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Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality
An anonymous reader writes in with this excerpt from Shirky.com. "The idea that 'failure is not an option' is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers. That sentiment was invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13; no one said it at the time. (If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.) Even NASA's vaunted moonshot, so often referred to as the best of government innovation, tested with dozens of unmanned missions first, several of which failed outright. Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying 'Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.' ... Healthcare.gov was unable to complete even a thousand enrollments a day at launch, and for weeks afterwards. As we now know, programmers, stakeholders, and testers all expressed reservations about Healthcare.gov's ability to do what it was supposed to do. Yet no one who understood the problems was able to tell the President. Worse, every senior political figure—every one—who could have bridged the gap between knowledgeable employees and the President decided not to. And so it was that, even on launch day, the President was allowed to make things worse for himself and his signature program by bragging about the already-failing site and inviting people to log in and use something that mostly wouldn't work. Whatever happens to government procurement or hiring (and we should all hope those things get better) a culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn't well equipped to try new things.'"
>> a culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news
I'm pretty sure the guy at the top was in on the ruse too.
>> no one who understood the problems was able to tell the President
Isn't there a petition system for that? :)
When both parties work together toward a common goal, we can put a man on the moon.
When both parties work against each other, and try to stop each other every step of the way purely for their own political agenda, we can't even launch a damn website.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Just ask Pelosi: they had to launch the website so they could find out what would crash it.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
While there is plenty of blame to go around, I am still left wondering where the investigative journalism was regarding the true progress of ACA implementation as the 3 years progressed up to this point.
So, while the press is justifiably having a field day with the sheer incompetence displayed here, where were they while all this was developing?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Isn't it more like the gulf between focusing on a service versus focusing on the nepotism behind awarding contracts to provide that service?
the worst fears of the GOP will be realized - people will be getting better healthcare at lower cost.
No one will remember the hysterical media and its 24/7 garbage reporting
People will remember the almost unbelievable distortions of "news" sources like S Hannity, which had what amounted to out and out lies about PPACA
u an anti obamacare politician, get ready to duck as a tidal wave of your constitutents march with signs saying, keep the gov't out of my medicare/obamacare
of course, that some person (or a few million people) are living much happier healthier lives will only be a page 3 story
So the *signature* piece of Obama's second term agenda -- the legislation he's harped on loudly and constantly -- launches with an epic fail. The contractors working the site were sounding alarms well in advance of the launch. And yet Obama is somehow utterly unaware that the launch could be anything but a total success? I call bullshit. Either Obama is the most disconnected president in recent history when it comes to the success of his *core legislative agenda* or he's just bullshitting about not knowing there were issues on launch day.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I think the most interesting thought in the article was about the author's observation of contempt between modern managers (in the example in the publishing business) and the engineers who actually create and manage systems. I'm also drawn to how articles written with sources inside the Administration refer to the technical people as 'Technicians' instead of what they probably were 'Senior Software Engineers' or appropriate equivalent title. I certainly don't think of myself as a technician, and I find the term somewhat demeaning somehow.
Subject pretty much says it, both the legistlation and implementing regulations were hope-based....
CGI was selected in part because they were one of only a handful of companies that got on the task order from DHHS that covered this and many other big CMS contracts. This system is designed to make it extremely difficult to just start a business and put out a bid. The justifications for it are very flimsy and center around things like making sure that some fly-by-night company doesn't get the contract/screening out junk bids. Poblem is, they don't actually work. In many cases, they just let the "primes" that win the slots act as funnels for the actual work done by subcontracts which just adds to the cost of the contract.
Another thing, if the reddit thread on this was correct, CMS needs to do what the DoD increasingly does with overtime which is to scrutinize or reject invoices with more than 80 hours per two weeks per employee unless the overtime was either authorized or can be explained in reasonable terms. Overworked government contractors don't get rich; their employers do at the expense of the employee and government. One thing often left unappreciated by the general public is that unpaid overtime is literally stealing employment from the employee because a salaried employee is only authorized to bill so many hours to a contract during a period of performance.
If only there was this much scrutiny and post-mortem analysis over other government failures such as, oh, I don't know, the multi-BILLION dollar failure joint strike force fighter that nobody wants (other than private contractors who are making billions).
Thank gawd, however, that we have this eagle eyed scrutiny over a website that's a few months over deadline and a few million over budget.
I think that the Members of the House who were newly elected in 2010 after the ACA, resulting in the GOP retaking the House, and re-elected in 2012 are rightfully following what the people in their districts want them to do: oppose the ACA. There are a handful of districts which voted for both Obama and a Republican Member of Congress, but there aren't many, and those few are pretty squishy about what to do. My own Congressman came back into Congress in 2010 (he had been unseated in 2008) and then defeated in 2012 by a Democrat; he wasn't following the will of the voters who showed up on election day 2012, other places, the story is different.
when non-engineers that dont understand technology but make engineering decisions, shit like this happens.
shocker.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When you hear "X is not an option", for some X, you should understand it as "X is a foregone conclusion". Here are some examples:
Bankruptcy is not an option for General Motors.
