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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."
This article is dated oct 8. I had assumed it would be more recent.
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?
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).
As opposed to Democrats lying that everyone could keep their coverage? And that Benghazi couldn't have been handled better? At this stage in the game, there is no blaming Bush. It's all Obama's lies and failed promises.
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.
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"
Hmm, maybe you should blame the people wrote it, voted for it, exempted themselves from it, and implemented it?
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.
I guess you touched a nerve with tparty mods!
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.
Area man upset that govt is open also upset that govt website is slow!
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
All they do is sabotage everyone else's work
Pretty much. It's the "starve the beast" philosophy and strategy. Sabotage something, then point out how it doesn't work, and then say "well, duh, because all government is evil."
It's their raison d'etre and since the Republicans are so invested in it after 30 (40?) years, without it they would have an existential crisis that would end in the same fate as the Whigs.
--
BMO
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.
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.
One could argue that the Administration's tactic of preventing release of critical design data until after the election, to prevent the opposition from using the true costs as a campaign issue, was sabotage de facto. This put the entire development process several months, perhaps a year, behind schedule.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
it's a reflection some plans were actually broken.
My former plan was not broken. It was exactly what I wanted. Now, I have to pay over twice as much for a plan that is not what I want. Obama promised I could keep my old plan. I cannot do that. I am forced into a much more expensive plan.
Quit making excuses for them. If you enable the lies, you're part of the problem.
Who says health care ever was a free market? There are a number of ways of arguing it was never and could never be a free market.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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
My son will be covered by our health care until he is 26. Good thing. Pre-existing conditions not a reason for no insurance for millions of people. Great thing. And you would propose what? Do tell, oh wise slash dotter.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
Once can argue a lot of things. However, I am sure the real problem is corruption in awarding contracts, then leniency in monitoring the work of contracts, or not enough resources to do so effectively. I mean, companies continually screw the public in their contracts with the government, and yet we do nothing about it.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
All over the place. For example, cut funding to oversight agencies, then blame failures of oversight on the evils of government.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
Off the top of my head?
FEMA.
FEMA was a functioning agency until Bush II took office.
And then Katrina happened.
But that's not the only example. I'm not going to tediously list all the "starve the beast" examples, especially when "starve the beast" is a publicly stated philosophy of the Republican party.
--
BMO
you are my foe, so I will not tell :) Seriously, though..I have too much work to do right now, but I'll try looking some up later
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
From Kevin Drum's blog:
So basically, these insurance companies sending out these cancellation notices were gaming the system so that they could both undermine the law and blame it for "forcing" their customers to buy more expensive coverage.
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.
Grant me the legal authority to print money anytime I want and make everyone else pay the true cost of it (inflation) and I, too, could pay for anything money can buy. In the Apollo days they at least tried to pretend that debt is important and that there's something deeply wrong with running a government in a way that would bankrupt any business or household.
Oh incidentally, for those who think the group identity of those who suffer is really important, inflation is the most regressive tax there is. The truly wealthy have investments like securities and real estate that scale with inflation. It's the poor who try to improve their standard of living by living within their means, saving, and building wealth over time. That's who is hardest hit by inflation, because it devalues their savings. It's amazing how "regressive taxes" are EVIL and routinely railed against by a certain element, yet this one has gone unnoticed for so long.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
FEMA was still a functioning agency once Bush took office. The Posse Comitatus Act prevented FEMA from taking control in the Katrina ravaged areas before the governor ceded control to them. The Governor and mayor of New Orleans refused to cede control of the situation until it became obvious they couldn't handle it. Had the Governor and more precisely the Mayor of New Orleans stuck to the emergency preparedness plans they already filed with FEMA, the Katrina response would have been completely different.
It is because you cannot do it. It doesn't exist and your one example is only valid of you ignore all of the issues surrounding it. FEMA's failures, as was decided by congressional panel investigating it, was due to an clear lack of authority to act without being requested by the officials in the state and as a result, the law was changed to give FEMA the authority to declare local efforts inefficient or overwhelmed if it appears to be the case like with Katrina and assume control.
