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HealthCare.gov: What Went Wrong?
New submitter codeusirae writes "An initial round of criticism focused on how many files the browser was being forced to download just to access the site, per an article at Reuters. A thread at Reddit appeared and was filled with analyses of the code. But closer looks by others have teased out deeper, more systematic issues."
Can't wait to read the thoughtful comments to follow.
bitch and moan
BITCH and MOAN
all americans do is bitch and moan.
bitch and moan
BITCH and MOAN
all republicans do is bitch and moan.
This article is dated oct 8. I had assumed it would be more recent.
Everything.
Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the Govt can design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center for the NSA but can't deploy a website to allow people to sign up for insurance?
The web site turned out like every other v1 web app that gets rushed out to an externally-set deadline?
The US re-elected a nigger. What were you people thinking??
obama
Basing a computer program upon a deliberately obfuscated law that is also so huge that no single person has ever read the whole thing, much less that it can be converted into something that can be comprehended in mathematical terms is at least where to start with the whole mess. Forget about if the ideas that got the law started are valid or not, the law itself doesn't really accomplish any of the stated goals of what the legislation was supposed to do in the first place, other than to become a fiscal black hole for everything that touches it.... including any software development related to the law.
It's another expansion of an already too big welfare state by socialists communists and other traitors.
combined with a lead footed captain/owner you could only expect a rapid failure.
Now you look at an idiot electorate who elect a command-n-chimp and what would expect after the match was lit?
Socialist healthcare is only gasoline on the fire...
You assume that it didn't go exactly as planned.
it was designed to fail, so as to inaccurately blame the Republicans and replace it with single-payer as a ' i told you so ' maneuver.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It was slow to load, I couldn't sign up, my browser hung waiting on lost connections with the too many other files it was trying to download and there seem to be server sync problems with the back end databases.
In other words it acts like PayPal, Google, Facebook and Slashdot.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Not "systematic."
Some states succeeded with their websites. The federal government succeeded with its employee insurance marketplace which has much wider coverage.
http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/
Republicans refused to allow people onto this plan, or to buy into Medicare.
ACA is not designed to fail intentionally but it probably will because it only addresses one part of a profit-making system. There is no competitive substitutability or clarity on prices (not just costs!). Ever try to find out how much some thing will cost at office X vs Y, with insurance? It's astonishingly difficult. I suspect this is intentional.
Single-payer appears to be empirically more successful for medicine (and few other goods and services).
Healthcare.gov is merely a distraction from Obamacare, also Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Sooner or later the website will be fixed and many will think that the mission has been accomplished. It is obvious that Affordable Care Act is not really Affordable for the middle class, it is merely a new additional tax for most of the working people, who were mostly silent through the process. Affordable Care Act does little to employ free market principles and to combat the true problem: HealthCare costs.
log on Then 7he
The Govt can't design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center. It can hire people to do it for them. Badly.
http://storageservers.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/nsa-prism-data-center-stops-working-due-to-electrical-problems/
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Murphy and Ted Cruz.
Dear AC, Please explain to me how purchasing private health insurance from a competitive marketplace is even remotely socialist. I suggest you learn what socialism really is, instead of invoking it towards everything (or everyone) you may not agree with. It just makes you look stupid.
So would blatant violation of the 10th amendment of the US constitution by the US federal government come into play here?
It seems to me that the website tried to do too much and the company tasked to build it were given a no bid contract and had political connections to michelle obama. Government corruption at its finest.
Regardless of "what went wrong", you know that the higher ups will just fire some peons, give themselves some big bonuses, and call it a day.
But the BIGGER question I don't see anybody asking, is why is there no apparent fall back or concession to delay requirements due to the problems? ANY significantly complicated computer system can reasonably be expected to encounter problems at deployment. And despite what the talking, drooling, blathering heads on TV seem to think, it is simply IMPOSSIBLE to test a system like this 100.000000000000% against real world scenarios. There will be glitches, there will be people who can't use the systems, there will be all sorts of "people problems" that no technology can fix. They should have been ready with other non webby ways to get people taken care of, and prepared to delay the needs for all of this if they could not get everyone taken care of in time.
It's hard enough to work with one spotty vendor, let alone 55. That number, 55, represents somewhere between 55 and 55-squared lines of possibly iffy communication between possibly iffy organizations. When I first heard that healthcare.gov had 55 contractors working on it, I was surprised that the damn thing ran at all.
My take on it (as I've posted previously):
The government seems to treat the population, in many ways, much as a farmer treats his livestock. But when it comes to getting old, how DOES a farmer treat livestock?
On a farm, while livestock is healthy and producing profit, they're valuable. Once they're costing more than they're producing, it's time to get rid of them. A particularly beloved animal might be kept on as a pet. But the anonymous mass has to go.