Defaulting on the government's obligations is not an option.
You can make up your own examples. It is easy.
This issue of only reporting good news upwards is prevalent in *many* places, not just in the Federal government. I don't understand how it happens, but there has to be a "don't fire the messenger" culture where delays, bugs, issues, are all handled in stride and the project stakeholders are getting good information during the entire project. I am involved in plenty of projects where this doesn't happen, though, and everyone nods politely while someone reports that something IMPOSSIBLE to complete is being reported as "slightly behind, but we'll make it up...somehow".
The task was simple. Make a friggin website that takes user input and spits out insurance options. If this happened where I work, they'd fire the whole lot without question. Probably enact some kind of legal investigation as to where all the money went too.
If Congress can't handle a simple friggin website project, it's time to clean house and Enact term limits. Restructure the entire congressional seating process, and give people more control over who's buying the laws for us. It's time to change that whole mess.
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I just tried going to healthcare.gov. It works fine for me.
Hint that a larger than usual deception is being carried out.
we could stop supplying weapons that are killing our genuine allys mostly kids in some free land freeloader greed fear hoarding real estate based genocides (see also the native american genocides; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88k2imkGIFA
stop feeding us crap made by corepirate nazis
let our civil servants treat us with civility again
put an end to the ever fatal WMD MANufactured 'weather' http://www.globalresearch.ca/weather-warfare-beware-the-us-military-s-experiments-with-climatic-warfare/7561
clean up the false alarm media mongrelling 24/7
that should make most of us feel better right away at least a start instead of the current cheerleading hypenosys 24/7 for 10 years
(If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.)
I reject that sentiment. The statement was a motivating tool. It may not have been said - it probably didn't need to be said during the real mission as these were people that worked with those astronauts for years before the launch occurred. They didn't need to be told that the future of the space program and the three astronauts hung on their actions. But it got the point across to the audience, who didn't have that relationship.
It could be argued that complacency within the Space Shuttle design team engendered a feeling of "failure is never an option." Why else be so confident in a design that allowed them to remove crew escape contingencies and quote a 100,000 in 1 failure rate?
My web domain.
if there were any (love) involved. maybe we should ask the moms or the native elders?
Next time try being a little more subtle - not even Obama himself thinks this mess will be fixed in six months.
If you want to pretend to be a left wing loony, "keep the gov't out of my medicare/obamacare" is a little too stupid.
Try "keep the evil businesses out of my business".
All the angst over the website is just getting silly. Yes, the website launch sucked. So what? Nobody died. The site didn't even exist before. You can still go to the individual insurers' sites if you want, like before. In a few months the new site will be working, and the whole thing will be quickly forgotten.
Seems to be a clasic case of the Themocline of Truth. http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/
I still don't get how the website could have failed so incredibly miserably.
The problems the site faces seem to be elementary, the type of mistakes that I made when I was first doing web development. I get that the scale of the site is massive, and that at that scale you have to do many things a little differently than smaller-scale web apps. But this was a president who had very tech-savvy people at hand on his campaign, and even in his first term (Look at "change.gov" for example; that site gets massive traffic and holds up pretty well, even if the responses from the WH are patronizing as hell at times). How come this site crashed and burned so pathetically?
" a culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn't well equipped to try new things."
So simple, so true. Obviously US government people don't need to fear Gulag, but I guess the specter of unemployment nowadays is the threat enough.
The Affordable Care Act : AKA ObamaCare
Well, the website had 4 major functions:
1) Comparison shopping. In retrospect, it could have been handled by a private company that Travelocity like didn't sell insurance, but instead helped you shop.
2) Subsidy. According to the law, you only get a subsidy through a state-run exchange (the Administration has chosen to ignore the actual wording of the law to include the Federally run exchange two.)
3) Seeing if people should be shuttled off to the mediocre but cheap care of Medicaid.
4) As a showcase for the law. This was to be something concrete to show what great things progressive government is capable of.
Bureaucrats are comfortable generating reality. To a large extent this becomes their job; if you are in charge of an environmental clean up you will move the goalposts around to match what you can do, and if you can't even meet these mutable goals you figure out a way to measure it so that the result are met. Plus you take any reports that indicate failure and "massage" them until they look good; and if the underlings who create these horrible truths won't shut up you punish them or just get rid of them.
This works well when the facts are a bit fuzzy and you are able to control the flow of information to your superiors and ideally the public. The problem is that the skillset that enables these people to survive and thrive in a bureaucracy aren't the skills required to deliver a functioning and realistic test passing product. So you have a product such as healthcare.gov which is going to be wildly exposed to the public and the scrutiny of people you can't control (the press and political opposition) and oddly enough it blows up.
People look at the hard numbers and say this is a pile of crap that doesn't work. Yet I am willing to bet two key things are happening:
One is that there are reports flowing up to the top people (who don't understand technology) that are a combination of saying that it works far better than the "detractors" are claiming while simultaniously blaming some other party with lesser abilities to communicate with said superiors.
And two that the company that won this contract is awesome at participating in this reality distorting circlejerk. I bet that the reports and other paperwork was Washington gold; the product of top-of-the-class-MBAs. People for whom facts are not only to be ignored but to be looked at with suspicion and hostility.
