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HealthCare.gov Can't Handle Appeals of Errors
PapayaSF writes "The Washington Post reports that roughly 22,000 people have claimed they were charged too much, steered into the wrong insurance program, or denied coverage, but the HealthCare.gov website cannot handle appeals. They've filled out seven-page forms and mailed them to a federal contractor's office in Kentucky, where they were scanned and entered, but workers at CMS cannot read them because that part of the system has not been built. Other missing aspects are said to have higher priorities: completing the electronic payment system for insurers, the connections with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust coverage to accommodate major changes such as new babies. People with complaints about mistakes have been told to 'return to the Web site and start over.'"
Maybe they should have hired actual coders to do the job.
I have been advising anyone who will listen to keep their personal information the hell away from that site. My assumption is the fraudsters that eventually got hold of it would be criminals, not the government and the insurers themselves.
In retrospect I am really not surprised.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Please fasten your seatbelts, we seem to be encountering some turbulence.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The system is not broken, it's "Fixed"... Probably would have cost less money to just put up a web page that says; "We can't help you, but we will gladly take your money."
Yeah, $634 million and counting (as of... way back in 2013-10) ceartainly isn't enough to develop a website. What price would you have us pay, ridiculous, partisan one?
sig: sauer
Didn't they spend $600 million tax dollars on it so far and you still want blame the Republicans? Just blame former President Bush and be done with it
Exactly! This is what all of the "small" government CONservatives want. They want to strip government down so much that it can no longer help people.
If you created this huge of a disaster you would have lost the contract, and most likely have to pay back any payments made. You would also be on a virtual blacklist as being completely incompetent.
But here in the federal government.. it doesn't work that way. You get rewarded.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Regardless of who you voted for, you're a fool for assuming either option was a good choice.
There were more than two choices. You know why Democrats and Republicans keep winning? Because fools like you keep voting for two choices.
Cut to the chase and blame Bush, after all Obama inherited this mess. Ohwait...
maybe they should of give the them time and other stuff needed to do there job.
I head QA only had a week and the backend was a big mess with it taking a long time to get info on data formats.
A friend of mine has tried a couple of times and he always get an error from the system. The people who have called him to followup have also been baffled He has 8 dependents, so that probably has something to do with it.
My application breezed right through. The website was flawless for me, even from firefox on linux, and wicked fast.
... I personally know several people, in several states that have not established their own exchanges, who have signed up for "Obamacare" using the federal site and are now taking advantage of much better coverage, at a much lower price, than they could have received before the ACA went into effect. The problems are real and clearly need to be fixed, but beware of confirmation bias--every single problem is going to get lots of press, while successes go unnoticed because they don't fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" paradigm.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Progressives: "The governments too small until it owns and controls us all."
And didn't 3 guys make a working front-end site in a few weeks (the part that lets you browse for coverage). This project went quite well if the goal was to funnel $600 MM into the pockets of well-connected contracting firms, but otherwise it's hard to see how anyone could fail so badly at what's effectively a storefront website. (Yes, the backend's a bitch, and 3 guys couldn't do it in a month, but it's not that hard).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Single-payer universal nationalized healthcare is right around the corner.
Just a few more insurance rate hikes and government regulatory fiascos should do the trick.
I used to be against it. Now it looks like a blessing.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
that the government keeps hiring firms like Accenture. This is not the first time they have been involved in failed government IT projects. Here is just one of many examples: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Accenture has learned how to game the system. A system that, for large scale government projects, is very difficult to break into. The contract language makes it very difficult, or impossible, to bid on if you are a small company.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans know that the procurement system is broken and yet neither one of them have offered any concrete solutions.
The failure of Healthcare.gov is not news. It's business as usual. The difference is that healthcare.gov affects many people more directly so it has higher visibility. Many of the other failed projects do not have the same direct impact so they appear in the news for a little while and are then swept under the rug.
I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message. Go Bears!
Maybe if they got 9 women pregnant they could have had a baby in 1 month.
"How's that 'hopey-changey' stuff workin' out for ya?"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of women.
Was that in the requirements doc? There was a requirements doc, wasn't there?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It didn't cost $634 million.
