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."

Comments

The answer is SIMPLE

[BreakBad]

SIMPLE != LAWYERS

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[Big Hairy Ian]

Yes imagine a world without lawyers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhkmOThIySc

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[jriding]

It's not the lawyers, it's the developers.

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[jellomizer]

Well it is worse then that. Most Politicians were Lawyers, Every once in a while you may get a Businessman, a Professor or a MD. But most come from the Legal background.

That is a big problem!

How we solve problems is often reflected in our professions.
I am a software architect, to me I see most problems can be solved them differently then an engineer, which is different then how a School teacher would...

All these Lawyers in politics is causing a problem where they don't know of other ways to solve problems and they think the only way to do this is changing the law. While that is part of the governments job, we don't have leaders anymore just a bunch of lawers

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[sycodon]

Lest you forget, Obamacare is a Democrat invention. Lock, Stock, and Barrel. They wrote it, they passed it, they implemented it.

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right.

I have regular work conversations with a lawyer, and she's always trying to put a law or regulatory frame on every single technology or related activity (which is where our company does business). I can understand it, to a point. People are always talking about how Technology moves in one direction and Law is always playing catch-up, and when that happens or, *gasp*, Law actually leap-frogs Tech, then things start to get really messy. They say their trying to make things fair for everyone, but in reality they're bowing down to lobbyists interests.

It's like in that HHGTTG book (I forget which one) where those people hadn't invented the wheel yet because they couldn't decide what colour it should be.

I also had a conversation recently with a banker (actually a manager of a local branch office). She said that they were having problems giving out loans to businesses. One one hand, the businesses they could give a loan, don't need it; and those that do need it are in no condition to be given a loan. Well, fuck, who made up the terms and conditions for giving out loans? I thought it was the banks (followed by gov't law and regs), they ought to be able to change the rules...one would think.

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[LynnwoodRooster]

Well it is worse then that. Most Politicians were Lawyers, Every once in a while you may get a Businessman, a Professor or a MD. But most come from the Legal background.

And even worse, those few politicians who were businessmen or doctors are the ones most reviled during economic or healthcare related debates... I mean, we can't trust people who have actual experience in the issue being debated, that might show the rest of the politicians in a bad light!

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[ColdWetDog]

Of course "Obamacare" looks almost exactly like "Romneycare" which was a Republican invention.

The problem is that the Republicans and the Democrats are, to a first and second approximation, exactly the same thing. Their minor differences and simply talking points that the media uses to get everybody all riled up. They are both fully capable of taking a good idea and grinding it to death under the weight of confusing mandates, pork, pandering to special groups and general malfeasance.

The devil, of course, is in the details. And the devil is a pretty active fellow these days.

Re: The answer is SIMPLE

[iamhassi]

It's not the lawyers or the developers, it's the fact that Obama was trying to sell insurance instead of telling the experts to figure out a way to provide universal coverage. Obama is a president, he should act presidential, assign the task to the experts and let them do it. Instead Obama tried to take total control and screwed it up bad. At least if he assigned it to someone and they screwed it up he could blame someone, but Obamacare literally has his name all over it

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The thing that's interesting about the 'blame the developers' position is that, in the run-up to the election, it was generally demonstrated that Obama's tech (management) chops were head-and-shoulders above his opponent's. (Obama's election-information-system-thing was called 'Narwhal', Romney's 'Orca'. Arstechnica has some good coverage of the two; but you can google around for other info. In short, though, 'Narwhal' was considered agile, cloud-architecture-oriented, etc, etc, etc, modern buzzwords, and brutally outperformed the competition.)

Given that healthcare reform is Sort of A Big Thing (even if the result he got is basically Romneycare, as it exists in MA from before Romney's conversion to the idea that it threatens the fundamental underpinnings of America), I would have expected that an IT project in support of it would have been running in skunkworks mode from pretty much the moment of the election, if not before, and that absolutely every effort would have been made to assure success.