So the question of which development style should have been used or which technology was best are nearly moot; in that every choice would have been made based upon the criteria of "It must look good in a report"
I suspect that the only lesson learned from this in Washington is that if you love your career that you should not get involved in a project that involves a measurable end product that is delivered to the public.
The various opposition groups will probably try to score various points based upon actual facts such as cronyism and poor testing but the reality is that 5 minutes into getting power they would hand a similar project over to their insider friends and primarily demand good paperwork over an actual product.
So to prevent this type of disaster you can't look at say agile practices in software but maybe agile type practices within government itself.
... it comes bundled with the software.
between a piece of legislation and a website? The Affordable Care Act is NOT a website. The failure of the website does not equate to a failure of the Act. Mainly, it's indicative of the fact that government contracts go to companies that are good at getting government contracts, NOT companies that are good at the work for which the contracts are granted.
Way to take that line out of context. "Failure is not an option." wasn't about general day to day stuff, it was about saving the lives of 3 astronauts during an emergency situation. In fact, the mission (LANDING ON THE FREEKIN MOON) was indeed a failure.... They DIDN'T do it!
The whole "failure is not an option" thing is fine when you have lives in danger and the whole world is watching, but you don't get to use it about your website, no matter how many jobs are at stake. The message to take away here is "Even a million jobs are not worth 1 human life." If you understand and live by that, you will be a better person. Otherwise, you're just another scumbag millionaire who doesn't care about people.
In my group there is a person with that specific responsibility. They communicate the possibility of not meeting a deadline and make contingency plans to get the best result given the circumstances.
That person should be fired, and IIRC they have already resigned.
Now find senior advisors who weren't responsible for communicating the risks but knew about them anyways. Ask them why they didn't communicate the risks to the President and based on their answer either fire them or reprimand them.
Send the message that there will be accountability. Why is that important? Unfortunately, be it in Government or the private sector, there is a culture of "that wasn't my job". Everyone knows the project will fail, every single fucking person from the junior engineer to the senior project director know. But everyone winks at each other across the table at meetings and agrees that "failure is not an option, it will be done on time". And inside their heads and within their small groups everyone is saying "well it's not my job to sound the alarm". There is no incentive to take that political hit and say "Boss, we might have told you several times that everything is OK but honestly there are some severe risks to launching by the deadline and we need to start planning for a delay or reduction in features". Instead, when shit hits the fan it's like a mexican gunfight, everyone points a finger at someone else and says "well he knew too" or "that wasn't my job to bring up that this would never work."
Engineering is hard, failure happens. It really shouldn't be punished (except where people just failed to do their jobs), instead it should be learned from so that the same mistakes are not made again.
One day, when software engineering management is a real discipline, they will pound it into the heads of MBAs and PMPs that failure is not only an option, its the most common result so make sure the lines of communication are open, that people feel comfortable communicating risks and saying no, and that all the stakeholders know that the engineers cannot travel through time, so if you start a 1 year project 9 months before you want it to launch then you are SOL and have to pick what features are most important.
I hate "you have more than one number one priority" more than "failure is not an option" and I feel people who say one usually say the other.
In a former life I did a lot of gov contracting. For any project, you couldn't get your GPM (gov program manager) to sign off on anything. Why? Because they had to go to their boss to get approval. Who also had to go to their boss to get approval and so on.
Why? Because they didn't want to be the one to blame if something went wrong. If anything, they were very apt to go up the flag pole for anything, but the issue was you never got an answer for anything.
This seems to be the case for healthcare.gov, no one made actionable decisions.
The more you hear about how he supposedly didn't know this or that, the more you have to wonder if he isn't a simple community organizer.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
March 21st 2010 to October 1 2013 is 3 years, 6 months, 10 days. December 7, 1941 to May 8, 1945 is 3 years, 5 months, 1 day. What this means is that in the time we were attacked at Pearl Harbor to the day Germany surrendered is not enough time for this federal government to build a working webpage. Mobilization of millions, building tens of thousands of tanks, planes, jeeps, subs, cruisers, destroyers, torpedoes, millions upon millions of guns, bombs, ammo, etc. Turning the tide in North Africa, Invading Italy, D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, Race to Berlin - all while we were also fighting the Japanese in the Pacific!! And in that amount of time - this administration can't build a working webpage.
Politicians don't get their rewards through revenue-generating web sites, they get their rewards through being able to convince the public to re-elect them. Although Obama clearly screwed up on this one, usually it's not a problem when government sites or projects are over budget or don't work: costs are shifted around, data is presented in more favorable ways, and taxes are used to pay for it. The result is that voters get fooled into thinking that they are getting value for their money, vendors get paid off and end up supporting the politicians that shoved money their way, and the politicians get reelected. And the system works so well because nobody ever wants to admit mistakes: politicians want to pretend everything is working, and if that fails find someone else to blame; companies and even competitors pretend everything is fine because they want to get more contracts; and voters don't want to admit they were fools voting for this.
