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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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
never heard of walter mondale, have you? senator and one time presidential candidate tried to kill apollo.
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!
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.
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.
The Apollo program did not have one party actively trying to sabotage it.
Ultimately it did. The last three moon missions were cancelled. Luckily Skylab kept it from being a total loss.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I guess it's kinda fun to force the children to enter the house through the pigsty and then blame them for dragging shit in.
That surely enables an happy family.
Well, there should be 50 web sites, one for each state. But 34 (or 36?) states decided they didn't want to do it, so healthcare.gov had to be extended to handle way more states than they expected. If I go to look for MA or NY, I don't have to sign in, I just get redirected to the state exchange which operates separately.
Please explain with detailed examples how Republican speeches and failed votes in the House to defund ACA affected the implementation of the web site.
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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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.
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.
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?
You voted commie, you got commie.
I appreciate self-parody.
You wonder how people like Stalin and Hitler came to power huh?
That explains the brutal dictatorships of Canada, Japan, Australia, and all of Western Europe, since they all have universal health care.
P.S. What color is the sky in your world?
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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
... 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.
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).
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.
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?
Single payer means the government has 100% control of all health care, regardless of what anyone says differently.
Forget your ideological fantasies and stick to the facts. Name a country with universal health care where you can't get what you want by paying for medical services yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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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."
Most Americans can't work their way up the "corporate ladder". I keep hearing the phrase repeated: "It's about who you know, not what you know" repeated to describe how one becomes successful. And, indeed, it is very much that way; your college degree is just a required paper (much as a driver's license when you want to buy alcohol). It doesn't confer anything about knowledge, but if you have that and you know the hiring manager you've got yourself a job...and sometimes they'll even dispense with the formal requirements based on who you know. I should know, that's how I got my current job.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
"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.
> '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.
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.
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.
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.