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Project Rescue Expert Todd Williams Talks About Healthcare.gov (Video)
By now, most Americans have either heard or learned firsthand that the Healthcare.gov website doesn't work right. Slings, arrows, and brickbats are being slung all over Washington, and Congressional representatives are busily thundering imprecations at all and sundry who were involved in putting Healthcare.gov together. If there have been any Congressional hearing focusing on how to fix the problems, though, we have not seen them. You'd think that our representatives would bring in people like today's interviewee, Todd Williams, who has written a book titled Rescue the Problem Project and runs a company that specializes in rescuing failed projects. What's more, Todd is just one of many Americans who have helped rescue projects that have gone awry. Hopefully our government has at least one of them working on Healthcare.gov by now, although we haven't heard that they've selected a strong turnaround manager and set him or her to work on the project -- and you'd think they would have told us if they had.
Yeah, but can you do it in the face of sabotage and grandstanding by Republicans at both the state and local levels?
I'll use little words so you can follow. The Federal website was speced to be a portal to the STATE websites where people could sign up to the you know, STATE insurance pools. Like it says in the law. Except 38 Republican-controlled state legislatures and governors decided not to bother, so the Federal site ended up getting overloaded with functionality and traffic it was never intended to have.
As for "grandstanding", when the (Republican) Medicare Part D rollout turned into a giant turd and the Republicans were making excuses about "any large system is going to have teething problems...", the Democrats actually did what they could to make it work, rather than hold a lot of hearings and press conferences about who was to blame and needed to "apologize" -- you know -- NOT grandstanding.
That's funny; did Sean Hannity tell you that?
I don't understand why anyone would want to turn this thing around. The ACA is another incremental step toward socialism. Socialism has always resulted in a lower standard of living for the people it's purported to help. The ACA is doomed to failure,as the Democratic Party doesn't understand where money comes from: it comes from hard work, not redistribution of somebody else's hard work. It's going to fail eventually. I hope it's now and not later, when it might take our entire economy down the tubes as it fails.
That is the 'percent complete' the IT folks who made the Obamacare site estimate that it was when it launched.
Some people, including Obama, say the site had 'bugs'. It didn't have bugs. It was not complete and had never been tested.
So at $600 Million and change, we got 30% of a website that is central for people getting the healthcare that the government mandates that they get.
Furthermore, part of the 60%-70% that is unfinished are the parts that pay the insurance companies.
Let that one sink in. The companies that will be shelling out money to pay your doctor at this very moment have no way to get any money from the website.
Here's another one:
Site launched with NO SECURITY. Not 'flawed' or 'incomplete' security, NONE. During senate hearings a white hat hacker was texted by a friend that 30 more vulnerabilties were found THAT DAY. I've used companies that, for a fee, will do a full security audit and in about a week recommend all the ways to close the holes. Nobody thought of doing that?
Obama claims he had no idea. No idea. The site that carries the future of his only important work as president is completely non-functional and he had no idea? Never thought to try it? Ask "Does it work?"? The contractors who built it were very open in saying it was not done, they said everyone knew it was not done, but Obama is shocked, SHOCKED, that it 'has bugs'?
Seriously folks, this is the guy you want leading our military? Our economy?
You Democrats are ****ing idiots.
(note, not my comment, but I couldn't have said it better. Thanks Armand.)
-Styopa
The problem was never the fact that the people putting the site together were incompetent.
Yes, they WERE, and that IS a problem.
But the real problem is that the entire project has been a study in incompetence from the top down.
Yep, that means good old Obama is at fault as well.
*Gasp!* I just blamed the president for something! Quick! Someone chuck an entire deck of race cards at me! Follow it up by a bunch of bully pulpitry on my terrible politics!
Basically you have a top-down mandate for a site with no competent technical oversite at every level.
You have no clear chain of command for making decisions.
You have unclear, shifting, and sometimes even contradictory goals (along with feature creep).
You have no project documentation or data management assessments.
You had nobody responsible for monitoring standards, best practices or security.
The true miracle here is that the site worked at all!
Basically the entire Obamacare thing has been a gigantic boondoggle.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!