The $600+m is what you get if you simply add up every contract given to the original contractor (CGI Technology and Solutions) since 2007. You know, when Bush was in the Whitehouse. They're a reasonably large, reasonably well-used contractor for things so they do other stuff too.
Since Congress dicked around with actually providing specific funding for it's creation, the estimate is that it probably cost about $120 million, with an original budget of ~$55 million + auxiliary spending (after changes to the various bills by Congress and states) of $63 million. For a total of ~$120 m. That's probably at the high end.
> Cut to the chase and blame Bush, after all Obama inherited this mess.
You're correct that Bush did create this problem, and Obama did inherit it. The $600+ million contact numbers quoted from the CGI contract start in 2007. Obama was just a senator at that time. It was Bush that created this. Or are you CONservatives going to make-up more garbage about time machines and disguises again? You people watch too much TV.
"We’re making our source code freely available on GitHub" and it's a promise they made good on... until the site launched.
so... is it time to post the code again... or ever?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Exactly! This is what all of the "small" government CONservatives want. They want to strip government down so much that it can no longer help people.
Government HELPS!?!?!?!
What color is the sky on your planet?
LOL, the OP points out how much money the Dems have blown on a nonfunctional Obamacare website and you manage to find a way to blame Bush. Yep, Bush sure is responsible for that law passed by the adminstration after he left office!
Is there nothing progressives can find some way to blame on Bush?
Didn't the aliens try that in Duke Nukem Forever?
Bush is a Pussy.
Yeah, $634 million and counting...
Nope. It is more like $174 million and counting (still plenty of scratch though).
For those that don't follow the link (and are unfamiliar with government contracting practices - which is most everybody): CGI Federal was a successful bidder on an HHS umbrella contract in 2007 (Bush Administration, in other words) to provide IT services to HHS, along with IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., and Quality Software Services. These same four companies were the bidders (under said long term contract) for the specific task of site implementation, and the $634 million figure is for all of the services from CGI Federal under that contract. Only 25% of that total, dating back to 2007, was for the website.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Accenture -- weren't they the company that worked for Enron but in the aftermath of the fraud and the role they played in it they renamed the company to "Accenture." Or did they rename again and this company took the name? I am pretty sure Accenture was the name they picked after the Enron disaster.
Government flops that involve voters are a good thing; they can hold somebody accountable which is far more than they can do with businesses they are bound to.
Politicians are made or broken on how they handle Medicare and Social Security; the result is that those programs run quite well despite attempts to sabotage them. This will likely end up in a similar situation which is why so much is being put into sabotaging it now because it gains too much momentum with the voters.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
... to do their job.
FTFY
"There" is the antonym (opposite) of "here". "Their" is plural possessive.
("They're" is a contraction of "they are". The apostrophe stands for missing sounds or letters.)
And if QA sits around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for a final product to review, they're doing it wrong... not that they're the only ones in this mess.
Pussy has a bush.
Where did you hear that?
'The health department has provided some information on spending. It paid $174 million on contracts tied to Healthcare.gov and supporting technology through August, a sum that jumped to $319 million by the end of October, according to Albright of the Medicare agency.
The figures suggest a late surge in spending before the website’s opening. Only $18 million was spent in October, Albright said in an e-mail.
The Medicare and Medicaid agency owes $630 million for the work through September, Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the health office, has said. The agency didn’t provide updated information on the amount owed, or obligated, for work since the October debut of healthcare.gov.'
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
You information is quite a bit out of date... During October they roughly doubled the tab "fixing" Healthcare.gov spending over $300m by the end of the October.
clusterfuck?
Best to scrap the whole thing, law and all, and start over. And this time please don't leave it up to a community organizer and his gang.
Obama Reid and Pelosi jammed this law through with absolutely NO Republican input (Republicans wer physically locked out of the rooms where the law was negotiated and written and heve never even been able to get the names of the lobbyists and lawyers and coproprations who were in the meetings with the Democrats, so they are under NO obligation to support it. That said, however, in every year since the GOP took back the House in 2010 they have had SYMBOLIC votes to repeal Obamacare (symbolic because Reid will never bring any such bill for even a VOTE in the senate (to protect his "moderates" from having to take a stand)) and then they have voted to give Obama all the funds to implement Obamacare (much to the outrage of the TEA Partiers).
