Tech Titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google To Help Fix Healthcare.gov

wjcofkc writes "The United States Government has officially called in the calvary over the problems with Healthcare.gov. Tech titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google have been tapped to join the effort to fix the website that went live a month ago, only to quickly roll over and die. While a tech surge of engineers to fix such a complex problem is arguably not the greatest idea, if you're going to do so, you might as well bring in the big guns. The question is: can they make the end of November deadline?"

Comments

Answer: No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.

Re:Answer: No.

[BasilBrush]

Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.

True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.

Defect fixing is indeed somewhat scalable.

Re:Answer: No.

[Virtucon]

No but I heard 18 Women can do it in two weeks. The guy from Infosys told me so.

Re:Answer: No.

[turkeydance]

the Mythical Man Month returns

Re:Answer: No.

[dmbasso]

It all depends on the quality of the existing code base. More often than not, it's better to start from scratch.

Re:Answer: No.

[ebno-10db]

That only works in Bangalore.

Re:Answer: No.

[Ol Olsoc]

That only works in Bangalore.

Bang-a-Lot?

Re:Answer: No.

[MightyMartian]

The last time I had to "re-architect" an existing website, I ended up putting in roughly twice the amount of time as the original "architects" (and I use that word very very loosely). Believe me, there's a lot of shit out there that will require a lot more effort to fix than originally went into building it.

Re:Answer: No.

[sexconker]

there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system

You've never worked on anything with multiple teams working on different parts, have you?
It never fucking works. You need knowledgeable oversight.

Re:Answer: No.

[Frojack123]

True, But...

With Oracle doing JUST the database,
And Google and Redhat handling the server Cloud
and Google fixing the bugs in the existing code or rewriting large segments
it could conceivably get done in time, because it is just a software system with a web presence, not a baby.

Unlike a baby, you can LEGALLY dump the stillbirth into the trash and start over.

Re:Answer: No.

[Frojack123]

The last time I had to "re-architect" an existing website, I ended up putting in roughly twice the amount of time as the original "architects" (and I use that word very very loosely). Believe me, there's a lot of shit out there that will require a lot more effort to fix than originally went into building it.

Good thing they brought a "lot more effort" to bear then.
Not only more, but higher quality.

Re:Answer: No.

[icebike]

Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.

But I bet even one woman could spell cavalry, and know the difference.

Slashdot editors wanted. No Experience needed. We wouldn't know what to do with experience if we tripped over it.

Re:Answer: No.

[MightyMartian]

Yes, because it's likely they'll have to put as much effort into fixing it as the original designers, if not more.

Re:Answer: No.

[MightyMartian]

Exactly. I think the Linux kernel is a damned good example of how a large number of developers working in very different kinds of development environments, some working in side-projects like Netfilter, are coordinated by one guy intimately acquainted with the kernel.

You can say what you like about Linus's attitude at times, but the fact that the Linux kernel is running on everything from supercomputers to be Nexus 7 tablet tells you that there is a way to successfully and productively organize multiple teams to produce a successful software product.

Re:Answer: No.

[Jstlook]

My wife saw that book on my shelf last night and asked if it was related to a man's period. I had to chuckle.

Re:Answer: No.

[cold fjord]

.... with a vengeance. And this time, its personal .... health insurance that's at stake.

At least the stakes are low. No worries.

Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare

Re:Answer: No.

[Frojack123]

Yes, because it's likely they'll have to put as much effort into fixing it as the original designers, if not more.

Lets hope so.
Or lets hope they have the common sense to start over.

Re:Answer: No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok! But afterwards, why don't you bottom for 9 men and we'll also see if you produce a butt baby in 1 month!

Or are you just a sexist asshole?

Re:Answer: No.

[Anonymous Coward]

That article is so full of contradictory statements it's ridiculous. Which isn't to say I'm defending the excessively sugar-coated defenses the administration made in 2010. But 94 million is an upper limit, and it's mostly composed of private insurers and private companies purposefully choosing to change coverage, not because the law mandates it.

And let's not forget about the 20-40 million people who will be unable to keep their lack of insurance coverage. What's the difference between being uninsured and underinsured? Maybe I should be allowed to get a car insurance policy with a $100 limit. I mean, freedom, right?

If you want to diss the ACA, then diss it on its merits.

I hate taxes as much as the next guy. More, in fact. My combined income is over $240k/year, almost all earned income, so its taxed heavily. It's a gigantic bitch. But you know what? I grew up in poverty, in foster homes. I benefited from a safety net. And the elder members of my family all depend on some sort of government assistance. So I just suck it up, because as the extremely conservative Justice Holmes once said, taxes are the price of civilization. And this civilization let's me make almost a quarter of a million per year. You think I could make that in Mexico, Brazil, or China?

The penalties for having no insurance are is like $150/year. If you can't afford that, then you have bigger problems--and in any event, if you couldn't afford it the government would pay for it.

Re:Answer: No.

[erroneus]

Interestingly said.

Even if by some miracle, they bring something up, it doesn't fix the actual problems. Ridiculously increased rates, it's a new tax on everyone, lies about keeping one's old policy and a general over-all burdon on the remaining who are employed above the poverty line.

Re:Answer: No.

[s.petry]

You are not saying the same thing as the person you responded to, not even close.

Re:Answer: No.

[kimvette]

> True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.

You are assuming that there is a detailed (and accurate) functional spec, design spec, and that the code is organized and well-documented - and that it is architected in such a manner that throwing more engineers at it will actually fix the problem. More often than not, that is not the case.

Re:Answer: No.

[Fluffeh]

They didn't mean like horses and stuff... Wow, they like totally meant Calvary - cause that's like the most common saying ever, you know, calling in the ancient name for Golgotha, the place just outside Jerusalem. You and your horses.... cavalry indeed. Preposterous!

*sips coffee*

Re:Answer: No.

[ebno-10db]

the Mythical Man Month returns

It never went away.

Re:Answer: No.

[craigminah]

...and let's hope the US Government has enough sense to not pay the clowns who built that FUBARed website. Interesting Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website and won the contract in a rare no-bid contract. Very fishy...

Re: Answer: No.

[Nikker]

All of these companies make packaged solutions. It would be like taking a Ford motor, Toyota transmission and Honda body and hiring engineers to put it together. It doesn't make the job easier. When you bring in engineers they all have the same basic skills but have specialties due to their day to day workloads. They can tell you how their software works but it doesn't mean they can just 'fix' your software.

Re:Answer: No.

[Runaway1956]

Higher quality? I dunno - how do you measure quality when you're comparing a sack of feces with a basket of beautiful red strawberries? I mean, the sack of feces may be high quality, as fertilizer!!

Re:Answer: No.

[Runaway1956]

What? You're saying that possession of a degree, doesn't make him competent in anything? *GASP* The shock!!

Re:Answer: No.

[MillerHighLife21]

Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.

True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.

Defect fixing is indeed somewhat scalable.

I don't have mod points, but you are correct sir.

Re:Answer: No.

[BitZtream]

No.

Almost universally in software development, starting from scratch is a stupid fucking idea repeated by inexperienced developers.

Now a bunch of slashdot will tell me I'm wrong, but that doesn't change the previous statement, just reenforces it.

Re:Answer: No.

[Snotnose]

But only if they're Indian or Chinese women, American women are too lazy.

Re:Answer: No.

[msauve]

Defect fixing is indeed somewhat scalable.

It depends on whether the defects are in architecture or implementation.

Re:Answer: No.

[funwithBSD]

Nuke it from orbit, it is the only way to be sure.

Re:Answer: No.

[funwithBSD]

The Mythical Man Month Strikes Back?

Re:Answer: No.

[funwithBSD]

Someone is going to be crucified before this is over...

Re:Answer: No.

[DigiShaman]

Being that
1: this code was already created by inexperienced developers.
2: anything created from the group of these titans will by default be superior work compared to the last guys.

Re:Answer: No.

[I'm New Around Here]

Well, the basket of beautiful red strawberries will become feces soon, so may as well go for that option.

Re:Answer: No.

[I'm New Around Here]

...because Linus doesn't provide "knowledgeable oversight" to kernel development?

Methinks the "senior" in your title applies in the same sense as "senior moment."

Quoted so the Anonymous get heard.

Re:Answer: No.

[RulerOf]

You can say what you like about Linus's attitude at times, but the fact that the Linux kernel is running on everything from supercomputers to be Nexus 7 tablet tells you that there is a way to successfully and productively organize multiple teams to produce a successful software product.

It seems to me that he's blunt frequently because he's probably one of the busiest developers alive.

If people were given awards for "keeping up" with email, he'd probably be in the hall of fame :P

Re:Answer: No.

[recharged95]

But all 3 companies listed will have those rock stars that will:
a. look at the code and call is rubbish.
b. ask to rewrite the whole thing
c. charge an arm and a leg to do it within time.
d. run it under agile (so THEY control the requirements, not the domain experts).

Really they should have hired the guys that do turbotax and such.... it works for the type of users on this healthcare system. The above 3 will struggle through it as well... but will milk it for all it's worth.

All I say to the Obamacare management team & Obama: TAKE A STEP BACK, WAIT.... ASSESS THE PROBLEMS one by one, THEN HIRE THE RIGHT FOLKS. This is a knee jerk reaction and will go down in flames. Of course, the valley and wall street is loving it....

Young MBA folks: this is your Y2K computer problem moment. Remember those times: the panic, the flooding of cash, and nothing happened afterall? Yeah, get ready for another internet boom/bust.

Re:Answer: No.

[couchslug]

I'd not mind seeing vidyas of the effort!

Re:Answer: No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rare? Nearly every government contract offered to the private sector since Bush took office has been no-bid. Remember the deals made during the Iraq War? Every single one of those was no-bid to Halliburton. This kind of cronyism is NOT rare at all; it is the norm, and has been for over a decade.

Re:Answer: No.

[Beeftopia]

Almost universally in software development, starting from scratch is a stupid fucking idea repeated by inexperienced developers.

For working, debugged, stable code that looks messy, that's almost always true. But this site failed immediately when put under load.

Now, if the site logic for ONE user is sound, then they could preserve that and put in the infrastructure needed to handle the sheer electricity of thousands of requests per minute. That's what Google is known for, with their vast datacenters and ability to load balance. Oracle is known for databases able to handle high concurrent transaction loads. Red Hat can provide support on a reliable, robust operating system (Linux).

For 654 million dollars, hopefully the government got the logic and blueprints down for how one user is supposed to progress. Now, the folks who know how to handle the sheer electrical volume of the massive numbers of connections can perhaps install that missing, essential portion of the website. IF of course, the design and logic of the site for one user is sound.

Re:Answer: No.

[Fluffeh]

But be back with more wiseass comments in three days...

Re:Answer: No.

[cold fjord]

Taxes may very well be the price of civilization, but what those taxes are spent on may be efficient and valuable, or destructive and wasteful. They can build bridges that are needed, and in a useful place, or expensive bridges to nowhere. The ACA is proving to be badly thought out, badly implemented, justified by lies, and seems to be headed towards being a train wreck for the American people, the economy, the healthcare industry, and even the Democratic party. It is already driving many jobs out of the medical devices industry. There are other ways this 15% shortfall could have been addressed, but the party with the power decided they wanted to build another "bridge to nowhere" and now are forcing the American people over the bridge.