I think what Richard Feynman said at then end of the appendix to the report on the Space Shuttle Challenger failure may also apply in this situation.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. --Richard Feynman
Planning? What planning? Hoping. Commanding. Directing. Praying. Lying. Concealing. Misdirecting. Deceiving. But no "planning" of the type that experienced project managers would recognize.
Have waited years to use that line. Thank you Healthcare.gov!
So you imply that he DID know and lied about it?
Let me see if this fits...
If he did know, that means he was lying when he feigned surprise that the thing was broken... Ok.. Does this guy lie on a regular basis?
Benghazi was a protest over a video? Yea, that one was a lie.
"You can keep your plan, period" Another lie.
I didn't know the NSA was tracking phone calls (of Americans and/or world leaders)! I'll call that two lies (if not more).
Yea, ole Barry has a habit of lying when it suits his political need so this "I didn't know the website was messed up" sure seems likely to be a lie too.
People need to realize that law cannot set a strict date for software releases! Project like this should have been released gradually to small city, smaller state, then state by state. After every release check issues, then fix them. Even Brodway learned to tests their plays in smaller/controlled population.
I mean, it's not like the President lacked any management experience, right?
Seriously, though, I think people who have never done it believe that running an organization is easy. Being a GOOD manager, or a GOOD CEO can be hellishly hard work where everything is done through innumerable proxies yet are ultimately your responsibility.
It is not a partisan statement to say that the world's only superpower shouldn't be run/led by some dumbass community organizer with no management experience. The result is a partisan comment, unavoidably, but the simple fact shorn of context is undeniable.
-Styopa
Reality is an idea so far removed from the neoliberal mindset that it shouldn't have surprised ANYONE (except liberals, of course) that Obamacare was a train wreck.
Liberals do not live in reality. They live in fantasy rainbow unicorn land.
>> If Congress can't handle a simple friggin website project, it's time to clean house
Replace "Congress" with "the current president" (you know, the one in charge of IMPLEMENTING the law - http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html) and I'll agree with you,
that there are apps being distributed specifically for the purpose of crashing the web sight and doing DDOS attacks upon it. I'll leave it to others to try and guess who's the likely party responsible for this crap but that site has been a lightening rod for one of them. Yes, it was built poorly and can't handle the traffic but asshats doing this kind of crap can't be helping matters. Real people NEED to get into it to get health care, including people I know, so I truly hope that the FBI is on the case and going after the idiots at least as hard as they did the Anonymous twits if not harder!
One of the most helpful things I ever realized is that Design and Management think in terms of yes / no and Engineers think in terms of shades of gray. It will work vs it will work to "x" sigma are very different things and you have to have some skill to translate.
Well, it is true that gerrymandering leads to extremists, but gerrymandering really only is that bad in large states. I live in New Hampshire, I'd like to see you try and draw a district map in New Hampshire which was more than 55% Democratic, as we only have 2 districts and both are always competitive. On the other hand, Massachusetts has no Republicans in Congress; and even then Barney Frank quit in a huff when his Newton district was redrawn to be even a little bit competitive and he'd have to spend time debating some hopeless Republican; how humiliating for him.
I used to live in California, and the gerrymandering there was horrible and resulted in the legislature being filled with morons and parasites. It'd be nice if you could mandate a computer algorithm to draw the lines based solely on population, city boundaries and a minimum number of polygons.
Usually, it's a requirement (or, in the case of HeathCare.gov, several requirements).
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Wrong, under ObamaCare the blood suckers don't have to pay anything. They get essentially free insurance. So how does that help lower the cost?
Super summarized.
Who concedes decision-making power of the most important item on one's list? It's more than a conundrum, it's a full-blown mystery.
It baffles me, but the President surrendered leadership on his signature legislation at the beginning. One of his first moves was to let partisan Nancy Pelosi take the lead and also take the process into the back rooms with lobbyists in tow. He surrendered his promises of an open and transparent legislative process with seats at the table for all.
Can we call this the Vasa effect? Named after the pride of the Swedish marine that sank minutes into its maiden voyage, killing dozens of the crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
Even if healthcare.gov worked perfectly from day one as a website, the ACA is a colossally bad law. It is flagrantly unconstitutional and preposterous in its financial structure. Furthermore, the ACA is an excellent example of political deception. Virtually nothing about the political arguments for the ACA or the process by which it was passed into law was transparent or honest. The ACA needs to be killed and killed quickly before it destroys whatever is left of representative govt. in the U.S. The citizens of countries other than the U.S. should by very worried by the prospect of the govt. of a country as powerful as the U.S. either becoming completely unmoored from internal political accountability or imploding economically or militarily, leaving a gigantic vacuum that will be filled by who-knows-what-or-whom.
The one positive thing the Bin Laden raid, Obama was at the controls making the tough calls.
Even with only a 50/50 chance the person in the compound was Bin Laden, the American public would *never* have forgiven the President for not sending a team to the compound. The President made the *only* decision that politics allowed for.
If no raid had occurred then right before the election there would have been a leaked story about a compound that may have held Bin Laden and the President decided to do nothing about it. The President had no choice but to go if he wanted re-eelction.
