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"War Room" Notes Describe IT Chaos At Healthcare.gov
dcblogs writes "U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has released 175 pages of "War Room" notes — a collection of notes by federal officials dealing with the problems at Healthcare.gov. They start Oct. 1, the launch day. The War Room notes catalog IT problems — dashboards weren't showing data, servers didn't have the right production data, third party systems weren't connecting to verify data, a key contractor had trouble logging on, and there wasn't enough server capacity to handle the traffic, or enough people on the help desks to answer calls. To top it off, some personnel needed for the effort were furloughed because of the shutdown. Volunteers were needed to work weekends, but there were bureaucratic complications."
"War Room" Notes Describe IT Chaos At Healthcare.gov
"Third World characteristics describe War Room deliberations at Healthcare.gov."
After all, had this happened in some far away land, we'd be congratulating ourselves for "not being them", right? And how we, being the "first world", are better at implementation, with "checks" and "balances" at every step.
But ends up costing multiple times more in the end.
Add something meaningful.
Go-live fiascos like this are quite common in the private sector. Large corporate bureaucracies can be just as bad, if not worse, than government. The difference is that this particular SNAFU is getting dissected in the press. It's a great opportunity to learn about the complexities involved when deploying large, complex, federated systems. I guarantee you there are people in the private sector pushing these articles to their corp. IT as a way to shame CIOs and CEOs into cutting the red tape, procurement hurdles, fiefdoms, and archaic development methodologies in their own organizations. If you want something meaningful from this event, learn from it rather than pointing fingers at "The Government." These are problems in most large organizations.
Vietnam, Iraq, the postal service, the NSA Utah data center, the response to hurricane Katrina, prohibition, no child left behind, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, shuttle Columbia, the great society, Japanese internment camps, Guantanamo, the F35 program, the war on terror, Fannie Mae, Amtrak, Railhead, Teton dam, Fair Housing act, TIDE, Social Security, the Bay of Pigs, Olmsted dam, Mariner 1, Iran-Iraq war, Solyndra, and IRS modernization...
...they were bound to get healthcare.gov right.
"The government employs too many people. We borrow money from China to employ them."
In the 1990s you didn't. You simply had a high enough tax rate to cover the bills and run a bit of a surplus that could be used to pay down the accumulated debt. Then the tax rate was cut on the theory that this would stimulate the entire economy. Instead it seems to have spectacularly enhanced incomes at the upper end. Although an unpopular solution, letting those tax cuts expire is one way to solve the budget problem.
The deficit problem you describe exists largely because the political decision was made to take in less revenue and spend more on programs, because "deficits don't matter", in the hopes that starving government of funds will eventually lead to lower costs, somehow. Unfortunately the people making these decisions have the will to cut revenue, but apparently not the corresponding expenses. The results are predictable. It is an artificial crisis that has been created by doing one thing and not doing the complement to it. The solution is to follow through with cuts that should have been made a decade ago or to reverse the revenue decline.
I agree that the government employs too many people for current revenue, but if you actually want to make cuts that matter, you should be looking at big-ticket government employment, such as spending more than any other country in the world on the military. Sad as it is, these federal employees and the gear they use are pretty expensive too. Perhaps fewer aircraft carriers would be worthwhile to consider, for example.
As a former DoD software developer, let's review your comments.
According to the best source of info I could easily find, federal salaries made up just 13.8% of the federal budget as of 2005.
You also neglect some important questions:
Expensive compared to what? If they don't have to show a profit, etc., then can you objectively demonstrate that they're getting less done than a (potentially) lower-priced contractor?
Also, you fail to mention that there's a very open debate about if / when contractors are a better deal for the government than are civil servants. Partisan thinktanks have no problem making sweeping statements, but organizations specifically charged with reporting truthfully find that there's not enough data.
I hope you're also not going to compare the average salary of all public sector works vs. all private sector workers. Because for the most part, the government doesn't hire people to do low-skilled work. For example, at the military sites that I've been at, things like building cleaning, etc. was mostly done by private contractors.
As opposed to what contractors do? Good grief man, have you ever seen what private sector contractors do? I've seen plenty of silliness and inefficiency in civil servants, but I've seen countless times contractors milking / drawing out contracts, while often getting less done than the civil servants with whom they collaborate.
I suspect you have two basic problems. (1) You're so frustrated with the negative examples you've seen of civil servants, that you simply assume the private sector is more efficient. And (2), you're confusing your complaints regarding the breadth and intrusiveness of the government's self-granted scope, with the quality of work being done by civil servants.
Add something meaningful.