Since at lest the late '70s or early '80s, the impending bankruptcy of Social Security has been a worry for government officials. I recall one of them making a "slip of the tongue" on a CNN interview, back when the channel was new: She lamented that small families and the success of the '60s anti-population-growth propaganda was leading to too many retired and two few working, and they had to "get the death rate up to match the birth rate" to save the program. That may not be the official position, but that sort of thinking is pervasive.
In past generations oldsters could be counted on for votes. But aging boomers aren't as solid a voting block for the party in power as some of the later generations - particularly the new, undocumented, immigrants.
What if our current party-in-power has decided that, now that the Baby Boomers are aging out of the work force, becoming a drain on, rather than paying into, the government coffers, it's time to kill them off? How could they go about it?
Just setting up "Death Panels" and picking who's going to be left to die isn't too popular. (Look at the bad press they got when they included that in a companion bill to Obamacare.)
But how about this:
- Nationalize the bulk of the medical insurance industry.
- Change the rules on all of it, so the prices for private plans goes 'way up, and the insurance companies can dump the sickly from their current, lower-priced, plans because they don't conform to the new rules.
- Then botch the rollout, so those dumped can't get new insurance, either.
Result:
- The poor boomers are dumped from their insurance. The moderately well-to-do boomers have their healthcare prices skyrocket, quickly draining them into "poor boomer" status. (Give 'em six months to three years without insurance and see how many are left.) Only the truly rich can afford to stay alive and healthy.
- With the "It's a really GREAT program, there's just a few bugs in the rollout." claim they can stretch it out and leave the oldsters uninsured for years.
- Meanwhile the politicians who orchestrated this get to claim they're doing it to HELP the population, not to kill them off. (They even get to claim it's their opposition who is trying to kill off grandma.)
Maybe it's not what's happening. But it fits so well with the rest of their track records and the party's historical roots. I ask myself, "If they were doing this deliberately, WHAT would they do differently?". And I can't think of a single thing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the Govt can design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center for the NSA but can't deploy a website to allow people to sign up for insurance?
The US govt is deeply split on if it wants ACA. Hell, the Dems are rushing to get the ACA in place to make it difficult to undo. The Republicans shut down the govt, to stop ACA, before it becomes difficult to undo. Much like Apollo, the most difficult part, was getting the govt, to decide it wants to pay for it.
it's simple: they didn't do enough testing and bug fixing. there should have been at least 6 months of testing and debugging to get this system working well. the information i found was that 248 people were able to sign up on the first day. so it works... kind of. there were bugs like spouses sometimes ending up being filed as children.
it's obviously a complex system but i take the 80m lines of code number with a grain of salt because i'm sure that includes all the libraries they (re)used too and maybe even an entire JVM. as such, it's probably all in house crap for each and every contractor, 55 if i remember correctly. there was obviously lazy coding involved to get that much bloat. there could be a swath of libs included that arent even used but were thrown in there "just in case i need it".
i hope the companies helping them gut the use of most proprietary libs because they are an easy way to get terrible bugs and gaping security holes. i also hope they move to a unified OO language to get a handle on this feral system. however, if i find out that google convinced them to rewrote it all in Go, i'll just cry.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The ObamaCare web site is an example of Splat Programming. What is Splat Programming? Cut and paste from every where, run once and move on if it appears to even marginally work, and don't think very long about method or variable names. The most important part about Splat Programming is that you don't try to combine css or js files but rather just reference them individually via CDN and only change function name or variables that conflict. Most importantly, do not do any loading, scaling or security testing especially if you know that the test will fail.
The other part is Government Projects. You don't have to worry about errors and omissions because the standard government contracts do not hold the contractor liable if the final result is approved. Finally, unlike commercial projects, there is an infinite amount of money available to pay for years of bug fixes and upgrades.
Thankfully this site only effects a small percentage of people so there is really no cause for alarm.:)
Typical of what happens when an organization is too used to spending other people's money. It's ike a 16yo girl's runaway spending habits with daddy's credit card...and she's got him by the balls, too, along with her mother.
http://ptweb.ir/ http://top.zanbilshop.net/ http://top1.shoperzfa.com/
Man, what a classic nerd response.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
This is all part of the plan. The Socialists want to destroy the heathcare system so that they can get everyone dependent on a single payer system and get rid of the insurance industry. Can't have a free market if you're going to redistribute the nations wealth.
Should have opened an Amazon store.. sign up would produce an eBook charge to fund the site and a User Account and eBook download with all the details of your purchase. Amazon would get paid by a Tax gratis from the Government.
First and worst, politicians were involved. Everything else pretty much is a cascade effect off that.
Second, cronyism.
Third, you had a bunch of non-technical people setting up moving goalposts for the technical people to hit, with regard to the technical specs of the site.
Fourth, distinct lack of firm, single-message communication to the technical teams with regards to whether the project was or was not going forward.