Obamacare has been fully-funded; the GOP has failed to repeal it and failed to de-fund it... this is FACT
In those states where GOP governors have not driven their states further into debt by having their states implement state exchanges, those GOP governors are faithfully following Obama's law. If you think this is "wrong" or "unfair" or a form of "sabotage", do not blame any Republican... blame the Democrats who wrote the law with provisions that specifically enabled this choice of actions. The GOP is obeying the law that the Democrats wrote, Obama Reid and Pelosi are just incompetent.
Climb out from beneath the purple napkin and drop the poisoned pudding - there's no mothership in the comet's tail, your cult leaders are lying to you.
You seem to be spouting the cult line that GOP==BigCorporations..... a line that the left used all through the banking crisis and the 2008 election cycle (when the big bankers shovelled more cash into the Obama campaign than into any other campaing in US History). Obama took so much corporate cash he became the first modern President to not take the matching funds (and live within the associated limits) and it's likely he ended modern campaign finance reform; no Republican is likely to ever again be as stupid and gullible as McCain who tried to beat Obama while staying under the campainf finance caps. Obama took giganting steaming stinking piles of cash from health insurance and prescription drug companies (who saw his big government health insurance mandates as a guarantee that young healthy people would be forced to funnel money their way).The TRUTH is that government is now so big and so involved in the economy that many companies see government as a manipulatable thing to help them defeat competitors. Big Government and Big Corporations are natural allies. As a result, ALL "establishment"/career politicians who support big government (regardless of party) take money from big business and use government to help the big businesses that help them get elected.
Don't like this? Then vote Libertarian or TEA Party (people who actually want to CUT government and get it out of many areas it has gotten into). If you vote for Democrats or "establishment"/"moderate"/"rino" Republicans then YOU support all this big corporate greed and you should stop pretending to be anything other than a crony-capitalist-supporting hack.
First, if they're being massively subsidized then the new stuff is not at much better rates than before, it's just then the new law is stealing even more money from their neighbors and giving it to them....and that COULD have been achieved with a ten-page tax bill, without screwing up everybody else's insurance.
Second, having "better" COVERAGE is meaningless if you cannot afford the co-pays and deductibles. Neither I nor anybody I know has better insurance now than before Obamacare; ALL of us have had our rates skyrocket, and ALSO seen a rise in co-pays and deductibles. What most young Obamabots do not seem to understand is that the policies they are being required to buy are DESIGNED to be worthless (so they PAY into the system while getting nothing of value from it because the "young invincibles" are the primary funding stream to support the poor and the elderly). The policies most (paying) young people will end up with have such high co-pays and deductibles that a young person would need to pay $10K+ per year in health costs (ON TOP of the insurance bills) before the policy kicks in. This is not "confirmation bias", it is the DESIGN of the system, by the HHS's own admission. The exceptions are: [1] the young poor who are shunted into medicaid (which pre-existed Obamacare) and [2] the very small portion of the population with severe life-long medical problems (things like Lupus, or MS) who've alway had problems getting coverage and whose problems could have been better solved with a simpler targeted law that left everybody else's coverage alone.
Yes, I believe it. I believe it would take a good month or two for planning depending on how many tools are needed for the project and all the tax info it needs to deal with but the website itself won't be too much trouble to build. Anyone with a few years of experience at least could build a front-end website like theirs (but better) in less than a week or two on their own. The difficult part is the back-end, and how to efficiently run server-side programs without much of a security risk. Unfortunately that healthcare website is nothing but a giant security risk, everything is bad. I would say with my limited knowledge on the type of tools they need, this project would take no more than 6 months to complete from start to beta, where start is planning and design documents and beta would be when it is finally being tested for security by say the cia or something. I would imagine the team wouldn't be much bigger than 12 or 15 individuals and would cost no more than 1.5mil to develop with the right people at the helm. But that's just my opinion after working in the field for over 10 years
Oh, but there's also one more thing to consider and that's probably the company itself is likely involved in a lot of government programs. I've seen this happen from time to time where a company will ask for an outstanding amount of funds for a pitiful project, take for example a database project that just needs to manage people and if it's time for them to be getting a raise or what have you. The quote? $500,000. Timeline? A ridiculous 6 months to build. After 6 months, what do these companies do usually? "Oh, we encountered issues and need more funds" so $500,000 becomes $1mil and $1mil becomes $5mil and then people vote against the contract so at that point the company keeps the money and doesn't have to complete the project. Seen it happen too many times, and you can blame the irresponsible people making the contracts for the government. Bad policies and bad companies all around. Just give me the contract and I'll build it in 2-days for that sum of money haha
She predicted this chaos.