The article isn't full of "contradictory statements," if it was I'm sure you could quote some. The insurance companies aren't changing coverage because they want to, but because the law is forcing them to. If anyone is contradicting themselves, it is you. On one hand you want to claim that large numbers of people won't be able to stay uninsured, but your last paragraph reflects the minor penalty for noncompliance which means it will be far cheaper to stay out of insurance than sign up. The kicker is that the only way for the IRS to force you to pay the penalty tax is if they owe you a refund. Noncompliance is likely to be a huge issue since the people needed to make the numbers work are the young and healthy that often don't have insurance now - by choice. Given the low and barely enforceable penalty they are unlikely to sign up in the numbers that are needed to make the Obamacare redistribution scheme work. Planned failure?

The Spanish site has never worked, and I doubt anyone knows when it will work. Spanish speaking people in the US are one of the key underinsured groups. What can you say when a major ethnic group is essentially left out of a major government plan that is supposedly critical, that can't be delayed to make it actually work? If the administration in power was Republican, I have little doubt the epithet "racist" would get quite a workout.

It is hard to believe that just a few short weeks ago the Democrats were fighting tooth and nail to prevent any additional waivers or delays for Obamacare despite the fact that it was well known by those involved that the key IT systems weren't ready. Now they are in a panic to get delays or extensions in place to try get it working in some fashion.

As it is now, probably millions more people have been informed that their insurance policies are being canceled than have been able to sign up for Obamacare. That problem is only going to get worse as the article shows. Much, much worse in fact. Many people that were advocates of it are getting hit with sticker shock when they do sign up. This won't be pretty.

I'm happy for you that you claim to have worked your way up from poverty, that you benefited from the various safety nets, and that you have elder members of your family. But none of that is a guide to knowing if any particular plan by the government is sound and will have the intended effect. There has been more than one government program in US history that had unfortunate consequences. The ACA, aka Obamacare, seems to be heading in that direction. Will you support it regardless of how bad a train wreck it becomes when there are alternatives?

Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if you do support it regardless of it becoming a massive train wreck. The one bright spot is this is for once someone in Washington clearly owns the disaster, and might see some consequences for it.

Poll Finds Vast Gaps in Basic Views

Re:Answer: No.

[clockwise_music]

You sir, are 100% correct.

Re:Answer: No.

[elashish14]

Correct. It would take closer to 5...

Re:Answer: No.

[Nefarious Wheel]

It was about the transposition of The Man Who Sold The Moon to the development of a text editor, wasn't it? 'Been so long, think I'd better dust it off again...

Re:Answer: No.

[elashish14]

More likely than not, there are likely components which will have to be entirely rewritten. While many of the bugs are trivial defects, it looks like in many areas, the design is just inherently flawed at the root. Particularly seeing the performance issues, I can't help but believe that it's just fundamentally architected in a very poor way, and while there might be quick hacks to at least get it standing, it won't really be functioning properly without seriously ripping out the internals.

But let's take a wait-and-see approach, now that we're calling the competent engineers in....

Re:Answer: No.

[Nefarious Wheel]

I just had a look at healthcare.gov. Not a lot to show in the page source, but doesn't that page trailer look a lot like one of the open-source content management systems? Very Joomla! or Drupalish. If the content is in MySQL (/huge assumption) I do not wish to be insulting, but I can see how Oracle would very likely be an improvement...

Re:Answer: No.

[Bite The Pillow]

Have all contributors be personally invested. From the unemployed hacker to the red hat ceo, everyone in linux wants it to work. It is more than a paycheck.
Can you do that with this site? No. Not even close. You have to hire intelligently, over many years.
It is possible. But how much development cost went into linux?
How much went into what Linus or tenenbaum rejected? Work that was done, in other words, but discarded?
We have to count that for comparison, and it won't be pretty.

Re:Answer: No.

[theshowmecanuck]

I like the 'almost' part of your answer. Do you think it applies here?

Re:Answer: No.

[theshowmecanuck]

What if it's the architecture that is completely fucked?

Re:Answer: No.

[theshowmecanuck]

Your sarcasm warms my heart. And I wasn't being sarcastic.

Re:Answer: No.

[VortexCortex]

Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.

No, but they can produce one baby per month if staggered properly. Have a look at any country's birth rate. There are literally tons of babies born every single day.

This is how I explained our multi-core processors to the aliens... They'll be back once a majority of births are twins.

Re:Answer: No.

[mysidia]

Almost universally in software development, starting from scratch is a stupid fucking idea repeated by inexperienced developers.

When the code is an unsalvageable pile of crap; sometimes it does make more sense, to reevaluate the design, and re-implement the entire application properly, using the old code only as a reference; than to try and repair.

Re:Answer: No.

[mysidia]

b. ask to rewrite the whole thing

Seeing as it's Oracle, Redhat, and Google.... the application will probably be:

Rewritten to run on Oracle Java, throwing away that old Visual-Basic code.

Leverage Google AppEngine and BigTable for data storage, instead of the Microsoft Access-based backend

Run on 64-bit Redhat Enterprise Linux servers, instead of 32-bit Windows 2003 and XP servers running IIS

In other words..... it ought to be a smashing success

Re:Answer: No.

[ctishman]

I was under the impression that nothing happened because they poured a lot of money into fixing old systems for 4-digit years before they screwed up, not that nothing would have happened if they'd let it be.

Re:Answer: No.

[gweihir]

In fact, all these companies will do is a turf-war and hence things might even be worse when they are done.

Re:Answer: No.

[gweihir]

Fixing defects in a convoluted mess is _harder_ than writing it new from scratch with a better structure and design.

Re:Answer: No.

[gtall]

If they used agile to build it, they are already screwed beyond repair. Agile only results in a dirty snowball of a system for large systems. And this sounds like agile too. They clearly did not architect for volume...oops.

Re:Answer: No.

[fatphil]

Until google step up and say they can solve it all with map-reduce...

Re:Answer: No.

[langarto]

True, but once you get up to speed, they can give you almost a baby each month. Assuming no twins, you could get 9 babies in 17 months, and if you keep going, 52 in 50 months.

Re:Answer: No.

[langarto]

True, but once you get up to speed, they can give you almost a baby each month. Assuming no twins, you could get 9 babies in 17 months, and if you keep going, 52 in 50 months.

Err, I mean 52 in 60 months.

Re:Answer: No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh... Halliburton had sweetheart deals back during LBJ and Vietnam. I understand a "decade" is about as far back as history runs today, but it's really closer to 50 years.

Some would argue that Halliburton really doesn't have any competitors (with the global reach and willingness to go work inside war zones). That may (or may not) be true. But at least the runways (and other shit) they built didn't collapse with the first airplane landing....

Re:Answer: No.

[BlackSnake112]

This is already a massive screw up. Having more teams work on different parts is not a good idea. Too many trams working on separate parts that have to work together. If one teams changes one of the parts that another team uses that can lead to more screw ups. All of the teams have to be on the same page. Starting over is a better option in this case. For the simple reason that the new teams will have met and decided on what each part will do and what each part expects and will hand off to the next part.

Re:Answer: No.

[gutnor]

d. run it under agile (so THEY control the requirements, not the domain experts).

It is sad what Agile has become since becoming mainstrean. It used to be a way to give back the requirement BACK to the domain expert instead of either the developer (bad) or some unrelated department (worse).

It used to give the planning and estimation back to the people actually doing the work, the developer. Now I see job offers for "Project Manager (Scrum Master)" to run an agile team. Sad, very sad.

Re:Answer: No.

[Virtucon]

Shit, don't tell my wife that she'll hit me with the frying pan again.

Re:Answer: No.

[Trailer Trash]

The difference is that there are few companies that can do what Halliburton did, but there are plenty of good software developers.

Re:Answer: No.

[dissy]

Ok, build me a web forum in similar style to slashdot. I've already started.
My code consists of a single FOR loop that never increments or even changes the counter variable.

You MUST use that code exactly as-is - NO changes, no removing it, no bypassing it.
Chop chop!

Oh, and the forum must support unicode :P

Re:Answer: No.

[DragonTHC]

That's a valid analogy for babies.

One person could have designed, programmed, and coded the whole site, including back end in about six months, If that person were skilled.

Instead, HHS and CMS paid multi-million dollar contracts to 3 foreign corporations, who had a year and still couldn't do it.

The site was doomed by salespeople and politicians.

QSSI, who got the contract for the EIDM in 2012, evidently got it working for medicare and medicaid, but this site wasn't even coded or tested right.
CGI Federal executive went to school with Michelle Obama.
Serco, well we all know what happened to serco.

Known issues in week one:
Security questions for creating account not populated in drop-downs.
Security question input failing validation.
Email verification tokens instantly expiring.
EIDM "accidentally" resetting all passwords.
Password recovery emails not finding accounts.
Links to back end oracle database not adequate to handle requests.
AJAX grid abuse causing far more server queries than necessary.
Oracle database not load balanced causing instability.
Application forms not populating.
Application answers not validating.
Application programming errors.
Application coding errors.
Inability to edit application.
Inability to edit family members.
Inability to go backwards in application.
Faulty eligibility information regarding medicaid.

Re:Answer: No.

[CaptainLard]

If the gov decided not to pay the cost of lawsuits brought by the contractors claiming its not their fault may well dwarf the original contract price.

The sad fact is the government ALWAYS pays no matter how big of a disaster a program becomes (or even negligence!). The only tangible repercussions are cheesy corporate produced lessons learned videos that all employees have to watch once a year.

Re:Answer: No.

[judoguy]

How about not implementing this nightmare at all?

This is typical nerd behavior - forget completely what the guillotine is getting ready to do to you and get absorbed in the operating defect! "Wait, I see the problem!"

No, the problem is that this abortion, Obamacare, is getting ready to fuck us all and you're all arguing about how best to load the batteries!

Re:Answer: No.

[khallow]

How about not implementing this nightmare at all?

Not going to happen. Maybe the disease will be the cure.

Re:Answer: No.

[ABEND]

Rare? Nearly every government contract offered to the private sector since Bush took office has been no-bid. Remember the deals made during the Iraq War? Every single one of those was no-bid to Halliburton. This kind of cronyism is NOT rare at all; it is the norm, and has been for over a decade.

I assume "Bush" means George W. Bush. The 43rd President of the United States. He has not been president for almost five years. Anyhow, cronyism existed long before he became president.

On the issue of purported no bid contracts: What services did Halliburton provide for the U.S. Military in Iraq? Who were the likely competitors to provide those services? What services did CGI Federal provide the U.S. Government? Were there any likely competitors (i.e. has anyone else built a website to service millions of customers)?

One more question: Why did congressional Democrats originally vote to support the Iraq War during the Bush administration? Was there some sort of quid pro quo?

Re:Answer: No.

[gymell]

Almost universally in software development, starting from scratch is a stupid fucking idea repeated by inexperienced developers.

Now a bunch of slashdot will tell me I'm wrong, but that doesn't change the previous statement, just reenforces it.

Obviously you've never worked on a project that involved offshore development.

Re:Answer: No.

[ApplePy]

If you can't afford that, then you have bigger problems--and in any event, if you couldn't afford it the government would pay for it.

Government doesn't pay for anything, dumbass. We do. I'm not sure why someone who makes a quarter million annually can't understand this simple concept.

Re:Answer: No.

[MightyMartian]

Oh BS. A kernel is a helluva lot more complex. Big or small, sites like Healthcare.gov are, no matter how you look at it, scripts gluing together database queries. A big job, to be sure, but certainly not one invoking the complexities of a modern-day kernel.

Re:Answer: No.

[johnslater]

Infosys can get a baby here in 1 week on a B1 visa.

Re:Answer: No.

[oldmac31310]

Sounds pretty standard for a .gov site.