I could go on and on about all the fuckups with regard to this. But I'd just piss off a bunch of people who aren't worth my time.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Maybe it's the fault of libertarians that seem to make up a significant percentage of the tech demographic; wanting to kill the Affordable Healthcare Act. Or tea party programmers wanting the same thing who managed to get on the project. Come on man! Think of some more conspiracies!! Lovin' it.
Of course it couldn't be the incompetence of contracting companies that seem to make a living because they have or aim to have some sort of inside track in Washington rather than the chops to do the actual thing that needs doing. Of course that would never happen in Washington or any other political capital. I'm not saying the way the primary contractor, Quebec company CGI, does business in any way follows recent Quebec business practices. They are probably a well above board and good honest corporate citizen (although according to the Washington Post article above they did screw up another medical system based project). I'm just saying that if Quebec ever did separate from Canada, as it is now, they'd have to think up some other adjective to describe it. It's too cold to grow bananas there.
Frankly (and personally) though, I wouldn't trust any company to government contracts with stated aims published in their profiles like: "The ultimate aim is to establish relations so intimate with the client that decoupling becomes almost impossible," (see Washington Post article). Especially not from Quebec.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
So what you're saying is it's just like every other bill the Democrats shove through.
The country elected a socialist. The question is, "what could go right?"
an ill wind that blows no good
Wow. Not equipped. I seem to recall a website called barackobama.com that came from behind to give Senator a Obama the presidency in 2008 and 2012. Maybe this should have been expanded to healthcare.gov. The campaign web site was admittedly less complex - it just had to record names, addresses, contributions, etc. but it did handle millions of small donations without crashing. Full disclosure, knocked on doors in Iowa in 2008, delegate to the DNC in Charlotte, NC in 2012, but damn! I would have thought that most /. users were a bit more liberal that what I am reading here. The AC's I can understand, but the rest?
So you would prefer who - Rand "Wikipedia plagiarized" Paul? Yikes.
Interested to hear intelligent feedback. That excludes conspiracy theories, ok?
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
What went wrong is we created a system which requires extensive paperwork for insurance. It should have been a web form that asks "Are you a US citizen?" and if you answer yes, it says "OK, you're covered."
You can make the system (not just the web site) even more efficient by eliminating that question and simply serving static HTML.
I blame Jquery... every amateur coders crutch.
no single person has ever read the whole thing
Here's someone who has.
Here's a link so you can do it yourself.
Why the lies?
Quote 1: "A complex system that works is found to have invariably evolved from a simple system that worked. . . .A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." (John Gall, Systemantics,p. 80, 1978 paperback edition).
Quote 2: "In architecting a new [software] program all the serious mistakes are made in the first day." (Martin, 1988, cited in Maier & Rechtin, The Art of Systems Architecting (3rd ed.), p. 399)
Quote 3: "Indeed, when asked why so many IT projects go wrong in spite of all we know, one could simply cite the seven deadly sins: avarice, sloth, envy, gluttony, wrath, lust, and pride. It is as good an answer as any and more accurate than most." (me, testifying before the Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology Hearing, US House of Representatives, June 22, 1998)
My pre- and post-launch analysis of the Healthcare.gov website can be found here. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
What went wrong? Government.
The ACA has some great theory behind it. Assuming that the federal government will be able to operate and maintain a system like this in a cost effective fashion is lunacy. It as bound to fail.
Also don't tell me it was Republican "starve the beast" strategy. The ACA was fully funded and largely untouchable. By any reasonable standard the roughly $400m spent on implementing this was incredibly excessive. If a private company had wanted to build this system for profit, it would have been done for under $100m. The big mistake of the ACA was that it did not allow for the creation of privately run and owned exchanges.
Dear socialist, Please explain to me how buying a product that the government forces people to buy and forces a company to provide at a specific level of service NOT socialism? Competitive market place? You don't have a clue! Socialists always look stupid and confirm it when opening their collective mouths.
"Billion+ dollar data center"
Well it's certainly not suprising that government spent a lot of money. They may well have spent a billion and ended up with a DC worth $10 million. As far as we know, their DC capacity may be the same as what Amazon and Google build for 94% less money
Most likely, though, people with experience in similar signals intelligence speced out a project that would actually meet their expansion needs, probably part of a ten year plan to reach X capacity. That's a different beast than politicians saying "my next election depends on building a giant federal bureaucracy in no more than three years".
Less complex is just a tad of an understatement.
You know we're in trouble when the best that can be said about the sitting president is to compare
him to a top 5 worst president and still Obama comes out worse. "He has less experience than Bush" isn't a compliment, my friend.
The top five worst presidents would include Filmore, Harrison, Bush, Obama, and another of your choosing. In many ways, including executive experience, Obama is the worst of the "worst five". Compare him to a good president like Kennedy, Reagan, Lincoln, Eisenhower ...
The problem is that the basic text of any given act is just the tip of the iceberg. The department of health and human services will be writing regulation to enforce and clarify the act for decades to come.
I believe the point is that the people near the top of the NSA, those managing major projects, do their work with a (sometimes misguided) sense that they are protecting their country.