Go-live fiascos like this are quite common in the private sector. Large corporate bureaucracies can be just as bad, if not worse, than government. The difference is that this particular SNAFU is getting dissected in the press. It's a great opportunity to learn about the complexities involved when deploying large, complex, federated systems. I guarantee you there are people in the private sector pushing these articles to their corp. IT as a way to shame CIOs and CEOs into cutting the red tape, procurement hurdles, fiefdoms, and archaic development methodologies in their own organizations. If you want something meaningful from this event, learn from it rather than pointing fingers at "The Government." These are problems in most large organizations.
This times a million. How many Oracle rollouts went disastrously wrong in private industry that it was obvious even to the casual observer (despite corporate NDAs) and yet here we have a bigger project than most, that was actually live on the date that it was supposed to be (despite capacity issues and some lingering bugs) but of course the fact that it wasn't perfect is proof that the government can't do anything right. If this same project were corporate, it would have gone live in 2015, still had only half the features it was supposed to, and bonuses would still be rained upon the CEO/CIO's heads. There's your "free market efficiency".
You mean the party that kept sending bills to the senate while the Dems said only "NO, NO, NO! We'd rather have a mandated shutdown!"?
You mean
That party you mean???
This is not to say the Dems are blameless, but for fuck's sake, stop saying the GOP is the party that keeps sending bills to the senate. That's fucking bullshit, and you know it.
Truly yours, a life-long Republican tired of seeing a sea of stupid beasts more interested in destruction, confederate-flag waving, secession, creationism, birtherism, social-medieval conservatism-barbarism and just blatant mental anachronisms than on making things work with the other half of the population who does not agree with everything they say...
All I know is that this furloughed worker debate is meaningless in the context of this article unless someone actually believes that the website would have worked properly if they had those 3 more weeks.
CBO estimated ACA would require $10B. Congress approved $1B. http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-not-take-victory-lap-on-obamacare.html?m=1
do you REALLY want these people in charge of your healthcare? I don't.
Congrats you baited me. The Government is not in charge of your healthcare any more than the SEC is in charge of your stock portfolio. ACA created a regulated market for private insurance. The person deciding whether or not you get surgery is a medical director at a *private* insurance company. Not a government official. If anything, ACA made it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage for certain types of care. This Republican talking point is way over-played and not based on facts.
Does your wife really think that insurance companies don't make errors with billing, coding or paying the bills?
Next time you're in your doctor's office, ask them how much effort it is to work with the various insurance companies. Should you be in a hospital, ask the doctor how much time is lost in disputing the necessity of treatment with insurance companies, or how many patients opt for less than optimal treatment because an insurance company bureaucrat interprets a rule differently from other staff at the very same firm.
Just like most large scale web deployments where there is instant user base of millions...
The problem with your analysis is that you have the facts wrong.
If you look at a chart of revenue and spending in constant dollars, you'll see that after the 1998 tax cuts, revenue increased until the dot.com bust in 2000. Revenue was down until the 2001 & 2003 Bush tax cuts, after which it increased until the housing bubble burst in 2007/08. Tha major tax cuts in the era you're talking about weren't followed by revenue decreases in the years right after they took effect. Revenue right now is about average for the last 15 years, down a bit because it follows the state of the economy and the economy overall is still down. Minor changes in tax rates don't affect revenue that much. Annual revenue is UP about a trillion dollars since 1980, so it's not like we've suddenly had less revenue than ever before.
Spending is the the obvious issue. Since 1980, spending is up $1.8 Trillion (still constant, i.e. inflation adjusted dollars). Since 2000, it's up over a Trillion dollars.
Bottom line, revenue is way up. Spending is just way, way more up. Revenue has gone in the desired direction. The issue is that Spending has gone in the wrong direction if we want to solve anything related to debt and deficits.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
healthcare.gov was opened to the public Oct 1st, the gov't shutdown started Oct 1st... anyone blaming furloughs for its problems is being disingenuous at best... and the gov't had 3 YEARS to get the site up and running
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I work at a major bank. This sort of non-sense has peaked in recent years at big organizations. One would have thought the business side would have become more IT savvy in the past couple of decades. Instead, they still think a magic wand can be waved in the USA or India which will cause a computer system to emerge. Perhaps the business side users are peddled such fantasy by Infosys, Tata, EDS, CGI, CSC, etc. But more likely it's business users who refuse to work collaboratively with IT. They think because they got a bunch of low cost Indian or American programmers, usually with one dimensional skills sets, whacking away at the keyboard that a quality system will emerge. Instead, they get crap. It's like a parade ground crowed with marchers who have no coordinated direction. There's no orchestration, no appreciation for logistics, and not sense of engineering. If an engineer tells the business side something cannot get done, then they replace the engineer with someone who'll tell what they want to hear. The best analogy is Hitler working with his generals in WWII. He thought flags on the battle maps could be moved around like a paste-it board, not concept of logistics. And when a general told Hitler his plans were imbecilic, then the general was shot. Thankfully for humanity Hitler's idiocy destroyed the Third Reich. What else will the business users destroy?