Re: Answer: No.

[unixisc]

Congratulations on the car analogy that explains it

Re:Answer: No.

[unixisc]

And then Oracle will push them to use OEL over RHEL, which will then throw up the question of what would the Red Hat guys be doing?

Re:Answer: No.

[StewBaby2005]

1) O.K. it's bad, so they should have gone with a single payer system like every other 'advanced' country, instead of pandering to the GOP and the Insurance Cartel. 2) I hardly think there will be a net loss of jobs in the Insurance industry when we are adding ~20 million people to the roles 3) It's been proven again and again that Medicare is less costly and more efficient than commercial companies.. 4) There may well be a mass migration of the poor and underinsured from the South to states that opted to expand Medicaid to the East/West/Northern states.. :)

Re:Answer: No.

[BasilBrush]

Yes. A commercial operating system. Far more complicated than any web site.

What's your experience?

Re:Answer: No.

[BasilBrush]

You are assuming that there is a detailed (and accurate) functional spec, design spec, and that the code is organized and well-documented

No I'm not assuming any of that. That stuff may help, if it's of good quality, but is certainly not necessary.

Take GNU/Linux for a publicly visible example. It has many teams and individuals working on different parts of the system, with relatively little insight as to what others are working on, and is lacking in quite a lot on your list.

If this is truly a case of fixing what's there rather than starting again, all you really need is source control, a defect management system which allows triage and a consensus on what constitutes a fix (if any) to a defect report, and people skilled in the various technologies that have been used to make the system.

Re:Answer: No.

[BasilBrush]

That's why I said "If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch".

Re:Answer: No.

[BasilBrush]

Then "The Mythical Man Month" does indeed apply.

However, it's a rare case when the best answer truly is to start from scratch. Mostly starting from scratch is a rookie mistake.

Re:Answer: No.

[BasilBrush]

Big mistake. Starting from scratch is rarely the best course of action.

For example:
"Netscape made the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make" by deciding to rewrite their code from scratch."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000027.html

Re:Answer: No.

[BasilBrush]

If one teams changes one of the parts that another team uses that can lead to more screw ups.

There are plenty of ways of managing this. Coding by contract. Public/Private. Published APIs. Project managers. etc.

Starting over is a better option in this case.

.

That's very rarely true. Many is the company that has failed because they decided to rewrite their software from scratch.

Re:Answer: No.

[mysidia]

These two statements are completely contradictory. Java is dying a slow death

There are large banks, ecommerce companies, insurance companies, brokerages, and government institutions including the IRS that have websites built using Java EE technology (java servlets).

It's a lot more than a small step up from VB; it is one of the top technologies that many large enterprises have built their websites on.

Re:Answer: No.

[Unequivocal]

Reducto ad absurdum against a straw man is not generally considered a valid way to win an argument.

Re:Answer: No.

[kimvette]

. . . and weeks to months to analyze the spaghetti code, db schema, etc.

easy

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'll be able to log in with my google account and everything will already be filled in.

Re:easy

[icebike]

Nah, just buy it in the Google Play Store.

They could have written an Android and Apple app by now.

Vermont's Site is Toast

[Cornwallis]

Our Gov is finally "out of patience" with Vermont's site (built by the same CGI that did such a bang up job on the Fed system: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20131031/NEWS03/310310034/Governor-Peter-Shumlin-Web-woes-prompt-changes-to-Vermont-health-reform

Re:Vermont's Site is Toast

[Skapare]

Demand that further payments using taxpayer money not be made to CGI.

Re:Vermont's Site is Toast

[BradMajors]

All Vermont needs to do is buy a copy of Kentucky's system. Kentucky's system works fine.

Re:Vermont's Site is Toast

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Our Gov is finally "out of patience" with Vermont's site

Out of patience? I'm actually sick of hearing about Obamacare.

Which raises the interesting medical-philosophical question . . . is illness caused by Obamacare, actually covered by Obamacare . . . ?

Yeah, I thought so . . .

Calvary? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's cavalry.

Re:Calvary? Really?

[cold fjord]

Of course maybe it was a literary illusion. ;D

Re:Calvary? Really?

[BrokenHalo]

A literary illusion?

I think you mean "allusion". Unless that was some illusion passing me by, going "whoosh"...

Re:Calvary? Really?

[Deadstick]

Of course maybe it was a literary illusion. ;D

No..."Battlefield Earth was a great novel" would be one of those.

Re:Calvary? Really?

[cold fjord]

No, it was deliberate. (I double checked to make sure I was misusing it as intended.)

The AC stated, " Goddammit, we care about spelling and grammar."

So, there was an element of tweaking (as opposed to "twerking"*) in the misuse (hence the emoticon), but a slightly more serious side as well. It is entirely conventional to speak of literary allusions, but skilled authors enable us to see things not present with the mind's eye, a literary illusion, if you will. (With an allusion sometimes adding to the illusion, so to speak.) Sometimes it can be inadvertent. The story header was no doubt intended to say "cavalry," but it said "calvary." (That is unless the intent was to show they were appealing to the All Mighty to get the website fixed.) The world would be better off if more people saw Calvary rather than cavalry, so I won't condemn the usage even if it would be fun.

* I despise that word.

Re:Calvary? Really?

[cold fjord]

Touché

Re:Calvary? Really?

[vandamme]

No, Calvary, AKA Golgotha, the Place Of the Skull.

Re:Calvary? Really?

[vandamme]

I see what you did there.

If in fact you meant it that way.

Re:Calvary? Really?

[BrokenHalo]

Fair enough - and you'll note I did acknowledge the likelihood of a "whoosh" moment. ;-)

OT and for the record, though, I used to have no formal objection to the term "twerking" until I saw the most ignoble moment of Australian politics in the form of a clip of that fat creepy billionaire, Clive Palmer twerking for votes. If only some things could be retrospectively "unseen"...

Amazon

[qzzpjs]

I think they should have just listed the plans on Amazon. Almost everyone already knows how to buy stuff from them and their servers would have handled it.

Re:Amazon

[Ralph Wiggam]

Prices and availability vary hugely for the same insurance plan for different people. Amazon has no way of handling that.

Re:Amazon

[BradMajors]

You could already buy all of the available plans through einsurance.com. I do not see what value the government website adds.

Re:Amazon

[Xyrus]

Just what we need. One-click insurance from Amazon. :P

Re:Amazon

[JWW]

Amazon on occasion has posted different prices for different customers.

As I remember they got in trouble for doing that, so I think you're right, they probably don't still have a way of handling it.

Re:Amazon

[sandytaru]

They still have dynamic, on-demand pricing. A thousand people look at an item on one day? I'll go up 1% by tomorrow. Nobody clicked on an item on one day? 5% discount tomorrow.

Re:Amazon

[cold fjord]

Control.

Re:Amazon

[Ralph Wiggam]

They didn't get in trouble for it, as it's a perfectly valid retail technique.

The insurance exchange requires answering a number of questions, like if you smoke and how many kids you have. Amazon can't handle that kind of decision tree (I'm sure they're capable of adding it, but their current store does not).

Re:Amazon

[mu51c10rd]

Don't worry, we Prime members would get the Cadillac plans...for an extra fee per year. Although 2 day shipping for meds sounds nice.

if only they could fix healthcare.gov by

[Anonymous Coward]

bombing the hell out of it!

Calvary?

[themushroom]

It's a Biblical reference -- and at this rate it would take divine intervention.

Re:Calvary?

[icebike]

It's a Biblical reference -- and at this rate it would take divine intervention.

This is government, nobody gets crucified, they all get promoted.

Re:Calvary?

[cold fjord]

It's a Biblical reference -- and at this rate it would take divine intervention.

Minus that it's going to hell in a checkout basket.

Re:Calvary?

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

As in collectively the three of them are going to have CGI drag a cross on their back around the country for a few months, before they have the company install the cross, and they will nail CGI to it in a standing, sunward facing position? On Good Friday, they will go into Chapter 11. only to return a few days later, clean up some left over bills, and then disappear for good?

Re:Calvary?

[I'm New Around Here]

As long as CGI doesn't resurrect as SCO, we'll be good.

Re:Calvary?

[cold fjord]

It's worse than that. Many people thought President Obama's first election was the Second Coming. Certainly the promises were messianic. But only now after President Obama's actual 2nd coming with his reelection are some people beginning to experience their first second thoughts. Now that the media is growing far less inclined to carry water for the administration, I doubt as many people will believe that President Obama walks on water. For some, the revelations are only beginning. Turn with me now to youtube page 5yaxVYNGaUU for a stirring rendition of Jerusalem.

Obama speech oceans receding, planet healing

Obama came up with ObamaCare because he needed a throwaway applause line in a campaign speech

Re:Why not IBM

[BasilBrush]

IBM certainly made sure the Nazi's CRM system worked right.

Let's see..

[Virtucon]

In two months the site will be using Oracle and Ellison will charge the Feds a fortune for the license fees.
Google will start mining every piece of data it can get off the website, of course the NSA will be stealing that and stashing it in Utah.

Red Hat will push it all to RHEL which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Re:Let's see..

[bobthesungeek76036]

In two months the site will be using Oracle and Ellison will charge the Feds a fortune for the license fees.....

Yea you gotta believe Larry is foaming at the mouth at this. Selling them a named-user license and getting paid for every man, woman, and child in the US? Cha-Ching!!!

Re:Let's see..

[Virtucon]

He has to do something since his pay package was not approved by shareholders today. Out of the 1.6 Billion shares that voted for his pay he owns 1.1 Billion... He made $78 Mil last year (Fiscal Year ended in May) I guess this government deal will generate some license fees and the shareholders definitely sent a message to the board that you can't keep paying this sleeze that kind of money unless he produces results.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/oracle-shareholders-oppose-compensation-for-ellison/?_r=0

Re:Let's see..

[Noughmad]

Google will start mining every piece of data it can get off the website, of course the NSA will be stealing that and stashing it in Utah.

Because NSA couldn't spy on a government website without Google?

Re:Let's see..

[Virtucon]

We're talking the Feds here, there's never a straight direct solution to a problem where they're concerned!

Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

No Microsoft? lol :)

Re:Red Hat?

[Skapare]

No open source, either.

Re:Why not IBM

[Virtucon]

No, they wanted it done and not outsourced to India.

cavalry not calvary

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Anonymous Coward, I am very concerned that proper language be used only when it places me in a position of higher authority.

The word for "soldiers who fought on horseback" is cavalry.

The word for "a hill near Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified" is calvary.

Re:cavalry not calvary

[sexconker]

As an Anonymous Coward, I am very concerned that proper language be used only when it places me in a position of higher authority.

The word for "soldiers who fought on horseback" is cavalry.

The word for "a hill near Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified" is calvary.

The word for "ice cream that's really expensive and super fucking creamy" is "Carvel".
The word for "fibrous green shit that children and guinea pigs eat" is "celery".
The word for "the poison center of a Milk Dud" is "caramel".
The word for "that shit you bruised when you gave your wife a raging tsunami" is "clavicle".

Oracle! YES!!