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[methano]

The answer is simple: Wernher von Braun

You need somebody in charge that knows what it looks like when it's finished.

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[smaddox]

I'm not sure why you received a troll mod, but this is one of those rare cases where Facts != Truth. You absolutely stated facts, but your statements are an incomplete picture which misportrays the truth. The democrats did not have a filibuster-proof 2/3 majority which means they wanted a bill that at least a fraction of the Republicans would support. They thought that by taking Romney's Massachusetts health care plan and using it as the base for a national plan, they would win over Republican support. Of course that was short sighted, because to a politician the politics are far more important than the project. But the point is the ACA was not what the majority of the Democrats wanted - it's simply what they (at least the majority) were willing to compromise for.

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[ShanghaiBill]

they don't know of other ways to solve problems and they think the only way to do this is changing the law.

The other problem with lawyers is that they come from an adversarial profession. They tend to think in terms of winning and losing, rather than mutual benefit. Courts are in the business of slicing up the pie, not making the pie bigger, and certainly not planting some wheat and apple trees so more pies can be made in the future.

So what can we do about it? Many ballots and voter guides list the profession of the candidate. When in doubt, vote for the non-lawyer.

Re: The answer is SIMPLE

[sumdumass]

Obama was trying to sell insurance instead of telling the experts to figure out a way to provide access to healthcare.
FTFY.

You don't neccesarily need insurance to have healthcare. You do not need to foot the bill for those who can afford insurance on their own. Over 85% of the population already had insurance so all that was needed was a few tweaks to existing plans like no lifetime limits and make sure those 15% remaining have access when they need it.

This entire ordeal could have been simpler.

Re: The answer is SIMPLE

[satch89450]

Everyone is missing the point. The space program was done one step at a time, finishing each step before moving on to the next. Yes, this is "waterfall" thinking, but in the space program it was the right way to do it. Properly done, the agile approach could also have been used in the moon program, as long as the result is that the final push is composed of fully-tested and vetted pieces. (Could it be that the agile approach was indeed used? People closer to the facts can answer that.)

The reason to have multiple contractors is to allow development of different parts to be done in parallel. The key to success with broad development is a really, really good architect specing the interfaces, and each people/group showing that their stuff works as specified at the interfaces. Then integration testing becomes a manageable exercise. This includes performance metrics -- at the interfaces. Was that done here? I highly doubt it.

And the Affordable Care Act missed a number of elements that would have made health care affordable. It's isn't about insurance, it's about the total experience. And Congress bungled it. At least, those people in Congress who were allowed to contribute did. What was wrong with stepwise refinement?

Re: The answer is SIMPLE

[KingMotley]

the agile approach could also have been used in the moon program

I'd hate to be the astronaut used when you begin your first unit tests. Especially the ones that happen before the '...and get back home alive' sprint happens.

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[sackvillian]

The other problem with lawyers is that they come from an adversarial profession. They tend to think in terms of winning and losing, rather than mutual benefit. Courts are in the business of slicing up the pie, not making the pie bigger, and certainly not planting some wheat and apple trees so more pies can be made in the future.

Exactly. Someone once said that the whole trouble with having lawyers in charge is that lawyers are paid to arbitrarily pick a position, then argue for that position come hell, highwater, or new information. They don't typically have any incentive (or even the opportunity) to pick the right position -- they go with the view they've been paid to represent.

Scientists, engineers, and practically everyone else are instead expected to come to the right answer based on the objectively best evidence available. And if that evidence changes, so should the position. The lawyer-approach wouldn't cure a patient or get an airplane off the ground, why does anyone expect it to be suited to running a government?

The reason is private insurance

[Chalnoth]

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.

Re:The reason is private insurance

[sweatyboatman]

there's nothing complicated about integrating the federal income and identity verification with state eligibility systems and dozens or hundreds of private insurers systems, ensuring that no information "leaks out" and that everything works in real time? There's nothing complicated about that?