Someone outsourced to cobble together a hundred archaic government systems for some other country is more likely to be simply punching the clock. They COULD do better work, and probably would if they believed their job was essential to protect their nation's freedom.
If anyone remembers the end of '99...
Then the beginning of '00...
I do recall seeing a website showing the date as "May 12th 19107" in 2007.
Dear AC,
Please explain to me how purchasing private health insurance from a competitive marketplace is even remotely socialist. I suggest you learn what socialism really is, instead of invoking it towards everything (or everyone) you may not agree with. It just makes you look stupid.
I'm not the same AC, but that's an easy answer. Being forced to give your money to some cause you don't believe in or even benefit from is socialism, and that's exactly what the ACA is. Case in point: I currently buy health insurance for myself, and I'm happy with my policy. The cheapest policy I qualify for on the public "exchange" (which you mistake for a "competitive marketplace", haha) is three times as much money as I currently pay, and it's not even what I want. That and every other policy includes maternity and newborn care, which I simply don't need or want.
You can try to make a pathetic argument about how it's good that I and many others (excepting those who don't work) have to pay for that (for the "common good") so that other people (including people who don't work) can stay dependent, but no intellectually honest argument can be made for the delusion that the ACA is not a socialistic program. I'll tell you how it usually goes... At this point in the discussion, many leftists do in fact choose to abandon intellectual honesty and instead launch into an emotional argument along the lines of "why do you hate poor people?" If it gets to that point, the discussion is mostly useless because intellectually dishonest people aren't looking with an open mind and only want to force you to agree with themselves at any cost, but patient teachers can calmly help such misguided leftists, with reason instead of emotion, see how much hurt and diminished pride dependency brings. Other leftists who retain some semblance of intellectual honesty may instead have chosen to focus on anecdotal evidence supporting how wonderful socialized medicine works in socialized countries; they will focus on how great it is that everything is free. Except, of course, that nothing is free. These leftists probably haven't bothered to do a few quick calculations to determine how much their health insurance actually costs in increased taxes. Some of them will be persuaded and realize how silly their argument was once they realize how much overhead is involved in any such governmental program."But it is 'just wrong' for mega insurance companies to make a profit on healthcare!" So we're back to that emotionally-based argument, this one stemming from a misunderstanding of how "greed" really works in commerce and a false assumption that profit is always the sole motivator; help such leftists by gently prompting them to go look up exactly what kind of profit margins insurance companies regularly see in comparison to other industries, then remind them that the profit motive keeps costs down and that accountability in government bureaucracies is virtually always much lower which drives up costs. At this point, many leftists will start muttering about "teabaggers" and start repeating the same talking points that you've just debunked; just graciously allow them to bow out of the conversation (you've done all you can to help those individuals think critically, but like every other skill, humans have varying degrees of ability for critical thinking; don't forget that those individuals undoubtedly do have other skills and talents that are still valuable in society regardless of whether or not they are capable and willing to abandon their false ideology for reason).
Reagan? He started the downward spiral toward total dishonesty and lack of government. Why are some countries rich and others poor? It's not resources, it's government. Germany and Japan had good systems imposed by the US and they are doing fine. Most Western European governments have similar systems, they do well. Most Asian/African/Eastern European have crappy governments and are poor. There are exceptions, Singapore has a repressive but effective government and they are doing just fine economically.
By choosing to starve and neuter the most effective tool for prosperity they have Americans are making themselves, and the countries who follow them poor. Government, and taxes, are a good thing. Corruption is bad, but a little theft is better than selling out the whole system which is what the US has consistently done for the last 3 or 4 decades. Who won each election? The man was bought. Why did Clinton win? He sold out more completely than his opponents. Why did Bush II win? He sold out totally and without reservation. The one exception is Bush I who actually did some positive stuff before being run out of town on a rail for not being bought. Obama was sort of a mistake, it should have been Hilary who was utterly bought, but Obama did the grassroots thing the first election... Too bad he doesn't understand Texan aphorisms like "dance with the one who brung you."
Government is good, Fox news sucks, current conservatism (here in Canada too, Harper is trashing the economy in the typical right wing manner) sucks, propaganda sucks, and going with the gut instead of what works (the economy was better when taxes were high? That can't be right...) sucks.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Why does everyone think making a web site is easy? With multiple feeds using different technologies even a fairly minimal health care web site would be complicated. Add in a whole lot of states that oppose the process and delay finalizing the requirements (client from hell) and you can pretty easily get to a point where the implementers have to choose between being late and being wrong. Think of the length of the requirements document distilled from the laws and negotiations. Think of the army of business analysts needed to get functional requirements and of the timeline they have to meet. Remember that no one ever hires enough business analysts.
This is not an easy thing to do.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
The second biggest oxymoron next to gov't intelligence?