[platypusfriend]

Just kidding.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[jbengt]

I've had the misfortune of needing to use an Oracle system with a web interface to deal with a large client for construction management & billing. If that experience is any indication of how Oracle will fix the problem, the Feds would be better off keeping the very crappy existing system. (seriously)

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[rwyoder]

I've had the misfortune of needing to use an Oracle system with a web interface to deal with a large client for construction management & billing. If that experience is any indication of how Oracle will fix the problem, the Feds would be better off keeping the very crappy existing system. (seriously)

You were lucky you only had to work with their product.
I had the misfortune of being at Sun Microsystems when the mindless Oracle borg took over.
I bailed out within two years.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Google and Oracle are both involved - they probably intend to rewrite it in Java.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[FlyingGuy]

One of the many problems is that most people do not know how to tune Oracle. Properly tuned Oracle, even when running on inadequate hardware, oracle can support TPS levels that many DB's only dream about with full ACID as a matter of course on the same hardware. I have watched Postgres, MS-SQL Server and DB2 just hit the floor while Oracle kept chugging right along, not always mind you, but more often then not.

I am currently running 11gR2 on hardware that is at best adequate and can assimilate the entire output of 80% of the state of California's highway loop detectors ( approximately 50,000 raw data rows inserted every 30 seconds 24/7/365 ) and that into a rather poky 15TB drive array with 7500rpm 2TB drives, in raid 5 no less, then query all of that data filter,clean and analyze it and shove that data into another table all in the same 30 second period.

The DMV project was a nightmare of never ending changes of requirements. When you think about the basic project, it aint that hard, but when there is no point at which you could say it was stable because the target just kept moving, I don't care who takes it on or who's DB engine you throw at it, it will fail.

When it comes to scaling something out, you take you best guess at what you load will be. When your prospective load might be a large percentage of 300 million people it is a hard target to pin down and that is what ( along with a few bugs that escaped unit testing ) was their ultimate undoing. No one knows who's DB engine was behind it but I doubt it was any of the "web scale" DB's since they don't support ACID very well and this was one of those when it was absolutely essential.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[bobthesungeek76036]

I've had the misfortune of needing to use an Oracle system with a web interface to deal with a large client for construction management & billing. If that experience is any indication of how Oracle will fix the problem, the Feds would be better off keeping the very crappy existing system. (seriously)

You were lucky you only had to work with their product. I had the misfortune of being at Sun Microsystems when the mindless Oracle borg took over. I bailed out within two years.

Ditto.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[BitZtream]

Having your product and department terminated isn't called 'bailing' btw.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[I'm New Around Here]

Google and Oracle are both involved - they probably intend to rewrite it in Jawa.

How about in Klingon? I don't speak Jawa.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[clockwise_music]

Cool story. Thanks for your post :)

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[Just Some Guy]

1,700 inserts per second is pretty easy for any modern RDBMS on decent hardware. Here's PostgreSQL doing 14,000 per second on a laptop, for example. My company routinely handles 40,000 inserts per second into Cassandra on midrange AWS virtual servers.

Properly tuned Oracle is probably pretty quick, but these days so is properly tuned everything else.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[FlyingGuy]

Casandra is a key-value store and does not do the things you need like joins and sub-queries. Data stores such as these do have their application sweet spots though. If you don't need critical analysis of relational data these types of programs are pretty cool.

PostGres is a fine DB, but I would guess that your figure is derived from PG being in single user mode and nothing else making demands on it while it was doing that. They do however desperately need to fix the TXID rollover problem since in hi volume data inserts the vacuum process really kills performance. PG has other issues like portability which machine and disk configuration dependencies really put a hurt on, but everything is a trade-off.

I use a smaller drive array that has much faster disks for the things I can fit on them and the performance really goes way way up, but cramming in about 11 million rows a day 24/7/365 just gobbles up storage, so I have to keep it on the big, and much slower disk array.

Keep in mind that while doing all of this the system is servicing the request of many other processes and users, and like most databases we are IO-bound in many instances as the primary storage array spends lots and lots of time running at or very close to 100% utilization. all in all we rarely dip below around 2000 TPS and are often peaking in the area of 6000 to 8000 and we do all of this on a single dell 12 core box w/48G of ram.

Re:Oracle! YES!!

[serviscope_minor]

One of the many problems is that most people do not know how to tune Oracle.

Maybe, an one of those people is, in fact Oracle. I don't know if you've ever suffered from a "turnkey" system of some sort delivered by Oracle. If you haven't, let me describe it for you. Sure, it's turnkey, lik an outhouse door. Behind, it's full of shit.

Oracle? Seriously?

[jcr]

I guess nobody in the decision making loop heard about Oracle's big California DMV fuck-up.

-jcr

There's no silver bullet

[TheloniousToady]

...and if there were, it probably wouldn't involve a violation of Brooks' Law.

Brooks Law

[mccrew]

Brooks Law states "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".

Re:Brooks Law

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Brooks Law states "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".

+6 man, +6. That is exactly what first came to mind when they went for that "surge" mentaphor.

Second thing that comes to mind is that the surge didn't work, it just happened to coincide with a change of local Iraqi politics (locals got sick of extremists killing locals instead of just americans so they started outing the extremists so the americans finally knew who to kill).

Re:Brooks Law

[forkazoo]

But there is an exception : adding manpower to a late software project being managed and created by incompetants who will never be able to finish it on their own can indeed be helpful. I mean, doing web front end stuff isn't exactly my specialty so if you gave me a big web project it would eventually be quite late, and adding web developers to it would get it done quicker than leaving me alone with it.

Re:Brooks Law

[myowntrueself]

How to defeat 'hearts and minds' etc:
"we went into a camp to inoculate it. The children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile -- a pile of little arms."
-- Kurtz, Apocalypse Now.

Re:Brooks Law

[phantomfive]

It's rather amazing how many quotes from Mythical Man Month apply to Healthcare.gov.

"Failure to allow enough time for system test is peculiarly disastrous. Since the delay comes at the end of the schedule, no one is aware of schedule trouble until almost the delivery date."
"False scheduling to match the patron's desired date is much more common in our discipline than elsewhere."
"Take no small slips. That is, allow enough time in the new schedule to ensure that the work can be carefully and thoroughly done."
"More products have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined."

Re:Brooks Law

[cold fjord]

Second thing that comes to mind is that the surge didn't work, it just happened to coincide with a change of local Iraqi politics (locals got sick of extremists killing locals instead of just americans so they started outing the extremists so the americans finally knew who to kill).

I realize that given your politics you just about have to say that, but it really isn't true. The AC that replied to you is more or less correct.

If a have a few minutes you might read this recent article from Foreign Policy.

How We Won in Iraq - And why all the hard-won gains of the surge are in grave danger of being lost today.

The surge in Iraq didn't work in much the same way as the Normandy invasion didn't work in 1944, and the Germans just coincidentally decided they no longer liked beachfront properties.

Altering the location of military forces, what they do, and how they do it can have a substantial impact on outcomes.

Re:Brooks Law

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I realize that given your politics you just about have to say that

Just like I realize that given your latent smugness you had to say that and that it is no surprise you posted a link from the writer with the absolute most to lose if the "surge" isn't all its cracked up to be.

Will they teach Economics?

[meburke]

I, for one, am glad to see government doing something right. They have fallen short of privatizing the site, but....

Will the three tech giants also teach Economics?

Re:Will they teach Economics?

[Skapare]

The government should have done it in-house, using directly hired citizens as developers and project managers. Use top developers that fully understand the selected technology. This site is something that will be changing a lot over many years, so continued staff where most developers already know how it's built would keep it upgraded.

Re:Will they teach Economics?

[calidoscope]

Hard to do when the guy in charge places ideology ahead of knowledge and experience. The website would have worked much better if the shopping for plans was done before the qualifications for subsidies was determined.

Re:Will they teach Economics?

[Bite The Pillow]

That's the kind of idea that sounds great until you get to the details. Who actually employs them, how do they get hired, who watches over the project managers as a stakeholder?

The reason contractors get used is they offload all of these problems.

"I know someone who is employed by the government therefore they can hire people directly." "My brother works in IT, they can just shore up the team and have them do the website."

No, these do not work. Adding infrastructure to handle these employed people is an overhead cost. Having a place for them to work, hardware and software licenses, someone as help desk, box admins. If you want a distributed team you have voice and connectivity issues to fix.

Finding a team of qualified people who can be self-supportive and operate in the way you need a team to operate so they can just get code, requirements, and testing done, is not simple.

Would people quit an existing job for a 3-year contract? Probably no. Do you want a team made up of people who don't have a job? For unemployment it sounds like a great idea, but is this the team you want?

Tell us how your idea would work, and make it sound like you through about this in more than a rainbow and unicorn fart kind of way. Because while it sounds good, it just won't work. Is everyone background checked? And knows what HIPAA requires? And knows to follow the government implementation guidelines? And can do the proper vulnerability scanning required? I'm pretty sure we just took most of the unemployed citizens out of the pool.

But fuck it, let's go with pure unadulterated idealism, because it works.

Re:Will they teach Economics?

[AmazingRuss]

Unfortunately the people doing the hiring have no idea how to tell competent people from idiots, and the idiots win with the low bid.

Re:Will they teach Economics?

[Monsuco]

The government should have done it in-house,

No, perhaps the government should have done it out-of-house. That code, legally, is in the public domain. It's just not publicly available. I see no reason why the (presumably php and sql) code behind healthcare.gov shouldn't be open to public viewing.

Re:Will they teach Economics?

[femtobyte]

Really? When you go shopping (possibly on a tight budget), you don't care about knowing the prices until you reach the register? "Don't worry, that box of pasta says $150, but it'll probably cost somewhere between $0.29 and $48 when you reach checkout. Just toss a dozen in the cart." To the end user, being presented *the amount they'll pay* while they're shopping is pretty important --- tacking on a random-number discount at the very end wouldn't make a helpful system.

Re:Will they teach Economics?

[chooks]

Why would top developers work for government pay?

Re:Cost?

[icebike]

He has already succeeded at that, and if ObamaCare gets off the ground it will be like 10x over all prior presidents combined.

Re:Just say no

[zippthorne]

In that scenario, we'd actually be worse off - the ones with principles wouldn't be working on it...

What is it originally coded in?

[deviated_prevert]

The choice of these companies makes it obvious that it is not an asp.net fix. Being from Canada I have no idea what front end the site is using in the first place. But if it is not a based upon Microsoft style asp.net in the first place then you can bet that the choice of who gets government contracts will be effected in the future.

Here in Canada the government has completely sold out to Microsoft and in some cases if you need to access government services on the net it is all coded in asp.net especially the revenue Canada sites where you do your taxes. I find it hard to believe that a Microsoft software based contractor did not get the original site contracts in the USA in the first place. Again if the site is not fixed on time then you can bet Redmond will have a PR field day with this one, if it is Google, Oracle, and Red Hat fixing asp.net code then Microsoft is in real trouble to say the least. MORE ACCURATE DETAILS of what happened in the first place to the site and who coded it would help here Slashdot!

Re:What is it originally coded in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Legalese. The syntax changes every few months.
A compiler has yet to be written.

huh?

[Charliemopps]

I can understand Google and Redhat... but Oracle? Talk about having a fox in the hen-house.

Re:huh?

[jonnythan]

Well I expect that the system has several Oracle DBs on the backend already. Remember that this site has to aggregate data from a whole bunch of different federal agencies. Assuming that the site interfaces with at least one Oracle db, having a couple of quality Oracle engineers on-site can do a lot to identify scalability problems, iron out bugs, reprogram things for efficiency, etc.

Re:huh?

[Fallen Kell]

Someone must not realize that Oracle DB is the go to database for big government projects. As this was a "big government project" to begin with, Oracle DB was probably used as the backend in the existing design.

Re:huh?

[See Attached]

Oracles (in)ability to ensure interoperability within its own software stacks should be evidence enough that they can be trusted for large scale integraion. As long as they stick with DB performance, OK... Redhat has more experience managing an ecosystem of technology,,, these are the guys and gals we need to have behind it.