It should have worked. It didn't. That's life. Remember when Slashdot rolled out its new commenting system? That sucked. We all complained. Now it works fine and nobody thinks about it. But I don't remember anyone arguing that it was a sign that private web companies were incapable of designing functional websites.

Re:The reason is private insurance

[Waffle Iron]

Note that the Affordable Care act is now resposible for far more people losing their plans

That's good.

Everybody should lose their employee-sponsored plans. Everybody should make their own choices and buy their own insurance Tying health coverage to employment is idiotic, and has become a modern-day form of feudalism.

Re:The reason is private insurance

[melikamp]

From http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/what-kind-problem-aca-rollout-liberalism

The biggest front-end problem is that users, before they can register, must “cross a busy digital junction in which data are swapped among separate computer systems built or run by contractors.”

Why is that? It is because the government needs to determine how much of a coupon it’ll write each person to go and buy private insurance. Beyond the philosophical components of means-testing (what the philosopher Jonathan Wolff calls “shameful revelations”), the actual process requires substantial coordination between multiple government agencies with very different infrastructures.

As the GAO notes, “the data hub is to verify an applicant’s Social Security number with the Social Security Administration (SSA), and to access the data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that are needed to assess the applicant’s income, citizenship, and immigration status. The data hub is also expected to access information from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Department of Defense (DOD), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and Peace Corps to enable exchanges to determine if an applicant is eligible for insurance coverage from other federal programs that would make them ineligible for income-based financial subsidies.”

Rather than just being an example of bureaucratic infighting, each of these pieces of information is necessary to determine how aggressively the government should subsidize the private insurance individuals will buy, and the entire process will stall and fall apart if one of these checks isn’t completed quickly.

This by itself might not be a problem; however, the second issue is that the means-testing is necessary to link individuals up with individual private insurers. As the Washington Post notes, the back-end problems are in part the result of the site being “designed to draw from the offerings of private insurers, each with their own computer systems, rates and offerings.”

Instead of doing it in a cheaper, more straightforward, and more humane manner, representatives insisted that private insurers stay in the mix, and they got exactly the system they wanted. They got a needlessly complicated back-end: a Katamari-like glue ball of various databases, both private and public, all hosted by different entities, and all indispensable by law. So given that the government never had a chance to design or even see significant parts of that system, is it surprising that it is overwhelmed by the initial demand? Not to me. But instead of patiently waiting a few months (which worked for every other massively online game, no matter how fubar the game or the launch was), the plutocracy supporters will now point fingers at Democrats, blaming them for correctly implementing what used to be the Republican vision of healthcare just a few years ago.

Re:The reason is private insurance

[Waffle Iron]

And your point is?

If you lose your job, there's a big difference between losing some service upgrades and being thrown under the bus.

Re:The reason is private insurance

[DerekLyons]

The problem is, that 'Everybody' includes people like me who had their own plans - not just those with employer sponsored plans. I'm losing my plan because I simply can't afford the rate hike. (Actually, my research to date indicates that I may no longer be able to afford health care at all - and I don't qualify for any kind of a subsidy.) The problems that grandparent alluded to are under reported and very fucking real, and jackass replies like yours don't help.
 
It's looking more and more that if my wife's employer does keep their plan, I'll have to go on her plan - worse yet, while I won't save all that much money... the benefits and services will be sharply curtailed compared to what I currently receive.

Re:The reason is private insurance

[Waffle Iron]

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.

Assumes we still could do that moon thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Assumes we still could do that moon thing

[hort_wort]

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?

We could just have someone climb the paperwork?

Apollo 1? Apollo 13?

[sweatyboatman]

Our efforts to land on the moon didn't go smoothly. Also we spent a lot more money to go to the moon.

Apollo 1 was scheduled to be the first manned mission of the U.S. Apollo manned lunar landing program, with a target launch date of February 21, 1967. A cabin fire during a launch pad test on January 27 at Launch Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral killed all three crew members—Command Pilot Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White II and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee—and destroyed the Command Module (CM).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon... but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module (CM) depended. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13

Complex problems are complex.

