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Obamacare and Middle-Wheel-Wheelbarrows
davecb writes "The Obamacare sign-up site was a classic example of managers saying 'not invented here' and doing everything wrong, as described in Poul-Henning Kamp's Center Wheel for Success, at ACM Queue."
It's not just a knock on the health-care finance site, though:
"We are quick to dismiss these types of failures as politicians asking for the wrong systems and incompetent and/or greedy companies being happy to oblige. While that may be part of the explanation, it is hardly sufficient. ... [New technologies] allow us to make much bigger projects, but the actual success/failure rate seems to be pretty much the same."
Actual rational commentary unencumbered by raving political partisanship.
How is this legal?
To many middle man get in the way of the people doing doing the tech work and it's like that part is being worked on by team X and you need to wait for them to do there part and no you can't talk directly to them.
"The Obamacare sign-up site was a classic example of managers saying 'not invented here' and doing everything wrong, as described in Poul-Henning Kamp's Center Wheel for Success, at ACM Queue."
I mean, you folks at Slashdot should have called it the Affordable Care Act website then reminded us that it's also known as Obamacare. But to call it what it isn't in the first sentence of introduction is [very] unfortunate!
Disclaimer: I am neiter Democrat nor Republican.
A problem with business, that is, not a problem of business. All too often I see business requirements for software that specify how things must be done, rather than specifying what is to be done. The problem is that the business requirements are being written by businessmen who have no training or experience in writing software, so they no more know how things should be done when writing software than (according to those self-same businessmen) the software developers know how things should be done when running a business. The solution is always the same: let the business people lay out what they want done, and let the software developers figure out how to do it.
You think along naive lines of getting things to work correctly, efficiently, to help people and at a fair price. These values, nice as they are, simply can't compete against the combined forces of "free-market" (which is anything but free) ideology and the collusion between government and the private sector.
The worst part is the government website is totally unnecessary.
There already exists perfectly good working websites for buying insurance (such as einsurance). All that was required was to add the government subsidy feature.
Charmingly naive, but naive.
The author of that article asks, several times in several ways, why the government always gets it wrong and the lasting solutions always come from the little guys.
The answer has less to do with the size of the organization than the number of organizations all pitching competitive solutions. Yes, a thousand 10-person companies are probably going to do a better job in the long run than a single 10,000-person company or government entity, on problems in the right scale. But you'll never hear about 9997 of those solutions because half of them are dumb and the other half, while not obviously dumb, are inferior in some critical way.
(Then why do we have big companies and governments? Because some projects are simply too large for a ten-person outfit. That, the author got right.)
There are so many websites out there that do far more complex operation, and they seem to have very little problem.
Not really at least not that worked at this scale from day one. The closest you're going to get to needing to support millions of unique users on the first day, and hundreds of thousands simultaneously are things like MMO launches and WoW expansion packs or something like google+. And most of those can scale by replication and sectioning people off so it's highly parallel, or are built on already substantial infrastructure. If you crunch the math, there were only 90 days from launch to end date, and you need to enrol about 25 million people or something in that time (the uninsured who don't live in states with their own exchanges), so the daily load is actually quite high, particularly with a large number of people hitting the site to browse and decide. It's also quite likely that they gambled on more states setting up their own exchanges... and lost.
The backend of games and google+ of those is trivial compared to healthcare.gov, which not only needs to talk to databases from federal agencies, but it needs to connect to dozens of insurance companies with multiple sets of rules and regulations. Sure an MMO needs to do math, but one designer with no technical training can decide what equations to use and if they get it wrong no big deal. When you're dealing with money - and we're talking about healthcare that's going to be worth a couple of hundred billion dollars bought through this site, even a 1% error rate is going to cause no end of problems.
is that it's a simple matter of input from the user, and then a matter of storage of that input, and maybe some calculations along the way - all very basic stuff for today's world.
Input from the user that needs to be checked against multiple databases that aren't yours, that have private information in them. Then talking to multiple insurance companies in multiple jurisdictions with slightly different rules etc.
I'm not saying that excuses about 2 months of failure, but one should not assume this is a simple project, that they somehow did not realize that this would require probably 10x the server capacity they had is a complete failure. But other projects that are huge and stable have spent a lot more than 500 million dollars to get to that point, over a lot of years. These guys were trying to solve a problem no one else has ever had to solve on this scale. That they didn't recognize that is pathetic, but we shouldn't suppose this is an easy project.
Wake up Amerikka - that subsidy is a temporary, fleeting thing. And, once you are registered, once you're in the system, you can never again be without insurance.
Well, yes. That's the point -- universal healthcare through universal insurance. Not really all that different from what we've done with auto insurance for years, and that works well enough.
Admittedly it's not as efficient or reliable as a single-payer system, but it's nevertheless preferable to our previous "just wait until you're at death's door, then go to the emergency room and run up an amazing tab on somebody else's dime" healthcare model.
Oh well - maybe they won't have Big Macs at the relocation and reeducation camps
Dystopian fantasies, cute. Not a good approach if you want to be taken seriously, though.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Well, yes. That's the point -- universal healthcare through universal insurance.
Will you be so calm and matter of fact about it when there is a law that every citizen must own a gun?
Because making a law that requires citizens to purchase something from private companies means that the government can make you buy ANYTHING (or pay a fee).
P.S. If " universal healthcare through universal insurance." was really the point, why were unions and many other organizations who contributed to Democrats given a waver for the requirement?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
True, the code for that ill-fated website was really out-of-this-world in term of lousiness, but in the whole scheme of things the developers play but a very minor role in that disaster.
The ones who should shoulder the most blame are the people who awarded the entire project (without proper bidding process) to a totally incompetent company due to political reason ( read: cronyism )
The ones who should shoulder the second largest portion of the blame are those who, despite receiving untold millions in funding, they hired totally incompetent people to be in charge of that project.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !