spectramind software bought by Wipro, ruined, trashed by Indian programmers) (forward caste)
* Medicare - Defrauded by Indian national doctor Arun Sharma & wife in the U.S. (forward caste)
* Microsoft - Employs over 35,000 H-1Bs. Stock used to be $100. Today it's lucky to be over $25. Not to mention that Vista thing. (forward caste)
* MIT Media Lab Asia (canceled) (forward caste)
* PeopleSoft (Taken over by Indians in 2000, collapsed). (forward caste)
* PepsiCo - Slides from #1 to #3 during Indian CEO Indra Nooyi' watch. (forward caste)
* Polycom - Former senior executive Sunil Bhalla charged with insider trading. (forward caste)
* Qantas - See AirBus above (forward caste)
* Quark (Alukah Kamar CEO, fired, lost 60% of its customers to Adobe because Indian-written QuarkExpress 6 was a failure) (forward caste)
* Rolls Royce (Sent aircraft engine work to India in 2006, engines delayed for Boeing 787, and failed on at least 2 Quantas planes in 2010, cost Rolls $500m). (forward caste)
* SAP - Same as Deloitte above in 2010. (forward caste)
* Skype (Madhu Yarlagadda fired) (forward caste)
* State of Indiana $867 million FAILED IBM project, IBM being sued (forward caste)
* State of Texas failed IBM project. (forward caste)
* Sun Micro (Taken over by Indian and Chinese workers in 2001, collapsed, had to be sold off to Oracle). (forward caste)
* UK's NHS outsourced numerous jobs including health records to India in mid-2000 resulting in $26 billion over budget. (forward caste)
* Union Bank of California - Cancelled Finacle project run by India's InfoSys in 2011.(forward caste)
* United - call center (closed in Indiay) (forward caste)
* Victorian Order of Nurses, Canada (Payroll system screwed up by SAP/IBM in mid-2011) (forward caste)
* Virgin Atlantic (software written in India caused cloud IT failure) (forward caste)
* World Bank (Indian fraudsters BANNED for 3 years because they stole data). (forward caste)
Without Tort Reform, we won't get medical costs to doing anything but spiral out of control.
Dictating the price of medical care won't do it. The doctors will just stop being doctors if they are losing money.
And unlike the ACA, the astronauts and NASA did not have a President jump in while they were descending to the Moon's surface and say, "Take a slow pass over the Moon for a few hours so everyone can see what it looks like, then go find a place to land".
While our President said at the last moment, "Don't take anyone to the financial areas until we have captured all of their personal data, because they might get scared off by the prices".
The laws of physics are simple compared to trying to corral the fine print of the US health insurance industry. I think my last health insurance policy was 300 pages of legalese gibberish.
They want this to be about Healthcare. So, while we are lamenting the care we used to have we won't have noticed that we just gave Big Brother all the information he needs to pick each and everyone of the Worker's pockets.
THIS WHOLE EXERCISE IS NOT ABOUT HEALTHCARE.
It is about control over the populace. With the information you provide to get healthcare, they will have all data need to use against you any time they choose.
The average person has no idea the data-mining that will go on with that database.
While I believe that tha ACA web-site and its database are being created by the wrong folks, it is keeping everyone's eye on the web site, and most people aren't even concerned with the security of the data they are placing on this system.\
The Security on this database should be more secure than NSA's most secure storage. And I bet it will be about as secure as posting your information on Twitter or Face Book.
My girlfriend who worked at the IRS for a year, .Net developer, was appalled at the poor quality of the staff. Just saying...
I have worked in both healthcare and the NASA/ von Braun system at Marshall in Huntsville AL. There were no committee's in the RedstoneMercury/Gemini/Apollo days. Von Braun and his project manager Arthur Rudolph were absolute dictators. They knew better and refused to take input from those deemed untrustworthy.
You cannot get rockets that fly where they are supposed by a committee. A committee builds the Space Shuttle embarrassment and the 'International Space Station' science make work projects.
Why would we want to put a website on the moon?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
"Were we directed by Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we would soon want bread."
-- Thomas Jefferson
(Don't know offhand where to find the whole statement, but...
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/screenhunter_159-apr-26-06-08.jpg?w=640 )
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You can have 6 million dollars to build a ($100k) web site, you can hire your friends/family to build it. Your friends and family can then give some of the money back to you (campaign contributions, discount stock, discount realestate, i.e. money laundering).
Nobody cares if the web site actually works, and you all get to keep the money. This is why people do not want to give (more) money to governments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m3NM6ISX_o
The reason it costs $7000/person/year is because corporations and doctors push unnecessary and costly drugs and procedures on gullible consumers
What you're missing is that government protects them from competition.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you had READ the article, you would have learned that government intervened to drive costs up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Which part of "And with ACA, Obama, the crony capitalist in chief, forces us to hand these corporations our money; we can't even opt out of that nonsense anymore by not buying." did you not understand?
gosgog:
2 Reasons...1/. People who go to work for the Govt, primary reason...You can't get fired easily, even if you're a dumbass (most of 'em are)
2/. POLITICIANS run the GOVT...THERE ARE SOME OF THE MOST STUPID PEOPLE ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH...don't believe it? Look at what they just did about the DEFICIT & ARE GONNA DO IT AGIN IN january.