Oh, and those "death panels" (the IPAB) are indeed part of the ACA (I just KNOW some Palin-hater will bring that up). The IPAB members are to be unelected (appointed, and therefore unaccountable to the people) and are not required to have any medical knowledge but they get to decide what treatments are "cost effective" using whatever criteria they choose (their job is to put money ahead of lives) - and they may block any doctor or hospital or insurance company from providing any care they deem "not cost-effective" (this is in the law, giving them great powers of life-and-death over all citizens). Do you need some special drug or procedure? They can tell you "no, go away and die" if they do not approve it.... and you will not even be able to get it by paying out of your own wallet. This is not happening YET because, like most of the worst aspects of the new law, it has not yet kicked-in (many part of the law are written to start in later years after Obama does not need the voters any more, some parts like the "employer mandate" have been delayed by Obama until after the Nov2014 elections). The IPAB members have not yet been appointed, so nobody is yet being denied drugs and procedures - but the elderly and the handicapped will be first to feel this; it happens in all socialized health care. In Britain, the equivalent panel is called "NICE" and it kills thousands per year by simply withholding care (pretending the care is unavailable) - death by official neglect. When budgets are tight, it's not "bureacrats getting laid-off" that save the money, it's "old people dying a little earlier".
The Belarusian Connection - Obamacare network vulnerable to cyber attack
'U.S. intelligence agencies last week urged the Obama administration to check its new healthcare network for malicious software after learning that developers linked to the Belarus government helped produce the website, raising fresh concerns that private data posted by millions of Americans will be compromised.'
http://freebeacon.com/the-bela...
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
The Republicans don't hold corporations accountable
Wake up man. Corporations have MORE of a hold over Democrats these days. There are some anti-corperation Republicans but there are NO anti-corp Democrats left.
Obamacare itself is a law designed to FORCE you to buy the most expensive insurance policy possible from "government chosen" private insurance companies. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about the current relationship of corporations to government, you are to thinking.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From what I saw, coverage is cheaper but deductibles are WAY higher.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
i'm pretty sure they got a decent version up and running in a long weekend...I actually used it to scan available plans in my state, the insurers involved, and to run what-if numbers quickly.
they did a real bang-up job.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
If the government can't put together a website, what in the world makes people think it can manage the complex healthcare system? The pain is only beginning. The failed amateur website will be nothing compared to the government crashing our healthcare system.
This is what happens when you give a huge project to a large group of government employees whom are protected from censure or being sacked for non-performance. You can't fire people from federal agencies, it's nearly impossible. So you collect incompetent people.... and then you give them a critically important project that is responsible for insuring peoples healthcare. FAIL!
Let's see here: massive, corrupt, inefficient and unaccountable bureaucracy fails to build and operate a website to manage ACCESS to health INSURANCE....not even ACTUAL HEALTHCARE......and YOUR solution is to say "let's put it in charge of providing the ACTUAL care"?????
REALLY?????
Can I please have the names of the drugs you are on? I'd love to see the utopia you are seeing, but I suspect those drugs kill IQ points, are highly addictive, lead to hallicinations and will eventually either be banned as "too dangerous" OR be mandated by the political class as a way to make all voters as stupid, docile, and gullible as Obamabots. Aldous Huxley, here we come...
That article isn't especially informative either, but does get into the issue better: it's all about how and what's being tracked and included as "healthcare.gov".
The $634m figure was being bandied around right out the gate - it's probably getting slightly closer to true now, but it depends on what you want to call a boondoggle in how you sum it up. I will wager there's a lot of non-optional IT costs at the moment which people are scrambling to shove under the "healthcare.gov" banner in order to hopefully make the number bigger.
Actually, my take is that there are a lot of people scrambling to rationalize away any and every expense they can because the horror show is so huge.