The point is a history of the right wing to hamstring or eliminate things they don't like. It's part of an overall strategy.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Idiots wrote the spec. They devised a system that was sized to accommodate 750k simultaneous users and at it's lowest point it's seen between 1-7 MILLION simultaneous users. They drastically undersized the offering.
20 years ago I walked out of a DoD agency to freedom in the Midwest, the Great Frontier during one generation in the near to mid-1800s.
Why did I walk?
A certain DoD GIS (Global) project.
It was scrapped (totally, ripped out and destroyed and buried in a land fill in Maryland; my Job Site is still visible on Google Maps though the Insignia sign at the entrance has been removed as well as the Guard Post, yes it was once a Secret Compartmented Information Facility) 3-years after I walked out. I recall it was, at the time of delivery and a big ceremony on the front lawn with Generals and all sorts of "Salad", 2-years over delivery date and 5 billion over budget (1992). I read about it being ripped up and scrapped in Aviation Week and Space Technology in October 1996 as I recall.
Walking away was the best move, I suspect, that I will ever accomplish (I suspect I still have at least about 25-years of life should I be so fortunate).
QED
"The way that the federal government bids out software is fundamentally broken.... Why can't the government draw on [the expertise of Amazon and Google] when designing a site as critical to the public as healthcare.gov, rather than farming it out to the lowest bidder?" There's nothing wrong with farming a project out to the lowest bidder, so long as you require performance. These developers should not have been paid. Furthermore, Google and Amazon are not the only organizations capable of building a heavy-traffic web site. Hundreds of companies could have done a good job, provided the specs were not too stupid.
or do you mean "systemic" - similar, but quite different in meaning.
Use your special system architecture x-ray vision, folks. This is not simple, stand-alone site like Slashdot that just has to do some database queries and generate some XML, then uses JQuery or something to asynchronously load some advertising into a DIV. This is a system that must orchestrate a complex *synchronous* process involving servers that belong to outside organizations.
Case in point; the system requirements say that the site must exclude illegal immigrants, so the system has to request and obtain proof of your status from Homeland Security's servers before it can proceed. Also, instead of issuing the same subsidy to everyone, the law specifies and income dependent, means-tested subsidy, which means the system ALSO has to check your claims against the IRS's computers before continuing. That's before it actually gets to obtaining the marketplace data.
So the most complex aspect of this system is essentially untestable short of a near-full scale roll-out. Hey, IRS, can I try hosing down your servers with JMeter? Even if you could orchestrate the non-functional testing you'd want to do, you won't know how the system works until it's handling real data. It's not like you can shove a test load equivalent to a thousand applications per hour, then another equivalent to ten-thousand, then draw a straight line that will tell you how the system will perform with twenty-thousand. There are some serious discontinuities in performance lurking, and the actual data submitted is likely to change things.
I think if I were in charge of this, the extreme difficulty of realistic non-functional testing might have led me to isolate some of the data interchange into a post-processing step. That is, I'd let people apply and take them at their word about their immigration status and income, then tell them to check back in a day while we confirm the data they submitted. It's more bureaucratic, but a big part of user experience is predictability. If someone knows they can complete their application in half an hour and come back 24 hours later for confirmation, it's not so bad. But if the system is designed to give them the expectation that they can finish in a half hour, but sometimes takes so long their sessions expire, that's a disaster.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They are at Verizon Terremark. They mostly use vmware and rely on contractors to fix their problems since their engineers on hand aren't very competent... You can take a look at some reviews here http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Terremark-Worldwide-Reviews-E6571.htm
Can't wait to read the thoughtful comments to follow.
If that website was built with thoughtfulness, it wouldn't be such a mess to begin with.
Hell, if the whole Obama care program was structured with thoughtfulness, it wouldn't be forcing insurance companies to cancel medical policies that people had already been already buying for decades.
Amazon and Google gradually grew their services. That's not relevant here. And lowest-bidder may stink, but nobody has a tested alternative. The third lowest bidder?
It may be that they procured for health-care experience but not scaling experience.
Table-ized A.I.
My understanding is this project was not bid out, but just given to some contractors.
You know, I've been developing internet applications for over two decades now. I've got a successful business, and the last thing that I'd ever recommend to my commercial clients is an open source philosophy. It simply won't work for them, since they tend to have zero in-house technical expertise. That's a longer off-topic discussion.
But...
In this case, I simply don't see why your government was ever trying to build a web-site at all. You're talking here about national health-care -- by definition a socialist endeavour, and a good one at that, especially in theory.
Your government should have (and still should, by the way) simply hire a proper application designer to put together a well-thought-out plan for the site. Spec'd and documented to an initial-draft stage, with some decent mockups.
It should then have been (be) handed over to the nation of open source developers to take it from there. That's my definition of "by the people". A year later, and zero additional dollars spent, a few thousand open source programmers could have, once and for all, proven that the concept works or doesn't work -- both the web site and the open source philosophy.