Keep in mind that he barely won while getting credit for taking out Bin Laden. Yes, barely won, the margin of votes was small in key states that could have tipped the electoral college vote either way.
Lack of good project management was the major fault. Developers are usually wrong on estimation and how good the code is. Testers are usually wrong on estimation. Project management is responsible to bring the picture together and provide reality.
While it may be the Republican's view that government does not work and should be reduced, it's the Democrats who are proving out the validity of that view.
Since the Democrats do not seem to have that view, it seems then a totally valid view to have given those most opposed to it are providing the evidence.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
False. 26 Republican States refused to create their own website by the December 31st 2012 deadline, forcing the Federal government to create 26 websites in less than a year.
So you are arguing that some big social programs are best handled at the state level, that they should not be done at the federal level? That they can not be done right at the federal level?
If you are budgeted 40 hours a week for six months, you can only work 40 hours/week for six months as a government contractor, salaried or not. Those are literally the only hours you can legally bill to the customer. That means that if you do 80 hours a week with only 40 paid, the business has literally taken away your ability to make a salary for those remaining 3 months unless they have new coverage. It is worse than normal salaried over time.
> Yet no one who understood the problems was able to tell the President.
If you believe THAT....
a salaried employee is only authorized to bill so many hours to a contract during a period of performance.
Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) require contractors working on US Govt contracts to bill for every hour worked. FAR do not require that the contractors pay the people who worked those hours (certain exceptions apply), but you can get a company in decently hot water (read: temporarily barred from future contract awards) if you can prove they billed for fewer hours than were worked and knew they were doing that.
I was at a multi billion dollar corporation. The CEO wandered by and chitchatted with the programmers about how their specific projects were doing.
He only did this once a year or so for each department. It took about an hour of his time per department.
He would also meet with the supervisors and then the managers.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
According to Wikipedia, "In left-right politics, right-wing describes an outlook or specific position that accepts or supports social hierarchy or social inequality."
Rand Paul is all about small government--which pretty much by definition means right-wing according to the definition above.
Rand Paul calls himself a "constitutional conservative" and a "libertarian conservative." He opposes federal government involvement in health care, thinks it should be entirely privatized. He thinks the 14th Amendment shouldn't apply to kids of illegal immigrants. He shares some of the views of the religious right--he is against abortion even in cases of rape or incest, and he is opposed to same sex marriage.
At least $600 million was spent on a website! with another $1 billion going to state exchanges to setup portals. Manned by SEIU aand Acorn people. They managed to sign up a dog and several hundred people yet not 1 person is paying as there is no setup for taking payments! Valerie Jarrett's daughter and son-in-law work at the Canadian company. Michelle obama's school buddy also works there as a VP. She started 6 weeks after the passage of obamacare ( passed late at night on a holiday with lots of bribes) obama knows all about this as obamacare is not about providing healthcare to anyone but a way to massively increase taxes and deny healthcare as punishment for not obeying the state. Example is myself in California. +$5,600 tax with $5,000 deductible. More then $10 grand I have to pay out for 1 person! More people today have lost their healthcare under obama. The estimate range from 50 million in 2013 to everyone come 2014! plus the millions and millions of people who have either lost their jobs or have had their hours reduced to 29/hrs. But don't worry as obama made sure he and congress and aids do not have to participate and use obamacare as you will be paying their medical care.
Is the car dug out of the ditch yet?
Look at the shitfest of a service that were the day-one releases of, for example, Diablo 3.
Or the releases of the code that was retailed as "Battlefield 4".
You know when you're a liberal, when your plans don't coinside with reality, and you blame reality for the outcome; instead of the validity and viability of your plan.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
False. 26 Republican States refused to create their own website by the December 31st 2012 deadline, forcing the Federal government to create 26 websites in less than a year.
You are ill informed at multiple levels. (1) The federal government only needed a single website. There is only one federal exchange. (2) The federal government knew it needed this website as soon as the legislation was passed. They have had over three years to implement it.
Sorry, those are your only options...
Proving once again (as if proof were needed) that science and politics are the worst possible companions. Read the Feynman Report on the Challenger disaster ( http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html [among many others]) where he lambasts NASA decision makers for using politics-inspired wishful thinking instead of science to decide to launch over strenuous objections by staff scientists and engineers. This meme is seen throughout history as the politics of wishful thinking crash onto the iceberg of reality time and again.
Organization? You must be joking..
SalesForce.com's CEO last week said they offered to write it for free and mange it for free for 5 years. All the wanted obviously was their name at the bottom for free advertising. Obama and minions said NO Way probable due to no kickbacks, no $600+ million to be spent on contractors. So now we have the Healthcare.gov POS site.
Yes, and the GOP also still see their underlying problem as a failure in messaging...
Is when you will not survive the failure. Similar to the defensive command "Die in place".
George W Bush knew that there were no WMDs in Iraq, but he had to go ahead too.
The system was doomed from the start.