And yes, law was specifically changed to allow FEMA the option to take over a disaster response if the locals weren't up to it.
And as for the folding of FEMA into the DHS, this did nothing to restrict funding, but officers were trained for more of a terrorist role then a natural disaster role which made them less capable in response. But funding wasn't yanked and FEMA was still a functioning agency.
"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".
You are completely wrong on this.
http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/enough-of-this-nonsense-george-bush-grew-the-sec
The SEC grew in size and scope under Bush. What you probably meant was the repeal of Glassâ"Steagall. But this was under Clinton with the Grammâ"Leachâ"Bliley Act. I cannot say for sure if this was what you meant because with you being factually incorrect in your statement, I can only assume based on facts that are true within it. But rest assured, of all the things that caused the "Great Recession" failing to fund the SEC or shrinking it was not one of them.
Here.. Also Here. You're welcome.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
So what failures are they involved with?
Here is the problem. You can cite funding failures but you cannot cite failures because of the funding. The law you bring up is after the recession and is associated with no failures in performing job duties that we know of.
So again, we are with platitudes and innuendos with nothing real supporting the parent's position.
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 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.
Funny, I would call the law's requirement that existing grandfathered insurance plans stop allowing new subscribers "Obama shutting them down".
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
all republicans do is bitch and moan.
Close. All they do is sabotage everyone else's work, then bitch and moan and point fingers and yell "we told you so" once the fruits of their labor manifest.
Wow. Remember how the Democrats treated George W. Bush? Try this quote, from a Kerry campaign manager:
"Off the record, I think Kerry just might lose. That doesn't mean it's over, though. Democrats will protest and fight so strongly that Bush won't have a win even if he wins. We will obstruct so much that this country will be ungovernable by Christmas."
Who did what now again?
The problem is that you cannot attribute those fuckups to Bush and a lack of funding. The Katrina problem is well documented and while it sounds good, it was no where close to reality.
As for the Mexican field kitchen, I'm pretty sure they were attending evacuees and relief workers from parts of Texas hit by the storm.
At least that is what the DOD seems to think. You might think they could have been used better or something, but they did serve a welcomed purpose.
http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=17205
"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.
"Government should not be in the business of business."
Especially when the private sector was doing such a bang up job.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.
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.
Yes, because the problems stem from not enough greed. It's not like all 40+ private contractors thought to themselves "If I make my part so complex and convoluted that no one else understands it they'll never be able to drop my contract and I'll have a perment income stream. Sure it'll cause a bit of slowdown and glitchyness, but the other contractors would never think to do what I am so the rest of the build will be perfect and my errors unnoticable. It's perfect!"
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
As opposed to Romney and McCain? Calling the kettle black
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
No, that's not what he said. There are far too many examples of him stating in clear terms that if you like your health PLAN or health COVERAGE, you can keep it. Period. He never said it as if you liked just your health insurance company, you get to keep it.
Medicare part D. Completely insane, pushed by GOP-W.
No, they were actually getting critical requirements late in the game, too. Some as late as March 2013 and a little even in Sept 2013. Not excusing the contractor, and especially the head honcho's in charge stating (despite every indication otherwise) that everything would be peachy on Oct 1st. This should be a textbook example of just how badly a project can be screwed up at every level of development, implementation, and rollout that should be studied in software engineering classes for decades to come. Since this was a signature piece of litigation for Obama, you KNOW he had to be highly interested in it's success, it's nearly impossible to believe that he didn't know there were substantial problems beforehand. If you believe him that he found out about the problems on the news, and you know he had to be highly engaged with CMS and HHS in wanting progress reports, some people severely lied to him to keep in the dark. No matter how you slice it, this was a major cover-up somewhere on the slim hopes that everything would end up okay in the end.
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.
Read for yourself the actual regulations, published in mid-2010, for grandfathering of existing plans. Less than 35 pages of single-spaced small print, so not too hard of a slog as these things go. A few recommended highlights:
In short, it seems clear from HHS's own pen that the concept of "grandfathered" plans under the ACA is (1) highly Orwellian; and (2) was deliberately set up for failure. It's disappointing that the latest distracting meme is blaming the insurance companies for doing what, as shown above in black and white, HHS fully intended to force them to do from the beginning.