You'd think that given the extreme costs, and the extreme debt, that perhaps your government would have allowed its own citizens to make it happen all by themselves.
Allowing the people to govern themselves makes a lot of sense when you're talking about healthcare -- a system that the people actually want, and you're asking them to pay for it through taxes anyway.
You could have had it all. You still can. $1 billion dollars of sunken costs later.
The problem was they hired offshore rotten curry to do the work instead of hiring people who knew what they were doing in an effort to save money and make more profit.
The scope of the screw ups on this is so big that new vernacular and laws will be coined. College courses will be created solely focusing on the screw ups involved in this system. Many of epic software disasters of the past will be forgotten because of how they fade in comparison.
The problems:
o $5B estimate to produce the site (WTF!) but only a $1B budget granted to create the site (still, WTF! )
o Hofstadter’s Law
o 55 contractors and Conway's law
o 2 weeks of integration testing before going live (seriously? a thousand WTF!)
o Unknown size of the Cone of Uncertainty at launch
o Failure to adopt 'Worse is Better' OR 'The Right Thing'
The solution involves a heavy dose of outside programmer's thus invoking Brook's Law.
The $5B estimate is nealry 24,000 man-years of effort at $100/hr. So, congress said, 'no way', we think it is only 5,000 man-years. Yeah. Congress is overseeing a software project.
The problem is that the basic text of any given act is just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm getting jetlag from the moving goalposts....
Correct. It was a no-bid contract. Interestingly, Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, is a Princeton classmate of Michelle Obama. In addition to being college classmates, both Obama and Townes-Whitley are members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.
...t damn! I would have thought that most /. users were a bit more liberal that what I am reading here. The AC's I can understand, but the rest?
So you would prefer who - Rand "Wikipedia plagiarized" Paul? Yikes.
You've got a 6-digit UID close in age to my first one -- have you been avoiding political discussions here for the past decade? During the 00s, Slashdot was primarily full of hardcore libertarians & conservatives that would mod down the rare liberal comments; it's only been the past few years (largely since the Great Recession began) that liberal comments became routinely visible again.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Amazon.com. IIRC didn't it blow up pretty spectacularly during its first big Christmas season? They got it fixed though. Same thing will happen with this web portal to Obamacare. dfw
Reagan? He started the downward spiral toward total dishonesty and lack of government.
Not Reagan. Government dishonesty goes back way further. Do you not remember 1973 Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger? In 1975 he said, "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." And what about J. Edgar Hoover?
I think dishonesty and corruption are part of human nature, and go back to the beginning of humanity. The Constitution gave the United States a "more perfect union," but it cannot eliminate the inherent evil.
Have a nice time.
There's all this doom and gloom, but where are the comments about what's going right? Nothing ever starts without problems.
When Twitter first became popular, the fail whale was a constant fixture.
When Microsoft took over Hotmail, it had major glitches. Microsoft's Azure cloud still has major service disruptions.
And who can remember the days when "Slashdotting" meant a site went down?
Of course, the major difference between those and Healthcare.gov is that ordinary people can freely choose not to join Twitter, but uninsured Americans face fines from the IRS if they don't get a health insurance plan by the start of next year.
Have a nice time.
It's about profit model.
The problems that were reported as "problems with the website" were either standard IT issues (no excuse, but no need to exaggerate) solvable with routine IT engineering work or they were problems inherent in the profit model of the insurance companies.
Health care is like clean water, plumbing, or roads...it is something virtually every American would want or need.
The very definition of government is to group our resources...and any time humans group for any reason...it is to somehow pool resources.
"insurance" is a viable concept in the free market...I'm thinking especially for things like automobile insurance. It makes sense that it could be profitable.
Technology has improved our ability to give health care such that, essentially, it is cheaper to just let everyone have access to health care (b/c on a per person basis it is cheaper) than to deal with the consequences of having an unhealthy populace.
Technology has rendered the health care insurance industry obsolete. It is similar to the effect the internet had on the RIAA's profit model of licensing and holding legal copyrights.
Thank you Dave Raggett
That's Python discredited then; lets go back to Perl and C.
</flameproof garments>
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I disagree completely with your "planned to fail" theory, but I'd love to see them do **what Obama was elected to do in 2008**
People forget that in the Democratic primary in 2008, Hillary and Obama had competing health care plans. What we have now is essentially a modified Hillary/Romney plan, whereas originally Obama was in favor of a single payer system (which he later allowed for a "public option").
But after the 2008 election moronic Democrats in Congress (right philosophically, strategically they are sub-idiots) passed a comprimise with the Republicans that eliminated even the public option (but greatly extended Medicaid, which is for poor people).
So yeah, I hope that part of your dumb comment is right! Bring on the single-payer system! Technology has made the personal health care model obsolete...we need to stop subsidizing Kaiser-Permanente with government money.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Brilliant deduction. As we know, only pathetic losers go to Princeton, so he must be relying on political favors to succeed in life.