The failure of Obamacare goes much deeper than this web site. It's just one of many indicators. When Nancy Pelosi said "we have to sign the bill, so we can find out what's in it" I knew exactly what that meant. Lot's of insurance companies and lawyers are going to make a lot of money and the general public will get less and pay more for the priviledge. Healthcare reform really needed to happen and what we got was a bunch of spineless politicians doing what they do best.
By your comment, I'm pretty sure you've never worked a contract for government at a high level.
For a reality-based perspective, understand that silos are DEATH to most projects, and government structures are ALL SILOS. The fact that every single one of the "senior political figures" refused (make no mistake--it is always an active decision) is just par for the course.
So, how to change this? There are two key policies that must be implemented from the top:
1) The career of anyone who lies or fails to report bad news up the chain to those who need it is over, regardless of that person's position.
2) The reporting of bad news is to be treated as a problem to be solved, not an issue with the messenger (or the person who caused it).
Example: at a major metropolitan newspaper, a tech made a mistake and rm -rf * the website's home directory. He immediately reported it up the chain and the team dropped everything and worked on restoring the files. They then sat down and discussed how to mitigate the problem so that human error could not cause the same situation or how it could be restored quicker when it happened again. No retaliatory action was taken against the tech.
Yeah, right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1
Prior to launch, Soyuz 1 engineers are said to have reported 203 design faults to party leaders, but their concerns "were overruled by political pressures for a series of space feats to mark the anniversary of Lenin's birthday."
Only stupid executives think this way. Smart executives -- Jeff Bezos comes quickly to mind -- listen to engineers. Especially ones who suggest your company commoditize all the web service components you need, and then rent them to the world.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Some years back, our group had the task of creating a software system for internal project management. There was already an existing system; this was a major redesign. The project should not have been terribly complicated. It was a web-based system. We had one guy in our department who was primarily responsible for programming it. For the last two months, he was "working from home" to complete the project without any distractions. When launch day was approaching, we had a small-scale stress test, in which just the people in our department tried to use the web page. It crashed and burned, hard. It was a disaster.
The thing the I never understood is that we had a staff meeting the next day, where our boss said that despite its problems, we had to release the new site to the rest of the departments on the previously-announced release date. And she wanted us to vote on it, and she wanted it to be a unanimous vote. I steadfastly refused; she said it was going to be very embarrassing for us if our release date slipped, and I said it was also going to be very embarrassing for us if we released a product that absolutely did not work.
In the end, of course, I (and the few others who were willing to stand up to the boss) lost, and we released the product, and the VP called a meeting later that day of all of the managers, because the other departments were flat-out refusing to use it, after seeing how terrible it was. It was decided that we would continue to use the old site and that our group would take some more time to make the new site work. (Once we got the original programmer off of it and replaced him with someone who knew what they were doing, the new guy completely threw away all of the work that the old guy had done and started from scratch, completing the new site in a couple of weeks.)
So, yes, Design and Management do seem to think differently. In this case, Management seemed to believe that putting one's fingers in one's ears and singing LALALA in the face of evidence that our product was completely useless was the best course of action.
Sure, but there was no law against delivering incremental features early in order to gain experience and have a fallback in case of partial failure. As the article points out, they had (and are having) an incremental roll-out anyway, it's just a lousy incremental roll-out.
I thought that was the phrase...
It is always easy to spot the breitbart.com fans in the office:
1) They all subscribe to the "Nancy Pelosi as ultimate evil librul WITCH" theory - despite Pelosi being an ordinary centrist Democrat. Which is to say, a bit to the left of the DLC/Third Way, a bit more to the left of the neoliberals: just about at the median of US voters.
2) They have no understanding of how a legislature that intends to endure for many years and which uses parliamentary rules of procedure, actually works
3) They have no understanding of what the Speaker of the House's job actually is.
sPh
Pelosi is, to be sure, a very good political manager (and therefore a very effective Speaker of the House). Perhaps that is what makes her unforgivable compared to Boehner and - particularly - Cruz.
despite Pelosi being an ordinary centrist Democrat
Pelosi is reliably elected by what is almost certainly the most wack-o community in the US. How many places in the US hold rallies for nudity? (I can't locate it at zombietime.com at the moment, but one of zombie's photo collections includes pictures of nude men at a street festival sporting their grapefruit-sized, air-inflated scrotums - real "centrist" stuff.)
Which is to say, a bit to the left of the DLC/Third Way, a bit more to the left of the neoliberals: just about at the median of US voters.
The DLC was/is nothing more than a ploy to disguise the leftist ideological bent of the Democrat Party leadership which is well to the left of most of the DP base and way, way to the left of US voters. The DP learned its lesson when Nixon destroyed McGovern in the 1972 election and the DP has been lying about its radical political agenda ever since. The actual median of US voters as revealed in issue-by-issue polls is in the direction of limiting govt to a degree much greater than that supported by the people running the Republican Party at the national level. The DP isn't even in the same frame of reference as the median US voter.
They have no understanding of how a legislature that intends to endure for many years and which uses parliamentary rules of procedure, actually works
On the contrary, they know exactly how an amoral, win-at-any-cost, use-any-means-necessary-to-attain-absolute-political-power cunt like Pelosi works. She has no respect for the rule of law or the US Constitution or the rights of American Citizens.