As long as your provider keeps offering it you can keep your existing coverage. And the law does not require the provider to drop it. If your provider drops you, it is entirely THEIR fault.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Does it matter? If the government can't manage the contractors, they shouldn't build a system that depends on them managing the contractors.
Private sector was doing a pretty good job for the majority of Americans. Even the ACA acknowledges that.
The ACA should have empowered private entities to create the market place. Then it might stand a chance of working.
So when did they defund it and what or when did it fail because of it? Who is pointing at it and saying it is proof that the government is evil or doesn't work?
My understanding of Medicare Part D was that it was too costly and we were spending too much money on it which was a criticism of the democrats. There is also the Donuts Hole problem and it might be far from perfect but again, the op said, "Sabotage something, then point out how it doesn't work, and then say "well, duh, because all government is evil." which I don't think medicare prescription coverage fits.
But by all means, if you know something specific, please share it with us. A bad program and a bad implementation doesn't make it sabotage and years after it's implementation, it appears that over 80% of enrolled medicare recipients are satisfied with the program. I'm not sure I can find any republicans pointing to it as a failed program or evidence of the government being evil.
Insurance plan != insurance company.
Nobody is talking about dissolving companies, and your post does nothing to address the point that people are, in fact, not able to keep plans that are supposed to be grandfathered in. The law has resulted in people losing their plans, and prevents people from buying plans prior to its enactment that would be grandfathered in.
It's amazing how scared some people are of actual facts being discussed.
Insurance companies are greedy corporations; they don't leave billions of dollars on the table in order to make a political point. Most of these cancellations are required by ACA: the old plans don't satisfy the law's requirement; this was designed into the ACA.
If insurance companies "game the system" and choose to drop people they don't have to drop (by creating plan changes), it's for people who they know have to sign up for more expensive plans with them right away. That's also a fault of ACA, not of the insurance companies: they are profit maximizers, and Obama knew that when he designed ACA.
And, of course, none of this counts the many millions of people whose employment plans and medical are are changing in other radical ways, like doctors leaving their plans etc. The ACA trainwreck has just begun, and a malfunctioning web site is the least of our problems.
Obama's real failure vis-a-vis Wall Street and corporate America was the massive bailouts and stimulus he supported, and all the other crony capitalist gifts he has given them. These regulators couldn't successfully oversee an elementary school class, let alone "Wall Street banks", no matter how much money you stuff into their greedy, incompetent hands. This blame game over regulatory agency funding is a fig leaf for Obama's own massive failures.
Grant me the legal authority to print money anytime I want and make everyone else pay the true cost of it (inflation) and I, too, could pay for anything money can buy. In the Apollo days they at least tried to pretend that debt is important and that there's something deeply wrong with running a government in a way that would bankrupt any business or household.
Hold your horses, partner.
A history lesson is in order. (Then get off my lawn.)
The 1960s had a lot of debt.
There was the Vietnam war and it wasn't cheap. There were some questionable political deals in Cuba that included a rather scary nuclear showdown that led directly into the cold war. Also there was the whole space race that you mentioned.
The US was in debt and facing a deficit. Not as big as today's deficit and debt, but it felt bad at the time.
President Johnson was looking over where the money was sitting, and he noticed a huge pile of cash sitting in an off-budget area. It was called the Social Security Trust Fund. It had billions of dollars just sitting there being invested, not being spent.
The good president looked over the budget, noticed that he could make himself look better (and presumably look better on the world stage) if the US didn't appear to be in debt. So President Johnson decided to move the Social Security Trust Fund into the general budget. There was a bit of a complaint at the time, "you cannot spend that money, it is for retirement". Not a problem they assured us, there would be plenty of money available in 2010 when baby boomers start to retire. We might not even be on a cash society in the future, let's spend it all today! The President made a proposal to Congress, and then all of them started rolling up the Social Security funds into cigars and enjoyed a smoke.