NASA isn't a private contractor

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

apollo took almost a decade

[alen]

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

Imagine

[sacrilicious]

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."

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.

This is why

[Chas]

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.

Its about the Sum of the Parts [gt] Whole.

[Bucc5062]

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)

Re: What ?

[drewsup]

Yup, just ask the UK how the NHS upgrade went, 16 Billion spent and then pulled the plug.

Why not?

[T.E.D.]

Anywhere from 30 to 70% of large IT projects fail, depending on who you ask. Why would the US Government be immune?

Re:What ?

[darkwing_bmf]

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.

Ummm...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:What ?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

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.

$136 Billion in Today's Dollars

[sweatyboatman]

NASA's budget peaked in the period 1964-1966, during the height of construction efforts leading up to the first moon landing under Project Apollo which involved more than 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 employees of industrial and university contractors. Roughly 4% of the total federal budget was being devoted to the space program.

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.

Gov. Purchasing is the Real Problem

[heavyion]

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.

Re:What ?

[MickyTheIdiot]

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.

Re:No-Bid contract to cronies perhaps?

[haapi]

$700M? $800M? A Beeellion dollars? This mis-attributed number seems to keep going up and up.
$634 million is the sum of all contracts let to CGI over seven years, not the amount expended on the web site.

Re:What ?

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Some perspective is needed

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:What ?

[ebno-10db]

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.

Re:Affordable medical care? We had it.

[ebno-10db]

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?

Re:Sabotage

[ebno-10db]

You voted commie, you got commie.

I appreciate self-parody.

Re:Congress....

[Rob the Bold]

Hence a major reason not to federalize a lot of power.

In this particular case, it was the states themselves that "federalized" the power -- only 14 of the 50* decided to set up their own exchanges, the rest decided it best to leave it to the feds for one reason or another. And some of them are doing a better job than the federal program.

*This number varies by source, I think because some states are setting up their own systems but not yet.

Flamebait

[pesho]

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.

Why can't journalists work without hyperbole??

[kaizendojo]

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.

Re:What ?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

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.

Re:What ?

[amRadioHed]

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.

Re:What ?

[digitrev]

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.

Re:What ?

[dkleinsc]

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.

Ask Doctors ...

[perpenso]

... 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.

Re:Ask Doctors ...

[radtea]

You should talk to Doctors. They seem to have a quite different opinion of Medicare

You should also look at world-wide comparisons. Medicare and other public healthcare programs in the US account for more dollars per capita spent than all or almost all universal health-care systems in other countries, and deliver lousy results comparatively.

Canada--with our nominally single-tier, public, single-payer health care system--has longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and better outcomes by any number of other measures. Critics (sometimes justly) focus on input measures like wait-times, but at the end of the day what matters is that we are getting health care and getting good outcomes. We aren't even the best in the world--just middling-decent as these things go.

So the real question is not "why can't government launch a website" but "why can't the US Federal government, alone amongst all governments in all developed nations, provide a reasonable level of basic, universal health care at costs comparable to those in every other developed nation on Earth?"

This isn't a "government" problem. It is a uniquely American problem, and the solution does not lie in any general ideological fix, but in the detailed structure of the specifically American, particularly broken, Federal government.

Re:Single payer

[ebno-10db]

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.

Not that easy to blame the contractors

[daninaustin]

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.

Re:Not that easy to blame the contractors

[davidannis]

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.

Actually, a lot of that delay was to try to accommodate Republican state legislatures and Governors in the hopes that they would step up to the plate and create state run exchanges. In my state (Michigan) the Republican Governor fought the Republican Legislature to be able to build our own exchange but lost.

Re:Not that easy to blame the contractors

[Jane Q. Public]

"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. "

That's a good excuse... and might even be part of the reason. But it's sure not the whole reason.