What went wrong ? A bunch of socialists who make believe they care and who really arent concerned with actual solutions or what damage they will do got some cronies (micheles progressive school mate in a NO BID contract) to NOT do the work for huge amounts of taxpayer money (it grow on trees after all)
Ieeptness/negligence/fraud wfor the SIMPLEST part of this healthcare scam -- imagine what it will be like when you actually will require authorization for care more than pulling out a splinter ....
The whole thing is a fraud from top to bottom and those responsicble (from top to bottom) should be chucked in jail or made to work on a chaingang for the rest of their lives for willfully and criminally depriving American Citizens of decent healthcare and squandering the nations wealth and freedoms.
Democrats- including Obama- knew everyone would lose their coverage because the 'grandfather' clause was worthless due to other parts of the 'Affordable' Care act. Obama has been lying since day one with 'You can keep your coverage if you like it."- lying as in he really, actually knew it was a lie, at the time those words came out of his mouth.
This is why Democrats make a better opposition party than an in-power party.
There's no accountability. It's always someone else's fault.
You can also graciously quote Margaret Thatcher "that the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money".
Being forced to give your money
If you ever looked at a dollar bill before, you may have noticed that it says "United States of America" on it... it was never "your" money.
Some of them will be persuaded and realize how silly their argument was once they realize how much overhead is involved in any such governmental program.
Administrative overhead on Social Security is less than 1%. Do you have some data which backs up this belief of yours that government is bad, or are you just making one of your hated "emotional arguments"?
Japan had a recession that lasted over an entire generation. Not sure how you would quantify that as "fine."
How is it a lie? The number of people who actually have read the full legislation is astonishingly few, and it doesn't include a single member of Congress. Yes, some staffers have read it, but that is immaterial. The point is that nobody read it completely before it became legislation (not even Barack Obama) except for the staff members that he trusted would have the stuff in it that he wanted, and relatively few have read it since. It also included explicit provisions for other "rule making bodies" that opened up those mere few pages as it were into a nightmare that nobody has ever read.
No, this isn't moving the goal posts. It is pointing out that it is deliberately obfuscated to be incomprehensible.
Interestingly, Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, is a Princeton classmate of Michelle Obama. In addition to being college classmates, both Obama and Townes-Whitley are members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.
They're both black? And they went to the same school? IT MUST BE A CONSPIRACY! Fucking racist jackwad moron.
Bush I -- he is actually the president of the last 50 years second most likely to have actually committed a felony with a good chance of conviction had it gone to trial (second only to Nixon). His pardons of six members of the Reagan administration during the active trials, including the former Secretary of Defense, decapitated the prosecution of felonies committed in the Iran-Contra criminal activities. As VP at the time and former CIA director, is it credible to believe that Bush himself didn't know what was going on?
What went wrong is the programmers had an Epiphany and realized that if their code worked, they would lose their current healthcare and then have to sign up for Obamacare.
Well, I became involved with the Obama campaign in 2007, and after that, spent more time on Daily Kos. When I saw /. pop up on Facebook, I started to read (and repost) a story here and there.
After 9/11, I discovered that other some IT people I had worked with at the World Trade Center were Republicans. I would find that I could have a dialogue with them for a while, and then they would regurgitate the latest "Fox and Friends" lie - BENGHAZI! - and I would have to let them go.
I guess it astounds me that tech-savvy people have views like "less government," which they share with tea-baggers carrying misspelled signs like Keep Your Hands off my Medicar.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
While I agree the health care system certainly needs to be revamped, I don't believe the method they came up with is the best way to go about doing so.
:D Punishment for their questionable behavior as of late. If we quit playing World Policeman, we could also cut our defense budget in HALF and use that to help pay for this thing. ( Hint, it's how the other countries pay for theirs. They don't have the largest defense budget on the planet :D )
Why make it so damn complicated ? Four levels of plans, different levels of coverage / premiums, availability determined by regional areas, IRS involvement, etc.
Really ?
There are more than a few countries who already have national health care systems in place ( France and Canada right off the top of my head ) so why would we try to reinvent the wheel here when systems already exist ( and have for many, many years ) that work ? I would rather pay a slightly higher Federal Tax and be totally covered than deal with the debacle that we now have. I know they were trying their best to get folks to believe that this wasn't a new " tax ", but only the naive still believe that. Hell, even the Supreme Court allowed it to stand because:
"The Affordable Care Act's requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the ruling. "Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness."
So, now that the cat is out of the bag and it's officially a tax, just raise the overall Tax on everyone to pay for it already. Would be far easier than the debacle we now have.
I don't see where the current implementation is going to do much good. When, in the entire HISTORY of the United States Government, has ANYTHING ever came in at or under budget projections ? Ever ? Anyone ? So when this monstrosity does what I think it will, what do you think the premium prices are going to do ? ( Hint, they're not going to go down and guess whose pocket it will be coming out of )
Another thought I've had is the coverage itself is woefully inadequate without one other "fix" in place.