The Apollo program and several other major programs were funded by TODAY'S social security problem. Much of the reason we have so much debt is because the social security fund was robbed to pay for the war and the space race. Government took out a loan from the people and only recently started feeling the pain of paying the loan back. Baby boomers who don't suffer from society's generally short term memory can clearly recall that the focus was divided on the war, the protests, and the space race, and how those few people who noticed the money was missing were quickly written off as being anti-war or pro-war (whichever was a better distraction) and somehow the messenger was blamed and the message quickly forgotten.
Much like groups like WikiLeaks today; we all remember the name but the hundreds of soldiers who were documented committing clear acts of murder somehow escaped the court martial. Back then if you mentioned the social security funds you were branded a hippie or communist and you didn't believe in America. (Anything to make you look like an unpatriotic troublemaker rather than someone who wanted to see where the money went.) Then Johnson lost to Nixon and another scandal followed, most people forgot about Johnson's scandal taking the money and moved on to Nixon's spying scandal that evicted him from office, which is NOTHING compared to today's spying scandal that people don't care about.
Enough rambling, get off my lawn.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Right. So, the Heritage Foundation wrote 1000 pages of law and 11,000 pages of Federal guidelines? Why do liberals keep hiding behind the Heritage Foundation?
So, what we have is that a conservative think-tank floated an idea that Republicans (congressmen and voters, both) absolutely wouldn't support, but the Democrats were willing to go to any lengths to get passed, in the process making it far worse. A terrible system, that liberals will unwaveringly support, until they are so embarrassed by its deep and numerous flaws that it then becomes the the fault of Republicans and a conservative think-tank. But, under no circumstances can we abolish it, because it's "settled law".
Man, that is so unbelievably delusional.
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!)
I hate replying to my own post but since I cannot update it...
Those billions of dollars in the 1960s, remember that was 1960s dollars and not 2013 dollars. The amount in the fund was huge.
I have read that if those funds were not raided and pulled into the general fund, but instead had been invested under the same plan in place in the early years of 1960, the fund would have reached quadrillions of dollars today. Instead of a quadrillion-dollar social security fund, we have an empty account that currently has an IOU totaling 2.6 trillion dollars.
Most don' t think of it as paying back a debt to the fund, instead most see it as a mandatory payment that is crippling the budget.
I still don't know if that money was better invested in the wars and space race. Somehow it seems that politicians would never have let the fund live; sooner or later the pot would reach critical mass and some politician or another would raid it like Johnson did. At least he generally tried to help people, with medicaid and medicare and healthcare reforms, much like today. Perhaps it is best that it went to those too rather than surviving a few decades and funding today's problems. Probably better that it funded the space race than funding the NSA.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I'll take mismanaged contractors over monopoly seeking groups lead by people specificallt chosen for their lack of empathy and inability to consider another human being as anything but a ledger entry.
Say they did farm it out to private corps:
Any bank: It presents you options based on your credit rating.
Car company: You can shop on their website but you have to visit an authorized dealer to purchase.
Walmart: Only HMOs that emphasize continued treatment are listed, others are strong armed into getting rid of long term cure coverage.
Verizon: It works for the most part but they leave a gaping hope in the system that lets spammers send fake messages to you claiming to be your insurance.
Oil company: Premiums double after a natural disaster or any sort of middle eastern unrest. They never go down.
Amazon: Site works fine but the mandatory Prime membership for every covered person is a bit excessive.
Microsoft: Site is slower than it should be and gets infected with malware 38 minutes after launch.
Apple: You have 3 plans to choose from, all of them bronze plans prices like a gold. Atleast the website is pretty.
Ebay: 50/50 chance the plan you bought is actually some rocks in a PS3 box.
Google: The influx of data from users is the last piece needed for the search engine to reach sentience. Maybe we shouldn't have emphasized drone warfare...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to argue. I never said the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was not supported by republicans. I said it was passed under Clinton which is not Bush as the op suggested with his claim on the SEC.