Pelosi is, to be sure, a very good political manager
No, she manages nothing. She is simply ruthless and devoid of conscience. She was very effective from 2008-2010, mostly because she was a hardcore ideologue who was dealing with a flaccid opposition party leadership. If she had to deal with an opposition party which was as committed to the desires of the American People as Pelosi was to her own ideological hunger for power, she would not have fared so well. Pelosi's real accomplishment was in brow-beating Democrats into voting for legislation that Americans did not want and which Democrats knew would severely damage their party for many years, particularly if Obamacare is ever repealed. That's not to say that Americans will ever forgive the DP for Obamacare, rather that Obamacare will allow the federal govt. to coercively suppress political dissent.
"That sentiment was invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13; no one said it at the time."
If this is true, someone needs to talk to the tour guides at Houston NASA.
...you'd roll this out in a smaller scale: Say for one or two states, learn from your mistakes, and then keep on chugging.
I'm guessing this wasn't an option--legally or otherwise--for healthcare.gov.
Just thought we should memorialize that as the deep, thoughtful, centrist political analysis of the Anonymous Coward at 45521181.
sPh
Not Zaxxar!
Am I the only one wondering why every week there is exactly one article by an anonymous reader on slashdot, telling us all how healthcare.gov is the greatest American catastrophe since Hurricane Katrina? Is that the regular Monday-morning work for a bored intern at some Republican organization? Trying to capture the geek vote before ... I don't know ... the Greens steal it or something?
I've heard it argued that the only real way to find compromise is to do the deals in the back room. The problem is that you're not even allowed to talk about compromise in politics since things are so polarized, but the final law had a TON of compromise in it.
So, you hash things out in a back room, and then everybody stands up and talks about how wonderful the resulting product is in lockstep. You don't have to talk about the bazillion compromises that were proposed and never accepted, just the ones that made it into the final agreement.
The real problem is with voters who care more about sound bites than good policy. Our politicians pander to what gets them elected.
First off, let's not call human beings blood suckers, okay?
Second thing, having insurance--even if it's Medicaid--means you get preventive care and you get to see a regular doctor in a regular office for regular prices for ordinary things before they become emergencies. That's how it lowers the cost.
That's not new information. You're just being disingenuous.
Complete bullshit. Obama won the electoral vote 332 - 206. Suppose you give Romney all the close states, so anything less than a 55% win for Obama counts as a Romney state, okay? That gives Romney Florida (29), Ohio (18), and Virginia (13), changing the totals to Obama 272 - 266. You'd have to throw in Colorado (9), which Obama won by 5.37%, to make it a Romney win.
You do know people can look things up and check your facts, right?
Say what you want about the bin Ladin raid, about the ACA, about the website, whatever. But your point about the 2012 election being on the cusp is just completely wrong.
Me thinks that when the government dangles a huge wad of cash and says "make me a website", EVERYONE and their little brother becomes a "web expert". Add to that the twin demons of either giving the contract to one of your cronies or giving it to the lowest bidder, and it becomes obvious that this thing was doomed to fail.
What about healthcare.gov makes it any more complicated than Amazon.com, Walmart.com, or even Newegg.com?
Amazon.com is amazing! A zillion different products sold by a zillion different vendors, all available for adding to your shopping cart, and shipped to your door in 5 days or less in most cases. Healthcare.gov doesn't even have a shipping requirement.
It's NOT the engineering that painted the egg on the President's face...
It's the politics.
The President knew. He didn't want to know. But, he knew. At the beginning and end of each day, he is a Community Organizer, and that is all he is. He has no Executive experience of any kind. He has never been trained as an Executive, just as a Lawyer, that has focused on ways to get around the Constitution of the USA, period. He has trained himself on how to usurp the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He has no financial training or experience. He has nothing going for him to even suggest he has Presidential capabilities. He only knows one formula for accomplishing anything. That is to divide and concur. Get two factions locked in combat with each other so he can do what he wants while they fight. When you start tallying up his accomplishments what do you come up with? He has spent more money than any President, ever. Is that a good accomplishment? He has single-handedly created more Government bureaucracies than any other 4 Presidents combined. Good or bad? He has dismantled our military leadership, and invited our Enemy's military onto our soil. Good idea or bad? He has lied to the country on so many occasions that the average citizen now has to assume he is lying to them whenever he speaks. He has wielded his Presidential power to attack, cripple, or just block all that do not share his ideology about anything. All of our bureaucracies that were originally empowered to enforce our Laws, Taxes, etc. have been converted into his personal attack-dogs, for his personal use. Good or Bad? He signed the "Unknown piece of Legislation" known as the Affordable Care Act into Law with absolutely no idea how to go about implementing it, or even understanding the huge amount of complexity of our National Healthcare system, or even how to go about fixing those areas he felt were lacking. Obama doesn't even have enough common sense to understand how to eat an elephant. He believes it must be consumed in one bite. Maybe someone with as big a mouth as he has doesn't consider that an impossibility, but the impossibility is still there. In his Signature Legislation, he has doomed many Americans to death due to lack of healthcare, when its expressed purpose was supposedly exactly the opposite!