Here's why:
Years ago I had a family member who had a heart bypass performed. He was in the hospital for about a month. When it was all said and done, the bill came in and checked in at just shy of HALF A MILLION DOLLARS.
Assume the health plan picks up a generous 75% of that bill. That leaves us with roughly $125k. Annual limit out of pocket expenses are $6k. So the remaining $119k the hospital is going to harass you for -eternity- to get because when you get admitted to the hospital, you sign a form that agrees YOU will pick up any costs the insurance doesn't cover. If you don't sign it, you don't get admitted. Failure to pay it will result in debt collectors, phone calls, letters, threats of litigation, etc. etc.
Does anyone really think that folks who are utilizing last resort government health care plans can EVER pay off a debt like that ? Hell, can you ?
And should you ? This is the real fix that needs to happen. Health care industry pricing is the ENTIRE reason we even have to HAVE insurance to begin with. No one can possibly afford the prices they charge without insurance. ( You 1% types don't count ) It's just insanity. Anyone who has ever looked at their hospital bill will agree. ( Really ? $5 for a Q-Tip ? )
So the easier fix for this is two-fold:
1) One plan that covers everything for everyone paid for by an increase in the Federal Tax and
2) The regulation of the health care industries out of control price gouging.
Hell, maybe we can help pay for this with some of the NSA's budget
The government had something to do with it.
Well at least it's nice to see that no one is really surprised by it's failure. This gives me some degree of hope for slashdotians. :D Now how many times has the government screwed something up? Even H.S. students know that "government" and "intelligence" are two words that do not belong in the same sentence, hehe. Hmm now here's a scary thought. If they can't even get a website right, something a H.S. student can do, how can they make the health care system work? Now there's food for thought. LOL
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
During my period onsite after being parachuted in to fix some identity management issues on the back-end(which were reverted two days later when they removed federation to allow for late/miss build code). The SUN/ORACLE EXA hardware had about 80% up-time and was plagued with I/O issues. That is correct it didn't have ONE nine of up-time.
Racist? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
So, because the association that they were both in chose to use the term "Black", does that mean it can't be pointed out that they had this connection? That seems quite ridiculous.
It turns out that there are other connections, though. They were also both members of the Organization of Black Unity (OBU) and the Third World Center (TWC).
In light of the fact that CGI got a no-bid contract on an enormously important development effort, these connections appear to be relevant. Perhaps you have a good explanation as to why CGI got this no-bid contract?
Correct. It was a no-bid contract. Interestingly, Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, is a Princeton classmate of Michelle Obama. In addition to being college classmates, both Obama and Townes-Whitley are members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.
I find this repeated on lots of conservative blogs, the fox news site, and the washingtontimes site, but nowhere else. Here is what reuters has to say:
The work on Healthcare.gov grew out of a contract for open-ended technology services first issued in 2007 with a place-holder value of $1,000. There were 31 bidders. An extension, awarded in September 2011 specifically to build Healthcare.gov, drew four bidders, the documents show, including CGI Federal.
So, yet another right wing lie. What a surprise.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Dude. Got any more of that cool-paid you're drinking? As a matter of fact, have another swig.
IF government was good. We'd still be paying homage to the crown. Oh that's right, you guys still do. Keep your claptrap. I'll go with the dysfunction, and free speech EVERY TIME.
Failure is the desired outcome. They want it to fail on every level. Cost, implementation, the website, all of it. The goal is to so completely hose the previous system we can't go back, create an unusable disaster with the AFC, paving the way for a single payer government owned and managed healthcare system.
Got a 404 when attempting to access the source code on GitHub. https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov
Private insurance companies have insured people for decades without running up any unfunded liabilities.
Medicare, on the other hand, has run up $89 trillion in unfunded liabilities; in other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come.
If everyone was aware of the economy-crushing magnitude of these liabilities, it would have a rather negative impact on Medicare's satisfaction rating.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
deals in Cuba that included a rather scary nuclear showdown that led directly into the cold war.
The Cold War began in 1947. The Cuban missile crisis happened in 1962.
Much of the reason we have so much debt is because the social security fund was robbed to pay for the [Vietnam] war and the space race.
Incorrect. A little bit of the reason we have so much debt is due to Vietnam-era borrowing. But to say "much of the reason" doesn't square with this fact: as of Oct. 2011, the Obama administration had incurred more debt that the first 41 presidents combined. (And that statistic is now quite dated. The national debt was $14.8 trillion in Oct. 2011, and $17.1 trillion now.) www.usdebtclock.org
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Someone once described American liberalism as confusing wishes with facts.
Well said. To believe that, for the first time in history, we could impose a massive new bureacracy and 13,000+ pages of new regulations on an industry, and not see its costs shoot through the roof, is an extreme example of wishful thinking.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Two people went to the same insanely popular school and associated with members of their own race.
More news at 11.