Go ahead and read my statement again. I'm willing to bet that you read into it and not what was said.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/are-all-those-insurance-company-cancellation-letters-too-good-check
Paul Waldman recounts yet another story of someone allegedly getting screwed by Obamacare. This time the victim is Deborah Cavallaro, profiled yesterday on the NBC Nightly News:
http://prospect.org/article/another-phony-obamacare-victim-story
We learn in this story that her insurer is cancelling her current plan, which costs $293 a month, because it doesn't comply with the new law. They've offered her a new plan at $484 a month. That sounds like it sucks!....But wait. Maybe she's not a victim after all. How does the $484 plan her current insurer is offering compare to the other ones she could get? Did she or the reporter go to the California exchange and try to figure that out? Apparently, they didn't. But I did.
It took less than 60 seconds. Let's assume that Deborah has a high enough income that she isn't eligible for subsidies. I put in that I was 45 years old and got nine different choices for a Bronze plan, which in all likelihood most closely resembles what Deborah has now. The average monthly cost was $258, or $35 a month less than what Deborah's paying now for her bare-bones plan....She can get a Silver plan, with more generous coverage, for $316, only $23 more than she's paying now. Congratulations, Deborah!
In a follow-up post, Waldman makes the right point about this:
http://prospect.org/article/time-investigate-those-insurance-company-letters
I want to talk about the thing that spawns some of these phony Obamacare victim stories: the letters that insurers are sending to people in the individual market....There's something fishy going on here, not just from the reporters, but from the insurance companies. It's time somebody did a detailed investigation of these letters to find out just what they're telling their customers. ....If the woman I discussed from that NBC story is any indication, what the insurance company is offering is something much more expensive, even though they might have something cheaper available. They may be taking the opportunity to try to shunt people into higher-priced plans. It's as though you get a letter from your car dealer saying, "That 2010 Toyota Corolla you're leasing has been recalled. We can supply you with a Toyota Avalon for twice the price." They're not telling you that you can also get a 2013 Toyota Corolla for something like what you're paying now.
I'm not sure that's what's happening, and it may be happening only with some insurers but not others. But with hundreds of thousands of these letters going out and frightening people into thinking they have no choice but to sign up for a much more expensive plan, it's definitely something someone should look into. Like, say, giant news organizations with lots of money and resources.
Is the above true, and if so don't the victims deserve to know, not be used as an example?
You can also graciously quote Margaret Thatcher "that the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money".
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.
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?
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
Is the above true, and if so don't the victims deserve to know, not be used as an example?
We'll never know if it's true based on the above -- a little birdie told Kevin Drum that "[t]here's something fishy going on here." Really?
You would hope that people around here would be particularly sensitive to the folly of apples-to-oranges comparisons. The devil is truly in the details with respect to comparing two different health insurance policies, given that there are so many variables that people just don't think about, e.g.:
Not a single one of those variables is analyzed in your linked article, or the article it links to. Their superficial analysis (along with every single other piece like this I've seen) is akin to saying, "that greedy car dealer was trying to sell you a 'full-sized sedan' for $X, but look--over here you can get a 'full-sized sedan' for $X/2!!!"
Wasn't this meant to be a thread about the web site technical issues?
You missed a few caveats there....
As long as your provider keeps offering it you can keep your existing coverage, as long as:
They never make any changes to it, including price, deductibles/copays (over $5), etc...
They comply with the coverage mandates in the law, like lifetime limits, covering adults up to 26, etc...
It's not an HSA plan.
It doesn't make "too" much money for the insurance company in any particular year.
It doesn't need new enrollees to offset people who drop coverage.
So yeah, as long as time is frozen and no one ever wants to adjust anything, except to follow more expensive mandates and lose money on it, your provider can keep offering the plan.
I mean, it's not like the Obama Administration knew that "language in ACA regulations dated July 2010 estimates that "40 to 67%" of consumers will lose their health policies", right?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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
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.
My son will be covered by our health care until he is 26. Good thing.
Don't you mean insurance? Or are you conceding now that this has nothing to do with insurance. Wait until you see the bill....
Pre-existing conditions not a reason for no insurance for millions of people. Great thing.