Re:huh?

[DarthVain]

This. I would guess also that A) some of the DB integrated are Oracle, and likely B) probably was an Oracle based design, and even go so far to say that C) likely partially caused by Oracle issues. I mean why else call in Oracle unless you are just dropping names that the public might know...

My only question would be: On a 600$ million dollar complex oracle application for the Federal US gov, how the fsck was Oracle not directly involved anyway.,, They really need to be "called in"? Anyway I assume it is all just for appearances, to let the public that they are on the case! It would also appears those people that assume gov can't do anything, and that by referencing commercial companies, they will "get it done right now"...

Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup

[liwee]

Enlisting JUST ONE of the tech giants would be more productive.

Re:Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup

[DigiShaman]

The soup is already spoiled. They can make another batch for all I care. I'll just sit back and watch with a bag of popcorn. This will be funny seeing if Google has the balls to school the Federal Government in public.

We all know...

[amightywind]

You can't fix stupid. End it, don't mend it!

Re:Wait, a tech problem?

[hawguy]

And Elon Musk hasn't even been MENTIONED yet?!

He already designed a solution based on "a series of tubes", but it was dismissed as being impractical in the real world because it didn't involve enough contractors for implementation.

Spread out the demand

[hawguy]

Why does everyone in the country need to use the website at once? Couldn't the problem be fixed with a little javascript function:

1. Enter your Social Security Number
2. Based on your Social Security number, your enrollment date is 1-Nov-2013 - 7-Nov-2013 or anytime after 31-Dec-2013. If you do not know or do not have an SSN, your enrollment date is after 15-Jan-2014. Click here to have an email reminder sent on your enrollment date.

They could instantly cut the website demand by 90% by dividing enrollments up by the last digit of the SSN of the primary enrollee.

Re:Spread out the demand

[tftp]

They could instantly cut the website demand by 90% by dividing enrollments up by the last digit of the SSN of the primary enrollee.

There aren't enough people as it is to pay double and triple for health plans that they don't need. I, personally, have no desire to even visit "that website," whatever URL it may have. I can pay for my own healthcare without involvement of moneychangers.

Re:Spread out the demand

[hawguy]

They could instantly cut the website demand by 90% by dividing enrollments up by the last digit of the SSN of the primary enrollee.

There aren't enough people as it is to pay double and triple for health plans that they don't need. I, personally, have no desire to even visit "that website," whatever URL it may have. I can pay for my own healthcare without involvement of moneychangers.

Unless, of course you suffer a catastrophic illness or injury. I know someone whose husband slipped while getting out of the shower, he hit his head on the floor, and ended up with a brain injury and needing brain surgery and months of rehabilitation. So far it's cost over half a million dollars. He was in his 30's, a triathlete in perfect health. Fortunately, he had insurance and his wife was able to take 3 months leave to care for him and can support the household on her income.

Few people can afford a $500K medical bill yet society has chosen not to let people die even if they can't afford medical treatment. What's your solution for treating expensive illnesses for the uninsured? Let the seriously ill continue to be covered by hospitals and government? Or just let them die (or euthanize them if they can afford to pay for the euthanasia).

Re:Spread out the demand

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea that people are left to "die" is a myth. They will be left poor though.

Re:Spread out the demand

[tftp]

Unless, of course you suffer a catastrophic illness or injury.

I have enough to pay up to the worth of my life. After that it's a losing proposition. What if you need 1 million dollars per month to keep you alive? What about 10 million dollars? Where do you draw the line? Should the entire planet work for you? I guess not. I have enough to take care of what I need. If I run out of money, it's too much. Nobody lives forever, after all.

Few people can afford a $500K medical bill yet society has chosen not to let people die even if they can't afford medical treatment. What's your solution for treating expensive illnesses for the uninsured?

People who need insurance (unlike me) but cannot purchase one are on their own. The society does not owe them anything. You should be asking why those people cannot earn enough money. That would be a far more valid question. Focusing only on food and healthcare only creates a class of permanent dependents who demand from you but deliver nothing in return.

Let the seriously ill continue to be covered by hospitals and government?

Those monies come from working man's pockets, one way or another. The government has only what taxpayers give it. The hospital only has what other patients pay. If a hospital admits a non-paying patient, someone else will pay for his treatment. There are no miracles, and you will have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Healthcare always translates to labor of people - of those who drill for oil, of those who make drugs, of those who make tools, and of those who apply all that to your body. This work needs to be compensated, unless someone proposes that doctors should work for free, and receive all the tools for free from those chemists and steelmakers. There is no fair way for a poor patient to consume thousands of man-hours of highly skilled labor without incurring debt to those people.

Or just let them die (or euthanize them if they can afford to pay for the euthanasia).

Purely mathematically, if you want the medical profession to be sustainable (such as with a balanced budget) then you have to pay the doctors. Obamacare's method is to rob the young to give to the old. I do not approve that. The best option, IMO, was in use until now - societies of mutual insurance, where, if you wanted, you could join at the level that you can afford, and which would return you your own premiums (on average) when you need them. If you contribute little, you will get accordingly. It may pay for fixing a broken arm, but won't be enough to fix a broken heart. Too bad? Yes. But you haven't contributed enough toward the needs of the society, so the society has no reason to contribute toward your needs. Money is used as a measure of those needs that you fulfull. A pizza will cost you 15 tokens; but if you take a broom and clean the floor in pizzeria, the owner will pay you 15 tokens.

So, to answer your question: if an adult person hasn't contributed anything to the society when he had a chance... yes, he should die. He made his choice when he decided to not work. (*) He chose poorly.

(*) It is getting fuzzier today - some people cannot find jobs, even though they want them. A rationally thinking computer would sentence those people to death anyway because they are, clearly, extraneous on this planet. Humans are a little slower with pulling the trigger; but still, nobody is entitled to the labor of others just because he needs that labor to survive. Let's say, I don't want to spend my own money on food - will you be paying for my food? If you don't, I will die!!!1! Should I expect a check from you? No? Why so? Because I could find other income? But an otherwise sane homeless person, who needs healthcare, also has other options. He just chooses to not exercise them. Tens of thousands of illegals from Mexico are standing by the doors of Home Depot, waiting for someone to pick them up to do some manual work. It's a good example. There are many ditches to be dug, and many fence posts to be instal

Re:Spread out the demand

[GodfatherofSoul]

Just get on at night. Besides the problems yesterday, I haven't had a problem getting through in the evening.

Re:Spread out the demand

[ebno-10db]

Either my parody detector is on the blink, or you make the Nazis seem compassionate. Seriously. With the obvious exception of certain minorities, they treated their own people more compassionately than what you suggest.

Re:Spread out the demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't feel too bad - we were all 14 year old boys once.

Then we grew up and started caring about people.

Re:Spread out the demand

[tftp]

Nazis killed their insane patients; that campaign preceded the rounding up and killing of Jews.

My view of the problem comes from purely financial side. Consider the following: (1) Healthcare costs money, and (2) you do not have money. You can have only two solutions: (a) you don't get healthcare, or (b) you do get healthcare, but someone else pays for you.

The (b) is traditionally reserved to those who the state officially considers to be unable to work. Those would be children, and adults with injuries or illnesses. They get healthcare for free, since it is customary for humans to help those who are truly in need.

But today (b) is expanded to cover not only injured veterans and wheelchair-bound patients, but just anyone who earns less than you do.

The (a) was the only game in town for millennia. No money = no treatment. Only as societies became richer they became able to afford some healthcare to those who do not pay. But costs of healthcare are rising fast - because the baseline quality of healthcare is rising, and because regulations and insurance consume a large chunk of doctor's income. The US society, on top of that, is not as rich as one would think. The US government has some debt, around 16 trillion dollars. There is no surplus money to treat poor people. (Plenty of those people are poor because of government's policies.) There is not much money in hands of the middle class either, because the middle class is being exterminated. So where would the money come from? Obamacare increases costs for every paying participant because there are too many participants who cannot pay. This will deny healthcare to some of those people who earned it, and will provide healthcare to some people who haven't earned it. Is that fair?

Re:Spread out the demand

[mutube]

So, to summarize...

• You value people with wealth over those that work
• You think a person's contribution to society is directly proportional to disposable income (Miley Cyrus > Van Gogh)
• You would rather keep someone alive who inherited vast quantities of wealth (and does nothing) vs. someone who started with nothing and now has a job cleaning floors
• You don't like people who clean floors
• You want your pizzas served by people with diseases
• ...preferably from a pizza shop that doesn't clean it's floors

Your utopian dream (I'm calling it Cyrocracy) might just be fair if a) everyone started their life with the same opportunities and wealth; b) all money was redistributed on death (no inheritance). But that smells an awful lot like government intervention so I guess your weird little fantasy can stay just that.

Re:Spread out the demand

[myowntrueself]

The thing is that it kind of goes against the hippocratic oath that doctors are supposed to swear... Unless I guess you could call it 'triage'.

Re:Spread out the demand

[tftp]

You value people with wealth over those that work

No; I value people who work over those who do not. Though, as I mentioned, some people are forced to not work because they cannot find work.

You think a person's contribution to society is directly proportional to disposable income (Miley Cyrus > Van Gogh)

I am not sure who Miley Cyrus is. From the context I gather that person has a lot of cash and does not work. Well, not working makes him/her/it less valuable than Van Gogh. However, how do we measure contributions to the society that we make? By using money. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Alternatives (like wise men who judge you worthy or not) are even worse.

You would rather keep someone alive who inherited vast quantities of wealth (and does nothing) vs. someone who started with nothing and now has a job cleaning floors

I would value higher someone who works. Money is just a crude measure of person's worth - and in case of inherited wealth that measure breaks down horribly. What to do?

You don't like people who clean floors

??? What could possibly lead you to that conclusion? Those people do work; and while their work is not valued as highly as being a CEO of a Fortune 100 company, it brings bread to the table. It's an honest work. If you don't like cleaning floors, you can always study and seek work on a higher level.

You want your pizzas served by people with diseases

At those prices that I pay for pizza they can afford better doctors than I can :-)

You are certainly right that inheritance throws a large monkey wrench into the valuation scheme. Again, my question is only how to make it all work. As things are, Obamacare is set up in about the same way as a highway robber who stops your stagecoach and asks for a small contribution toward the needy. It doesn't matter if you can afford it or not, by the way. If you are not poor yet, you will be after you buy your Obamacare insurance. I have a philosophical objection to the government who comes to my home, puts a gun to my head, and demands money "for the good of the humanity." For that audacity I will make sure that they get nothing out of me this way.

Re:Spread out the demand

[hawguy]

A rationally thinking computer would sentence those people to death anyway because they are, clearly, extraneous on this planet

That's funny, I ran the numbers through my rationally thinking computer and it deemed *all* humans extraneous on this planet because it turns out that this planet operates just fine (well, even better) without any humans at all. Please please proceed to the nearest disintegration station.

I wonder if there's some better judge of a human's value than a computer's sense of what is "extraneous"?

Re:Spread out the demand

[istartedi]

Unless, of course you suffer a catastrophic illness or injury.

Unless you have a net worth worth protecting. Health insurance can't insure your health. In theory, it could prevent you from falling back on Medicaid and/or going into medical bankruptcy. In practice, it has even failed to do that in many cases. Many people, either because "the light bulb went on" or because they simply couldn't afford it, stopped buying. When you have a net worth of less than $10,000 it's arguable that you're foolish to spend $500/mo on an insurance plan. Instead, invest the money on things that might actually improve your health such as a gym membership, a good bike, roller skates, etc.

