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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?"
Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.
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
I think it's cavalry.
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.
bombing the hell out of it!
It's a Biblical reference -- and at this rate it would take divine intervention.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
IBM certainly made sure the Nazi's CRM system worked right.
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.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
No Microsoft? lol :)
No, they wanted it done and not outsourced to India.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Just kidding.
I guess nobody in the decision making loop heard about Oracle's big California DMV fuck-up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Brooks Law states "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
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".
In that scenario, we'd actually be worse off - the ones with principles wouldn't be working on it...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
I can understand Google and Redhat... but Oracle? Talk about having a fox in the hen-house.
Enlisting JUST ONE of the tech giants would be more productive.
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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Crap, now the NSA will have a backdoor into the government!
Instead of fixing a bunch of hopeless code, why can't they start over the damn thing - with a properly designed paradigm ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
Alright, who is getting crucified over this one?
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).
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
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.
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.
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?
So, to summarize...
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.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.