I'd be willing to wager that more people in the United States will have no insurance a year after the ACA took affect than in the average of the 10 years before. Care to take me up on that wager?
Raising the price of something and making it fit an individual's needs less doesn't typically lend itself to a higher sales volume.
And you would propose what? Do tell, oh wise slash dotter.
How about we start with the health care proposals at the bottom of this economic analysis?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
They sabotaged it by implementing it in a confusing and costly manner. It was designed to do two things: buy votes from the seniors in the short term, and fail in the long term. The long con is paying off now with all the republicans complaining about the deficit/debt and "entitlements". Guess what, medicare part D is an entitlement. There is no need to dig deep to figure out their plan. They say it all the time: starve the beast, cut spending, etc. Then they continue to pass expensive bills so they can keep complaining about spending.
McCan, no. Romney, yes.
"And the law does not require the provider to drop it."
A complete untruth. The new regs make many currently existing policies illegal, as they don't provide the ***required*** coverage.
But we have to pass the bill so you can, uh, find out what's in it.
Perhaps you could provide a link to a the entire "context" so people can judge for themselves? Relying on your word seems so... shallow of thought.
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
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.
the INSURANCE COMPANIES were not suppose to CHANGE OR MODIFY plans that were to be grandfathered. BECAUSE companies made material changes to plans between 2010 and 2013 but did not make the plans COMPLY with the government rules, they do not QUALIFY to be grandfathered. They knew what they were doing because they read the law and found their way out.
the INSURANCE COMPANIES played folks for suckers, by taking their customer's money another 3 years and quietly nullifying their grandfather status. This is all about greedy insurance companies, not the President trying to get insurance out there.
I agree, covering your son until he is 26 is a great thing. I think it would be even better to cover him until he is 72, don't you agree? Why stop at him being 26?
Do you see what the problem becomes? The problem becomes what do we want to cover and for how long. The answer depends on the amount of resources you want to devote to that issue. We could cover every medical condition for everyone forever until they die. Do we want to pay that amount of money as a society? What are the other implications of developing that kind of system? What abuses will occur? When you start taking other people's money to do something for yourself, you will find that other people have other priorities. Maybe they prefer to save their money for retirement. Maybe they prefer to use that money to provide their kids an education instead of healthcare. Maybe they want to buy a nicer car instead. Who knows?
The problem you have is that we as a society don't agree on what the best use of our money is yet. Clearly we agree it was wasted on this website so far. What other waste are we going to find? If we find too much problems with the system, we don't have an easy out when its run by the government. When it is run privately, we can take our money somewhere else. Don't like this hospital? There is another one down the road. Don't like this doctor, go to that one. Don't want to pay this money for all the options on that health care plan? Here is an alternative cheaper one that doesn't cover quite as much.
When you have the government run it you start losing the options. And you don't have the option to picking up your money and taking it elsewhere. Unless you are open to moving overseas.
Nobody's "forcing insurance companies to cancel medical policies that people had already been already buying for decades." They're grandfathered in. The companies are cancelling them because they want to. Presumably they see enough current customers bailing out for the exchanges that it's not worth it to keep the policy on the books for ten people.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
As a Republican I can tell you that government is bad. Elect me and I'll prove it.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You assumed that Obama was going to have the government force the insurance companies to keep open plans that they want to shut down because you'd like to keep it open; and not only that, you're disappointed and angry that he didn't? Yeah, there's a conservative small government less regulation position that's fully in sync with the Tea Party. Hey, I want the policy I had 30 years ago back. No copay and cost $30 a month. Don't know why the Republicans let the company drop it.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You are working overtime to draw lines that simple are not there. If you directed just a portion of all that energy into something actually real, I'm betting you could change the world for the better. But until then, you are only tilting at windmills that aren't even there outside of your mind.
Got a 404 when attempting to access the source code on GitHub. https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov
What will you say when it does work? Because it will, it's a large project that takes time to roll out properly.
Cheap storage VM.
Where is my public option?
Cheap storage VM.
Why do the INSURANCE COMPANIES want to get the "suckers" out of the plans that they were already buying?
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.