If you just sock the extra money away you're up to $16,000 in the first year, and until Bernanke squashed rates you could factor some compounding on top of that.

Start young, and you could be ready for the more serious problems that come along later, or start buying insurance when it actually makes sense. But NooooO. Then the insurance companies wouldn't make money.

They literally had to force us to buy it. I wouldn't be nearly so upset if it were single payer, with no insurance companies. Instead, we had to protect these useless cronies. If we didn't, the people who make Brawndo would be out of jobs. Health insurance has electionalytes. It's what politicians crave.

Re:Spread out the demand

[tftp]

That's funny, I ran the numbers through my rationally thinking computer and it deemed *all* humans extraneous on this planet because it turns out that this planet operates just fine (well, even better) without any humans at all

There are several flaws in this reasoning. First, a computer can be programmed to take care of humans. Second, humans are the only organisms on this planet that are capable of very wide range of physical work. A computer, all alone on a planet, may be unable to maintain itself.

Of course humans are not computers. Ideally, I'd wish everyone to have everything (including healthcare.) The only problem is that humankind doesn't have enough resources for that, even if every worker surrenders all his money into the global pool of healthcare. That is impossible, of course, because the worker also needs to eat, to have housing, to have children, to have a vacation now and then... this already puts a US worker into a balance that is very close to turning red.

The idea of confiscation of nearly all gains from workers and using them, in part, for free healthcare was the way of life in USSR. This bought universal poverty and substandard healthcare. Why to buy the best if ancient equipment, substandard drugs, and idiots as doctors also fit the bill? I am well acquainted with free healthcare, and I don't wish it upon anyone. As they joked in USSR, "the treatment is free only if you do not care about the outcome."

Re:Spread out the demand

[hawguy]

Unless, of course you suffer a catastrophic illness or injury.

Unless you have a net worth worth protecting. Health insurance can't insure your health. In theory, it could prevent you from falling back on Medicaid and/or going into medical bankruptcy. In practice, it has even failed to do that in many cases. Many people, either because "the light bulb went on" or because they simply couldn't afford it, stopped buying. When you have a net worth of less than $10,000 it's arguable that you're foolish to spend $500/mo on an insurance plan.

At $10,000/year, you're so far below the poverty level that you'd qualify for medicaid or other state programs, so you wouldn't be required to purchase insurance. When your income goes above the poverty level, much of your premium would be subsidized. In california, a family of 4 earning $40,000 would pay $120/month in premiums.

Instead, invest the money on things that might actually improve your health such as a gym membership, a good bike, roller skates, etc.

If you just sock the extra money away you're up to $16,000 in the first year, and until Bernanke squashed rates you could factor some compounding on top of that.

Start young, and you could be ready for the more serious problems that come along later, or start buying insurance when it actually makes sense. But NooooO. Then the insurance companies wouldn't make money.

What you're proposing is why they have to make insurance required - skipping insurance because you're young and healthy and counting on the government to bail you out if you do happen to get a catastrophic illness or injury is just making everyone else pay your premiums. The only way that what you're proposing would be fair would be if you could sign away your right to public paid or subsidized healthcare in the event of serious accident or injury - you could only get whatever healthcare you could afford. Don't count on getting a loan to cover unexpected costs - who's going to give a 25 year old stroke victim a loan that he may never be able to pay back due to the injury?

They literally had to force us to buy it. I wouldn't be nearly so upset if it were single payer, with no insurance companies. Instead, we had to protect these useless cronies. If we didn't, the people who make Brawndo would be out of jobs. Health insurance has electionalytes. It's what politicians crave.

I agree, single payer would have been much much better. I wish Obama had the guts to push it, but no matter how much he pushed, I really don't think it was politically possible.

Re:Spread out the demand

[istartedi]

At $10,000/year

I said $10,000 net worth. In other words, $2k bank deposits, a car worth $6k, and rounded out by another $2k of posessions that might be countable as "assets". A lot of people are in the category of having that or less, and living "payckeck to paycheck" but not qualifying for programs because they're income is too high--but it all goes right out the window for rent, gas and... health insurance.

Re:Spread out the demand

[hawguy]

That's funny, I ran the numbers through my rationally thinking computer and it deemed *all* humans extraneous on this planet because it turns out that this planet operates just fine (well, even better) without any humans at all

There are several flaws in this reasoning. First, a computer can be programmed to take care of humans. Second, humans are the only organisms on this planet that are capable of very wide range of physical work. A computer, all alone on a planet, may be unable to maintain itself.

You are obviously not thinking this through logically. Computers are extraneous too - the planet needs neither humans nor computers. It turns that that humans and computers do not add any real value to the planet. Earth's evolutionary processes have been developed over billions of years to be completely self sufficient and automatically adapt to changing conditions (within reason). Therefore, humans are extraneous and are just getting in the way of established processes.

Of course humans are not computers. Ideally, I'd wish everyone to have everything (including healthcare.) The only problem is that humankind doesn't have enough resources for that, even if every worker surrenders all his money into the global pool of healthcare. That is impossible, of course, because the worker also needs to eat, to have housing, to have children, to have a vacation now and then... this already puts a US worker into a balance that is very close to turning red.

No need to worry about the world yet - the Affordable Care Act only covers US citizens. There's no reason why everyone in the country can't have affordable healthcare, the country has more than enough wealth to provide healthcare to all. After all, we already do because the government will pick up the healthcare costs for anyone that can't afford it.

There are a lot more problems in the world in general than healthcare insurance - like food and clean water. And these problems aren't solved by simply sending food and water, there are complicated social and political problems to solve too. But that's not relevant to the ACA.

The idea of confiscation of nearly all gains from workers and using them, in part, for free healthcare was the way of life in USSR. This bought universal poverty and substandard healthcare. Why to buy the best if ancient equipment, substandard drugs, and idiots as doctors also fit the bill? I am well acquainted with free healthcare, and I don't wish it upon anyone. As they joked in USSR, "the treatment is free only if you do not care about the outcome."

Can you give an example of "nearly all gains"?

Does it look like Canada is on the verge of bankruptcy because they have public healthcare? USA senior citizens take organized bus trips across the border to buy medication in Canada because they can't afford it in the USA. Is that good healthcare policy?

Re:Spread out the demand

[clockwise_music]

Nope, that's fair. Is it just? Nope. Is it loving? Nope. Is it compassionate? Nope. Is it mercyful? Nope. Actually I guess it's really not fair after all. Is it fair that these people are sick? Nope.

If my brother was sick for 6 months and couldn't work, I'd tell him to stay at my place. After those six months were up would I demand that he pay me for those 6 months in terms or rent, medicine or food? Nope, because I'm compassionate. This is how we should treat other human beings. This is going to do your head in - but some of us do it even if they don't deserve it. It's called grace.

Re:Spread out the demand

[tftp]

Can you give an example of "nearly all gains"?

For example, an accountant may earn 120 roubles per month. Rent would be 30 roubles, food would be 60 roubles, and family would consume 30 roubles. How soon will such a person be able to afford a car (6,000 roubles) ?

In USSR people were paid only the bare minimum to rent a room or a whole apartment from the government; to buy basic food in government-owned stores, and sometimes a TV (300 roubles) or a radio receiver (100 roubles) from the same store. They were not expected to have any excess money; many had to borrow several days before the payday. It took decades to outfit an apartment, assuming honest work.

People in USSR were nothing but slaves; however the government permitted them to pick and choose what they do, as long as they work somewhere (not working was a crime.) The government did not care where they live, and how many people (none or one) can fit into their kitchen. Slaves were permitted to play around with those trifles. A whole workday of a scientist was valued in 7 roubles - enough to buy a couple of bags of raw potatoes, or twice as much as cost of eating at a diner. Slaves were provided with transportation that was nearly free (0.05 rouble per ride) - but it was very uncomfortable. Taxicabs were available, sometimes, starting from 10 roubles.

This paints a picture of a very poor society. This is because the government retained nearly all the profit from the labor of those people. Some work was poorly organized and not efficient, but still people worked practically for free - because it was the only game in town, and you could not refuse to participate. The rest of the monies was spent on stupid things, like helping select African regimes. Millions of tons of trucks, weapons and fuel were readily sent to any tinpot dictator who declares himself a socialist (of convenience.) A lot of money was spent on weapons, and on spaceflight, and on personal enrichment of party leaders.

What was not spent money on? Housing, and healthcare. Those were two lagging areas of social development. People in 1980s still lived in homes built in 1880s - and those were not Czar's palaces either. Those houses were nearly impossible to live in, everything was worn down so much in them that many did not even have central hot water pipes connected; crude point of use water heaters were employed instead. Any living accomodations were hard to get. The Party simply did not care that the people live in squalor, like five people in one tiny room. (The bathroom was shared, of course, between all the inhabitants of an apartment when it is divided up this way. And the telephone.)

Healthcare was similarly rationed. Shortage of doctors was a permanent state of affairs. Doctors were paid very little, and in return they were often angry and hating the patient even before he walks in. The equipment that they used was from 1950s and 1960s. Dental fillings were done without anaesthetic, without suction, without a nurse, and using an old, belt-driven dental drill. No X-rays either. There are many horror stories on the Internet that explain how the whole torture was set up. Imported, modern dental drills, and anaesthetics, and nurses, and X-rays, and the latest materials - that was available only to patients at the Kremlin Hospital and a few top notch, closed hospitals that only serviced party bosses. Everyone else had to suffer without anaesthetic. Naturally, the "free" did not involve a dental hygienist - there was no such job, and nobody even knew that you need to see one a couple times per year. Slaves did not require good medicine - they only had to be kept alive for work. You can mill or drill or bake with three teeth just as good as with 32 teeth. And if you die, there are more slaves to step up to your machine and continue milling, drilling or baking.

Any escapee from *that* society truly appreciates the western system of medicin

Re:Spread out the demand

[tftp]

Perhaps this example would be more convincing if it's not your brother who is sick, but a random person from another city who you do not know, and who does not know you, nor cares about you.

Will you gracefully accept a stranger for 6 months and pay for all his needs? Will you not ask for compensation from that stranger? Even if you do it once, what if after this one checks out another one is already ringing your doorbell, for another 6 months of stay? How soon will you give up?

Obamacare requires you to pay for other people who you do not know, regardless of your own desires. Are you a free man after that? Is this the land of the free, or it's a slave ranch where every slave must obey the master?

Your example of compassion is expandable to private insurances - which is financing of other people's needs. You used to be able to buy any coverage that you need, or none. Now you must choose from three preset levels, none of which are very interesting. What advantage can you have from having a bureaucrat assemble a healthcare plan for you? Do they know your needs better than you do?

A private insurance is the same well known managed fund; everyone contributes, and everyone may draw upon it as needed. It used to be your choice what plan to join - and that would be indicative of the group of people that you choose to join. The plan for heavy smokers will be more expensive than for nonsmokers - but it's fair because smokers are more likely to need treatment. I do not smoke; why should I pay for someone else's vices? I may be willing to share the risk with people just like myself. That would be fair enough. The new plans make such separation impossible. People with healthy habits are expected to pay for treatment of people with bad habits. Where is my freedom of association?

Re:Spread out the demand

[Atomic Fro]

Few people can afford a $500K medical bill yet society has chosen not to let people die even if they can't afford medical treatment. What's your solution for treating expensive illnesses for the uninsured? Let the seriously ill continue to be covered by hospitals and government? Or just let them die (or euthanize them if they can afford to pay for the euthanasia).