Happened to me.
In 1981 I received SSI benefits because my father was disabled.
In 2012 I received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying they had overpaid me in 1981 and I owed them money.
After over 30 years!
I sent letter after letter, with the appropriate appeal form. They ignored all of them.
Just kept sending increasingly threatening letters. By the way, they were sending the letters to an address I ahve not lived at for over 30 years. Even though they have my current address.
I called, they could not help. Eventually someone was able to change the address.
They then sent a wage garnishment to my employer.
I called, reached a person who said 'fine, we'll reverse this'. But they didn't actually tell anyone.
So my employer deducted it from my wages. How embarrassing is that? They said I had to work it out with SSA.
And after that, the IRS deducted it from my tax refund. They too said I had to work it out with SSA.
Then I get a letter from the SSA saying 'we have recalculated your benefits and we owe you money'.
They sent me a check for over double what the had garnished from me.
No doubt i will get another letter in the future telling me I owe them money
You mean the party that kept sending bills to the senate ...
...without making any attempt whatsoever to make those bills something that could pass in said senate?
Yeah, them.
Note that the Senate during this time also sent a bill to the house. By all accounts, it was a bill that would have passed in the house with flying colors, and the POTUS would have signed. It would also have represented a tremendous victory for Republicans, cutting food stamps by 4 billion dollars, and all sorts of other assorted (IHMO evil) cuts to the poor that Republicans were wanting. In the Bush era a Republican house would have jumped right on this.
The house's Republican leadership wouldn't bring it up for a vote. In fact, they changed their own rules specifically to prevent anyone from being able to bring this passable bill up on the House floor. Why not take a big legislative victory? Because the Republicans in the House don't care about legislative victories. They wanted to shut the government down. Simple as that.
So ... I repeat my wife's question: do you REALLY want these people in charge of your healthcare? I don't.
They're not in charge of your healthcare. They're in charge of making sure you get healthcare from a qualified insurance company and have the ability to discuss your medical needs with a qualified doctor.
Please try again. This time plot revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP. I'll save you some time, go here to see it.
You are correct that spending is up, even as a percentage of GDP. The budget should be reviewed, as some of the causes are cyclical (the recession) and will "self solve" as the economy improves, while others are structural issues, like devoting an ever larger chunk of the budget to military and war expenditures over the past decade.
But it's just as important to realize that as a percentage of GDP revenue is down. Those tax cuts mean the government is taking in a smaller percentage of economic output. So when inflation drives up the cost of guns/tanks/healthcare/office space/contractors for the government there isn't a corresponding increase in revenue to off set it, because we've chosen to end taxes on a number of things that get inflated (like the wealthiest 1%'s salaries).
Your bottom line is wrong. Revenue is up in dollar amount, but down as a percentage of the economy. Spending is up by both measures. Revenue has not kept pace with economic growth. To solve the debt and deficits we must both lower spending and raise tax revenue, ideally by closing loopholes and credits, rather than raising the marginal rates.
All that reads like pretty standard War Room activities for a launch of this size. There is a reason they chose the name "War Room" for these things. It is just a central location where issues are triaged, and it can be chaotic after a launch. This is an example of the press trying to make a big story out of something that isn't news by reporting on something that most people don't understand.
I would be more concerned by the lack of a war room than from war room chaos.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
That is true, but in this instance, this was a no-bid contract. And for hundreds of millions of dollars (do you realize how many programmer hours that buys?!) this is a fiasco. Just wait until it starts working and healthy working people realize how much they're going to have to spend to subsidize all the lower-income and non-workers. This is going to be a spectacular disaster.
So, the SEC will fine me for not being invested in a minimum government approved set of funds,
OMG, you have to pay a fine for not being insured!!! I guess that fine will go towards the actuarial cost you are incurring to society for just existing, and expecting not to die on the side of the street if you fall over an break your leg.
So which is it? Should the government scrap you off the side of the road in case misfortune visits you. If so, should someone else pay, or should you? If you can't afford to pay, shouldn't you be forced to insurance yourself.
What's that zen mantra of conservationism again? "Personal responsibility". Only an ideologue can look at a black wall and say it is white.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
but you WILL need healthcare
Yes. And I will need food and water, as well as shelter and clothing. In fact, those things are a far higher priority in my day to day survival than health care.
Is it now the job of the government to provide all things deemed essential?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.