I've heard it argued that the only real way to find compromise is to do the deals in the back room.
Perhaps if *both* sides go into the back room. However when only one side goes into the back room with their lobbyists and special interests in tow you do not get compromise. You get partisanship, and guess how the other party responds, with more partisanship.
... the final law had a TON of compromise in it.
Compromise between liberal democrats and conservative democrats. That doesn't really count.
Complete bullshit. Obama won the electoral vote 332 - 206. Suppose you give Romney all the close states, so anything less than a 55% win for Obama counts as a Romney state, okay? That gives Romney Florida (29) [at 50%], Ohio (18) [at 51%], and Virginia (13) [at 51%], changing the totals to Obama 272 - 266. You'd have to throw in Colorado (9) [at 51%], which Obama won by 5.37%, to make it a Romney win.
You are only including the states that had a 51.5% or less win for Obama, not 55% as claimed. You failed to consider Pennsylvania (20) at 52%, New Hampshire (4) at 52%, Iowa (19) at 52%, Nevada (6) at 52%, Minnesota (10) at 53%, Wisconsin (10) at 53%, New Mexico (5) at 53%, Michigan (16) at 54%, and Oregon (7) at 54%
Basically 64 electoral votes needed to flip. Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania represent 67 and there Obama's vote represent less than 52%. But lets go with the math you actually used (margin) rather than the math you claimed to have used. Why not go from a 5.37% margin to 5.39% it only a different of 0.02%? Then we can include Pennsylvania (20)
So, a 5.4% swing could have made it a solid Romney electoral college victory. As the NY Times reported, the President received an 11% favorability boost from the successful raid. Suppose we generously expect only a swing of half that magnitude when the October surprise leak occurs **right before** the election informing the public of a decision **not** to conduct the raid. That's 5.5%. Now consider how much of that 11% faded by election day, lets generously assume three quarters of it evaporated, so that by election day the boost was only 2.75%. We are looking at a 8.25% shift from favorable to unfavorable by flipping the decision from go to "no go".
You do know people can look things up and check your facts, right?
Apparently not you, saying lets go with 55% states but only including 51.5% states.
Say what you want about the bin Ladin raid, about the ACA, about the website, whatever. But your point about the 2012 election being on the cusp is just completely wrong.
Whether we use your erroneously stated argument, or your unintentionally used argument, its pretty clear that flipping the Bin Laden raid story from go to "no go" could have easily changed the election. All it took was a 1% shift in Florida, a 3% shift in Ohio and a 5.4% shift in Pennsylvania.
It is always easy to spot the breitbart.com fans in the office:
Really? I don't think I've been to Breitbart's website.
1) They all subscribe to the "Nancy Pelosi as ultimate evil librul WITCH" theory - despite Pelosi being an ordinary centrist Democrat.
Really? I called her partisan, not "evil witch". I'll go further and suggest her agenda is different than the President's, which leads to the confusion over his surrendering leadership to her.
In any case, thanks for your amusing post. You truly identified the political hack whose mind exists in some strange bubble, yourself.
Im president of the Solar System, yet I can't spell "Im"
Science and Engineering are not the all and all, but the people trained in them are what allows implementation of mechanical and technical realities.
The BOCare web site was wishing. Changing demands, not defining a 'direction' with appropriate limits and letting the techies do their thing.
Most of us say security, works for desired function (functionally, artistically, ergonomically, logically), within budget, maintainable are the 4 top hot buttons.
Every time a operational requirement changes more than superficial things once the design has been well defined, costs LOTS of money. Think of building a house, then deciding you want the front door moved 1' left or right, then move it back after it was completed, then enlarge the windows by 3" all the way around. Once that is done, reduce the size by 4" on one side. After marble counters and sinks are installed, you change your mind and want Formica because it is 'cheaper'. And all the developer/builder does is say 'OK, sign this change order so I can bill you more'. Without thinking, government customers seem to do this, without having to come up with 'reasonable' documented justification.
I worked for an oil company that was having lots of project overruns. The root cause was just because of this type of changes. Low level, not-financially-responsible individuals put in change orders they were 'allowed' to do, but they never reported they did it, but the company was billed for the 'add a door',
'move a window' orders after the buildings were built (but before being 'accepted'). Stopping those things happening, brought projects back within budget. Changes could still be made, but the ONLY accepted change orders were signed by financially responsible management (whos jobs were on the line for function as well as budget). If changes were needed for safety or required for the project to perform, they were approved, no problem. 'Cosmetics' or 'whim' changes just didn't get approved.
The Pres is supposed to be a director, big picture, and policy maker, but enough of a manager to get people around that know what they are doing and do it. BO has not set the 'right direction' and has made appointments that do not work 'for the people' but are trying to 'enhance a perceived legacy'. Like it or not, the Pres lives in public housing, paid for by tax $$ that many of us earn. It isn't 'free money' to spend, it is money that could be used for better education, research (medical and science), roads and bridges, or better, not taking it from the folks that earned it in the first place it it isn't used for the 'public good'.