The problem is that the medical bill was $500k. The cause of the problem is insurance and government. A working solution will never include insurance or government.
There used to be a things called charities and community. There was also a time when doctors were allowed to charge varying rates according to what people could afford.

Did your grandparents speak of the horrors of medical costs in their youth? Their parents not being able to afford a procedure that could have saved one of their siblings, so they died? The stigma of needing to declare bankruptcy because the hospital bill for when Grandma went it to give birth to Dad was over $20,000?

Google?....

[tooyoung]

Crap, now the NSA will have a backdoor into the government!

Oracle's involved?

[grasshoppa]

And we thought it was expensive and past deadline NOW.

Why can't they start over ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Instead of fixing a bunch of hopeless code, why can't they start over the damn thing - with a properly designed paradigm ?

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[Runaway1956]

That's my idea. Government hired an incompetent contractor to build something. They built a freaking MESS. Just clear it all out. Sure, examine the code, see what the ideas were when they built the site. Take the best ideas, and rebuild the ideas, from the ground up.

Years ago, I was called in to a construction job, where the previous foreman had really screwed up. He built a foundation and wall in the wrong place. We didn't try to make the wall fit into the plan - we wrecked the frigging wall, poured a new footer, and built the wall on top of our new footer.

The site designers need to do the equivalent. Consider the "blueprint", see where everything went wrong, tear out the screwups, and build from the ground up. If that should happen to mean that not one single line of code remains, then so be it. If it means that 1/4 or 1/2 or even 3/4 of the code can be reused - fine. Just get it working. And, do it for less than another half billion freaking dollars!!

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[game kid]

And, do it for less than another half billion freaking dollars!!

Oracle's involved, so good luck with that.

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[gweihir]

Actually, government hired far too many contractors as everybody wanted a piece. Now they are doing the same again. Have one competent entity fix this mess, not a lot of them and especially not a lot of them that are not used to cooperating.

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[gtall]

HHS was supposed to provide the supervisory role. Problem was they didn't have the experience to do such a thing. In a way, they were stuck. If they'd've hired a single contractor, they'd still be in litigation because the others would have sued. Hiring many meant they couldn't use a single company to ride shotgun because companies don't play well together in shotgun marriages.

They should have had the NSA do it. I hear they are quite good a building large systems.

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[Fallso]

Instead of fixing a bunch of hopeless code, why can't they start over the damn thing - with a properly designed paradigm ?

Paradigm is not the word you're looking for.

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[cristiroma]

And that would be writing it in Dart, running on RHEL with an Oracle back-end.
Luckily Microsoft didn't step in, they could have ended up with a Silverlight interface on top.

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[ausekilis]

They should have had the NSA do it. I hear they are quite good a building large systems.

Nah, the NSA isn'y intersted in decoupling your HIPAA information from your phone records, contacts, education, bathroom habits/timing, favorite restaurants, phone settings, pets names, etc...

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[vandamme]

Well, sure, that's how we build fighter planes. One piece in every congressional district. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Government directed the design based upon political considerations and the obstinate input of government employees with no expertise developing such a system, no ability to function in the private sector, and an unwavering belief that only they know what the hell they are doing. They then hired contracting companies who don't give a shit whether something succeeds or not and whose success is measured solely by the bottom line. That they fucked up the first pass and were awarded with additional monies to fix their fuck up is, to them, evidence of their business acumen. Doubtful there is any find of genuine business or system design requirements documentation. There were no performance specifications. There was no one in charge but there were an awful lot of meetings held with government people jockeying for position.

The contracting pussies let the egomaniacs run them around making changes as the deadline approached and beat the hell out of their contracting staff to throw some shit together. As A result, the concept, design, architecture, and implementation all suck donkey balls but every representative from the president on down, in government and the contracting con men, all proclaim that they didn't do anything wrong and their part "works."

Now that the clusterfuck is undeniable Sebelius will "work very hard" having 6 meetings a day and no clue that that many meetings will get in the tech team's way. They are operating from panic and making promises about problem resolution before even diagnosing the issues.

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[multicsfan]

The big problem is the contractor didn't even get the blueprint right so the entire project from start to finish needs to be tossed and redesigned go back to specs and then get the specs cleaned up as from reading between the lines, part of the problem is the spec is also screwed up. This is a case of GIGO, Garbage in, Garbage out.

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[MisterToad]

I agree. Starting over is usually cheaper, faster, better. BUT why doesn't the government buy or subcontract an Einsurance company??

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[gweihir]

There was this one VTOL that has had a really impressive failure record. Something for the marines, I believe?

Re:Why can't they start over ?

[I'm New Around Here]

But Microsoft could have brought back Clippy.

I miss Clippy. :(

Good Luck

[organgtool]

Google will spend all of their time working on tracking users, Oracle will insist on integrating dozens of Oracle products costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and RedHat will rewrite the system while removing the capability of running it over a network.

But in all seriousness, the reason this web site is in shambles is because the developers weren't given nearly enough time to implement a product this complex. And if years of development wasn't enough time, the government thinks that a few big tech companies can fix the problem in a single month? Even the best engineers will require weeks to understand how the system currently works, several more weeks coming up with a plan to fix what's broken, and months to implement the solution. This just goes to show how drastically people underestimate the complexity of software development. I wish those engineers the best of luck - they're being set up for failure.

Re:Good Luck

[myowntrueself]

Don't forget the RAM upgrades needed to run everything in Java! Every spare memory stick in the nation will be commandeered!

Called in the calvary?

[goosebane]

Alright, who is getting crucified over this one?

Re:Called in the calvary?

[clarkkent09]

The plan as I understand it is for Sebelius to continue being the lighting rod for as long as possible and then resign when the shit starts quieting down a bit thereby sparing higher ups.

Re:Called in the calvary?

[bhiestand]

The plan as I understand it is for Sebelius to continue being the lighting rod for as long as possible and then resign when the shit starts quieting down a bit thereby sparing higher ups.

No way in hell they allow her to resign until well after Obamacare stops being controversial. Why? They'd never be able to get a senate confirmation for a replacement.

Re:Oracle? Seriously?

[bobthesungeek76036]

My guess would be that healthcare.gov runs on top of an Oracle DB already, so Oracle probably has a few engineers that can be brought in to help identify and restructure problematic queries and/or tweak server settings to eek out a bit more performance. It's also a distinct possibility that the back end is in Java, so Oracle has a few knowledgeable Java engineers too.

Oracle's one-word answer for the DB -- Exadata...

Re:And...

[the eric conspiracy]

It's not 600 million.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/24/how-much-did-healthcare-gov-cost/?wprss=rss_politics

Do we know what the current architecture is?

[bobthesungeek76036]

Webserver? Middleware? Database? Hardware??

Re:Do we know what the current architecture is?

[AJWM]

Given the players, my guess is that the hardware is likely HP or Dell x86 server boxes, possibly Sun, maybe with an HP Superdome for the database, running RedHat linux, with an Oracle database. Middleware/webserver is quite possibly WebLogic (given Oracle's involvement) with the code in Java. Ie, a LWOJ stack ;-)

Very workable if given sufficient hardware (not VMs) and tuned properly -- but that latter often takes a fair bit of load testing and tweaking.

Re:Do we know what the current architecture is?

[bobthesungeek76036]

This is interesting reading:

http://www.propublica.org/article/heres-why-healthcaregov-broke-down

Looks like Oracle might be part of the blame for the websites troubles...

Re:Wait, a tech problem?

[93 Escort Wagon]

No, apparently they already had experienced PayPal's website.

Total PR move

[GodfatherofSoul]

No way you're dropping analysts in to fix a problem in a couple weeks that's probably going to be done in a month anyway.

Re:And...

[clarkkent09]

As per article it is AT LEAST $174 million plus a lot of other stuff that's hard to account for. Still seems ridiculously high.

Cronyism?

[RoccamOccam]

First Lady Michelle Obama and her Princeton classmate whose company received the no-bid government contract to build the HealthCare.gov Obamacare website were both members of a black student organization that caused a tense scene on campus by inviting a PLO leader who advocated for terrorism.

Michelle Obama ’85 and her classmate Toni Townes-Whitley ’85, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, were both students at the university when their groups the Organization of Black Unity (OBU) and the Third World Center (TWC) engaged in a confrontation with Jewish students on campus.

Source Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/28/michelle-obama-and-cgi-federal-executive-belonged-to-student-group-at-princeton-that-hosted-pro-terrorist-speaker/#ixzz2jM3P01QH

Re:You cant "fix" Socialism

[clarkkent09]

Guess what S in NSDAP stood for.

They really meant Calvary

[Latent Heat]

I think they are going to be prayin' . . . real good!

Re:You cant "fix" Socialism

[manu0601]

North Korea has Democratic and Republic in its official name, this does not implies that it is a democractic republic and it does not implies democracy and republic are totalitarism.

Same fro NSDAP: the fact that someone grabbed and kinked a concept does not invalidates it universally. And we we talk about "social" in the US, it has nothing to do with soviet Russia.

Do we even have editors?

[argStyopa]

calvary != cavalry.

One is the hill where Jesus is believed to have been crucified.
One is soldiers riding horses into combat.

That Word, I Do Not Think...

[night_flyer]

... It Means What You Think It Means

Calvary: the site immediately outside Jerusalem's walls where Jesus was crucified.

Cavalry: soldiers or warriors who fought mounted on horseback.

Since when does one start car with foot on floor?

[See Attached]

Apparently, there are two problems with the deployment process (not the health care logic behind it)... First was that the code didn't scale, second is that it was not tested in a meaningful way to show it. Let me guess, it was built by the cheapest contractor and we assumed their leadership and subject matter expertise would guarantee success? Sounds like the contract clause that says payment is based on performance should be exercised. There is one right? WHy should we pay CGI for their work? Time for them to shoulder the pain.

Re:Oracle? Seriously?

[phantomfive]

Or that Oracle already built a failed exchange website in Oregon.

At the same time, it's kind of entertaining to watch the general public start to grapple and become aware of the same project management issues I've had to deal with for the last decade.

Who here has used the site?

[greg_barton]

I have. It's not that bad. Really.

Now I don't need insurance as I already have it from my employer, but I was curious how bad the site was. But it didn't turn out being difficult or error prone at all to sign up. It took about 15 minutes total and I had the eligibility report for me and my daughter. Some nit picks:

1) The confirmation email was one of three emails i got from healthcare.gov when signing up. That could confuse some people.
2) One required field on one page was scrolled off the bottom, and no scroll bar appeared to indicate that. Mouse wheel scrolling down solved that, but if there are many pages with that problem it could be confusing.

That's about it. Maybe I just lucked out, bit it was an easy site to use.

Re:Who here has used the site?

[MooseMiester]

We have tried to get registered since the day the site opened with zero success, trying every day. I think you, sir, are a paid troll.

Re:Who here has used the site?

[greg_barton]

Look at the age of my slashdot account.

Re:Who here has used the site?

[MooseMiester]

Are you sure you didn't use a state run exchange site?

I know lots of people who have tried to get on, but have had no success at all. If lots of people were getting on, and registering, and buying insurance it wouldn't be a secret. The only reason it's a secret is because the numbers are incredibly low.

Re:Who here has used the site?

[greg_barton]

I live in Texas. It was the federal site.

Questions

[msobkow]

Why didn't they bring in someone like Amazon who is good at scaling interactive websites instead of static query serving like Google?

Is the site built using Oracle? If not, what do they expect Oracle to do to help?