I downloaded some of the JavaScript code directly from the site, and it was truly awful. I'm talking chock-full of first-day-in-javascript-class level errors. I simply have a hard time believing that anybody got paid for doing that. And let's be clear: I'm not talking about "Oh, no, I'm on a tight deadline so I goofed" kind of errors. I am literally saying somebody-who-doesn't-know-shit-about-javascript errors.

Of course, the Senior VP of CGI used to be a classmate of Michelle Obama. I suppose that just maybe that could have had something to do with it.

---

Re:Not that easy to blame the contractors

[I'm New Around Here]

That is just too bad for the admiistration. When over half the states declared that they were not going to implement their own exchange, and the federal government would have to do so, the federal government had two options: build the exchange sites for those states, or rescind Obamacare as being too burdensome for them to handle.

They chose the first option, and then completely botched the job. Don't blame people who didn't agree to play ball in a rigged game.

Re: Not that easy to blame the contractors

[Jane Q. Public]

"Requirement changes due to red states not implementing exchanges and their legislatures making any state assistance illegal constituted the majority of the development issues."

No, they didn't. Repeat: I *SAW* some of their code. (In was from the registration page, in fact.) And it was just plain bad. Quite literally terrible, inept programming. You would actually have to consciously try in order to do worse.

There may have been other contributing factors, but the plain truth is that they did a very poor job on the website.

An open, transparent, bipartisan process ...

[perpenso]

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.

Re:An open, transparent, bipartisan process ...

[Karl Cocknozzle]

If we had the open, transparent, and bipartisan (seats at the table for Republicans) process promised then things would have gone quite different.

Now who's being revisionist? We tried that: Every time the GOP was invited to participate they howled about death panels. Every time they were asked for an alternate plan they babbled incoherently about a "Free market system" without illuminating us as to how to implement such a thing in real life. I'm not sure how many opportunities they should have been extended.

It's easy to say they "should have been included," and, indeed, they should have been, but their non-involvement comes from their own choices, though. In effect they essentially eliminated themselves from the serious conversation by saying such radical and easily disproven nonsense, and are now whining about not being included even though they excluded themselves from the proceedings.

I count at least three, maybe four (depending on semantics) major pushes to get GOP support for this law. Two of them were the "Olympia Snowe-job" and the "Grassley Gambit," wherein the named senators entered (in bad faith) into talks about writing a healthcare reform law for the purpose of dragging out the proceedings even-longer-than-they'd-already-gone-on because they knew full-well they 1) Weren't going to vote for anything Obama supported and 2) They also knew the democrats were desperate to get even one Republican to sign-on and take part, and the democrats (somehow, despite being slapped in the face with evidence daily for months) still hadn't figured out that the GOP had no intention of "governing" by reforming healthcare, but every intention of "stymieing" Obama, whatever idea he brought to the table.

There was also the summit, where the GOP basically said "free-market, rah rah!" but didn't offer any plan. Hey, a free market is a lovely idea: How about some concrete suggestions on having it 1) Actually exist int he real world (i.e. "How to get there from here,") without 2) Taking us through a radical "shakeout" period where "the market" decides the best answer to the question "How much does life-saving treatment cost?" is "How much you got?" and 3) Do both #1 and #2 without locking out millions of poor people from access to care.

And, of course, the main evidence that suggests the GOP would have adamantly, vehemently opposed anything the President proposed is their own words, the day after the inauguration. They'd already decided on this course before there was an ACA--they already decided they would lock-step oppose anything the Obama administration tried to accomplish--short of him changing over to the GOP mid-term, anyway.

Wrong premise

[Kythe]

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.

Re:What ?

[bluefoxlucid]

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."

Re:yeah, those bastards

[Tablizer]

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.

Include the opposition? They just go Chicken Little over fake scandals like "Death Panels" and have sworn in blood to kill it at any cost, including shutting down the country.

Politics is an ugly game, and sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. It's unfortunate, but what do you expect from a bunch of (mostly) hairless apes?