Most importantly: Why weren't "hired guns" like this brought in to do the design and architecture in the first place? WTF were they doing using a provider who is already involved in a failing website serving a much smaller community?

As with most large scale government projects, the whole thing just smacks of mismanagement and scope creep.

The only way things could have gone worse is if they'd hired Accenture. Then the price would have doubled for the same crap.

Re:Questions

[msobkow]

Scratch that question on Google. I forgot about their interactive services -- they do have the skills needed.

payment

[hraponssi]

nice to see the us gov making friends with the big tech they supposedly just made mad. lets all be friends, share the data, and loot the taxpayers. no need to for anyone to feel left out. ok, need to get ms, yahoo and then some onboard. next.

Oracle!

[wadeal]

Oracle's online systems are as dinosaur as the company. Taking literally 30 seconds to "load" a web page... Take them out the back and finish them off.

We need a baby in a month!

[cplusplus]

Get nine women!

I don't know

[khallow]

I think a big part of any near future fix for the website will be a massive cull of features and functionality. For example, a number of features, perhaps even the entire website, could be handled by a human operator. They could have a few tens of thousands of "trained" operators in makeshift offices with the necessary telecommunication equipment and liability protection inside of a month, should they chose to go that route.

So I could see, for example, the entire website reduced to a shell which might collect some user data or discuss health insurance options with the eventual transaction handled over the phone.

So to go with the common analogy around here, instead of one woman having a baby in nine months, they'll have nine women hold babies for a month and leave the big fixes for next year or later.

DON'T START FROM SCRATCH

[clockwise_music]

It all depends on the quality of the existing code base. More often than not, it's better to start from scratch.

No, no, no, NO it's not. Do your research. Starting from scratch will end up taking you just as much time. Refactor, clean up and fix.

Re:DON'T START FROM SCRATCH

[Nefarious Wheel]

If there were any professionally-architected deliverables from the site, they would at least have provided a page architecture, business rules, and use cases. Those things take a lot of time to put together, and they're usually transportable to a new infrastructure.

The Big Three involved in this will be able to pull together an underlying structure to support that front end, and it will be solid. A good, senior architect would be able to look at what they've got for about 5 minutes, know the solution, and spend the rest of their time pulling people together and explaining what they're doing. Engineers from companies that big will know what boxes to move around, and all will be well in a crashing great hurry.

The big difference of this sort of approach? The players have already made all their mistakes on other companies, and will freaking well know what they're about.

Just sayin. Couple of decades of that sort of stuff under my belt. It's why customers don't mind throwing money in certain directions.
(And no, I am *not* volunteering. Unless you want us to build it in Australia :P )

Re:DON'T START FROM SCRATCH

[Ghaoth]

Everyone's an expert. Give it to Microsoft to write it on Windows 8 and Access and publish on IIS.

This is how it will go...

[ewhenn]

Red Hat will have everything switched to their version of linux, Oracle will have everything switched over to their db, and Google will data-mine it all.

Tech Titans Oracle, Red Hat, and Google...

[filthpickle]

to make shitloads of money. Muaha. Muahaha. Muahahahahahahha

weeee

[GrimShady]

oh man this is gonna be good (sits back with a bowl of popcorn)

Lessons learned

[dutchwhizzman]

What makes me kind of sad is that most companies and governments never learn from lessons that the past have already taught us. It was obvious that connecting so many different vendors through one web site was going to be a pain unless some communication protocol was established as a standard. What if this sort of thing, after being established, was thoroughly tested before a universal front end was created? However obvious this was, it didn't happen for the usual reasons; politics, delegation of blame, responsibilities and the usual unclear communication.

(grumpy old man voice) If we were ate war and the military was responsible for this, they would have gotten this sorted out in 24 hours! If only lives would depend on it, things would have gone so much smoother! Oh wait....

Oracle is an expensive overkill

[coder111]

Maybe that 1% of time Oracle DB is the right solution, and then you need it and you need to pay DBAs and consultants to do the tuning.

But in other cases, Oracle is an overkill. And Postgres with minimal effort will Just Work, while just the effort to set up Oracle and keep it running is going to be expensive (DBAs, consultants) and horrible. Especially if you can spend all the money you saved on licences on proper hardware. And I have experienced more bugs in Oracle than in Postgres, both in weird query optimizer behaviour, and outright incorrect data handling. And there is no way to get them fixed, at least in timely manner, not even with most expensive support options.

And don't get me started on Oracle enterprise applications- they are horrible. And given the history of company of overcharging their customers and delivering crap, I wouldn't trust them with any project.

About the only thing produced by Oracle that I enjoy is Java. And I still shudder every time I think that it is owned by Oracle, although they seem to be doing a reasonably good job getting new versions out of the door.

--Coder

I used to think this way

[coder111]

I do agree with a lot of points listed here. Rolling your own development team is not easy, nor cheap.

However, when you hire companies to do contracts this big, you end up with horrible horrible mess. First, you get to hide the bigest contractors available (because the project is big), like Accenture or similar. And they are the worst, and have the worst (cheapest) people available working for them. The only selling point they have is the headcount, not quality of developers. And they will assemble a new team for this project, from random guys, with flaky qualifications and skills, and often no prior experience.

And all those companies are for-profit. Which means they will find ways to overcharge you by A LOT. Like 10x-20x the cost of a good sized team for several years.

In the end, a project like this that has been outsourced to big IT companies is almost guaranteed to cost you a fortune, and end up a failure.

Now it's possible (and likely) to end up with a failed project with an in-house team, but choosing in-house development vs contracting is not as clear cut as you seem to suggest.

--Coder

Re:And...

[SternisheFan]

Thanks for that link, a lot of screwy numbers floating about. So, currently around $170 million, with an "upwards potential of $300 million."

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not 600 million.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/24/how-much-did-healthcare-gov-cost/?wprss=rss_politics

and I quote from your precious article:

"Update, Oct. 30: In testimony on Capitol Hill, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, in response to a direct question: “Congresswoman, we have spent about $118 million on the website itself, and about $56 million has been expended on other IT to support the web.”

That adds up to $174 million."

Do you really think this PIECE OF GARBAGE , was worth 174 MILLION US DOLLARS?.... REALLY? any way hippie liberals want to spin this, you BLEW 174 MILLION on GARBAGE.

What software architect here thinks they can do this entire site for substantially less? keep in mind, these are the OPTIMISTIC, hippie liberal numbers as reported by the washingtonpost.com . Yes, I'm not a democrat. and before you denounce me, look at the INSANE numbers here, and realize they probably underestimated it.

The truth lies somewhere between their LOW ESTIMATE, and the republican HIGH ESTIMATE.

Calvary?

[StewBaby2005]

It's 'Cavalry', not 'Calvary', although Healthcare.gov may end up crucified by these 'Tech Giant's'... Personally, I would have used Amazon and H-P or IBM , definitely NOT ORACLE.... $$$$$$

YOU'RE COMPLETELY WRONG

[PortHaven]

President Obama has spent SIGNIFICANTLY MORE than ANY OTHER PRESIDENT.

You're comparing apples to oranges. President Obama had significantly lower "increase" in spending from the prior year before. Largely, because he came in afte the super-massive emergency trillion $+ banking bailout. That was a) a huge expenditure b) an emergency expenditure. What President Obama did was continue at the spending level every year since.

In other words, imagine your household expenditure is $50K. But you had a major illness requiring a $50,000 hospital surgery. So that year, your expenditure was $100K. The next year you spend $98K and exclaim you've reduced spending. But what you're not admitting is that you're factoring an emergency expenditure into the regular budget. Then later spending that same amount without an emergency expenditure.

Bush Term 1
$8.9 Expenditure
$1.2 Deficit

Bush Term 2
$11.8 Expenditure
$2.2 Deficit

Obama Term 1
$11.9 Expenditure
$2.3 Deficit

Here is the key, ALL the deficits under President Bush were below $500 billion until 2009. 1/2 were around the $150-$300 billion. Three were around the $400-$450 billion. Then in 2009 we get a $1.4 trillion deficit thanks to the bank bailouts.

The deficits for every year of President Obama's 1st term exceed $1 trillion. While none were as high as the $1.4 during the banking crisis. Two were $1.3 trillion, and two were $1 trillion.

In other words, President Obama took an emergency situation that equated to an additional $1 trillion in deficit spending and made it standard. So yes, President Obama has "increased" spending less. But he has maintained "emergency" spending levels for every year of office.

Oracle's going to fix a website?

[Pherdnut]

Wouldn't that kind of be like putting Monsanto execs on the FDA? Oh... right.

"""called in the calvary""" = Calvary ??

[wganz]

Calvary, which is also called Golgotha, is a hill.
Cavalry is a horse or highly mobile military unit.

FURTHER MORE....

[PortHaven]

Rick Ungar = STUPID

"UhObama was never a Congressman. He did serve as a Senator."

Do you want to put any weight into an article written by such an ignorant man?

"The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States consisting of two houses: the House of Representatives and the Senate."

- Wikipedia

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/24/who-is-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower-would-you-believe-its-barack-obama/

***

Okay, what this article is really saying is that President Obama took office after the largest emergency budget expenditure in U.S. history. One that pushed the deficit up from President Bush's average of $305 billion to over $1.4 trillion. Largely due to a 1 time $1 trillion dollar bailout of the U.S. and global banking system.

Then he lauds President Obama for only having an average of $1.2 trillion dollar deficit. Exclaiming, see...see... President Obama lowered the deficit from $1.4. Reducing the deficit by almost 15%.

What Mr. Ungar fails to point out, is that President Obama kept spending at emergency levels. Take out that one time emergency expenditure and compare the average deficits.

What you see is President Bush's $305 billion versus President Obama's $1,225 billion a year deficit.

So how much did President Obama increase the deficit spending? 400%

Even factoring the 2009 fiscal year with the bank bailout. President Bush's average deficit was $443 billion vs $1,163 billion (and that's assuming the 2013 ends with the smaller estimated $0.9 trillion deficit - have my doubts).

Even then, it equates to a 2.5x increase in deficit spending over President Bush.

And, remember that half a trillion of that 2009 budget was the emergency stimulus bill that President Obama passed.

Hints at infrastructure?

[mu51c10rd]

So it seems that Healthcare.gov's "data services hub" is all built with Oracle, using RHEL app servers? Other reports mentioning them bring in Amazon and Google people as well...I am guessing for the cloud scaleability part. Funny that some nontraditional private sector companies are getting the lucrative contracting gigs. Usually it goes to companies whose revenue is 90+ percent from the government.

And to think...

[MooseMiester]

So we have three more no-bid contracts for an undisclosed sum.

Of course not even a whimper of discontent from the media, the lefties, or the commentators here, many of whom wailed and howled for years about such practices when the evil Rethugnikans did this out of necessity for ONE MONTH. Because as we all know some pigs are equal, but some pigs are not as equal as others.

By the time this is over we'll have a trillion dollar website. And then we will hear about the CRISIS where the whole thing has to be rewritten, or we are all doomed, and if the opposition party protests, well, they hate children, want grandma to starve, and just want people to die.

Sure about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the (possibly misinformed) impression that they hired ONE contractor who immediately turned it around and created 55 subcontracts out of it (which is pretty typical for govt work)

Re:Why not IBM

[DarthVain]

Ok, this is just begging for the Hitler ranting video meme for Obamacare... :)

Somehow I have to think there was a little more "pressure" from the Nazi's to not fail.

To quote DarthVader "You have failed me for the last time" *force choke*

That also needs to be made into a new internet meme... Perhaps after it fails the end of November...