> This project went quite well if the goal was to funnel $600 MM into the pockets of well-connected contracting firms
Sadly, I think that was the main purpose. And I believe it's the primary reason why government projects in general so often fail.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It a mess, pretty sad really.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
and exposure to real live users to work out the details of complex business logic.
In October 2009 the Democrats who were then running congress by a huge majority changed the locks on the capitol hill meeting rooms so they could keep Republicans out when they wanted to. (they did this to stop Republicans exposing the involvement of Democrats in the 2008 home loan meltdown activity at Countrywide, but they then used those locked rooms to exclude Republicans from the secret healthcare reform negotiations which Obama had promised would air in their entirety live on C-SPAN)
Obama did, indeed, promise Obamacare negotiations would air live on C-SPAN before he broke his promise, and journalists from across the political spectrum objected and tried to get the negotiations opened
And here's an admittedly biased link to a TEA Party site, used here to point out their frustration with the fact that the "establishment" wing (the lifetime politicians who like big government) of the GOP keeps doing SYMBOLIC votes against Obamacare but then keeps actually fully funding it. The Washington elites of both parties have done stuff like that to their base voters on many issues for decades, but the internet is exposing it.
Oh, and if you are in denial about the corporate lobbyists who climbed into bed with Obama on Obamacare, here is a link to a story explaining WHY big insurance got on board (they originally fought it, but then they got admitted to the closed-door meetings WE the public were shut out of). Also see this link on big Pharma and big Insurance climbing on board and throwing money at Democrat politicians. While many organizations and lobbying groups were involved in the "secret" negotiations, the names of most of the individuals involved are NOT known to Republicans who repeatedly demanded the names and were denied.
Let me further point out that when the Obama administration thinks a Republican governor is breaking a law, they run to the federal courts - something they have NOT done (so I cannot link to it here) to any governor over his/her refusal to create a state exchange - a tacit admission that the governors are obeying the law.
Since I have validated everything in the post you said was so full of falsehoods, whereas YOU provided NO evidence ANY of the claims was false, that previous post was the correct one and yours was the loser
Looks like they hired some coders
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yes, Heritage (a "think tank", NOT the GOP) published a paper endorsing an individual mandate on health insurance, but you guys on the left need to become a bit more honest about waving that report around as evidence that Republicans were for the concept of "Obamacare" up until "a black guy" was for it (always that nasty little accusation of racism, from the party (the Democrats) that owned all the slaves and went on to found the KKK). ONE report from ONE "conservative" think tank does NOT establish the beliefs of the GOP any more than ONE report on ANYTHING from a "progressive" think tank establishes that as official Democrat policy. It's also important to stop accidentally failing to report that the very same Heritage organization has long published rants against individial mandates ( HERE is one example I could quickly find for this post ). Sure, Mitt Romney (in conjunction with a Democratic state legislature) did "Romneycare", but let's face it - that was in loony liberal Kennedy-land and most Republicans from the rest of the country oppose it (it was one of the biggest problems he had in winning the GOP nomination in 2012)
George Soros
I see your Libertarian boogeymen, and raise you one absolutely evil slimeball (do some research, and then weep)
$634 million is the amunt set aside for the website, they spent over half of that by Oct. 1, 2013, and are quickly burning through the rest trying to fix what they created.
Oregon sent over $150 million on their website, and last I heard hadn't been able to process a single application through it after 4 months!
Ken
Lol
You have to love the efficiency that the private sector contracting firms have provided the taxpayers in this project? Should there have been somebody in government in charge of all this who knows what the fuck is going on? Yep. Is there? Obviously not. Why is that? Oh yeah, because it's "cheaper" to contract out.
So I don't have to deal with this stupid bullshit.
How NOT to implement socialist^H^H^H^nationalized healthcare.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If they were using Mocrosoft or IBM that would be the licensing fees alone for several million users.
the smokers, obese, alcoholics and drug users don't have to change their ways, right? They can continue to choose lifestyles known to increase health risks while increasing the costs for the rest of us.
Apparently it's not an invasion of privacy or government overreach to force people to hand over their money to private companies or have the government forcibly extract the money from one's bank account whereas making people lead healthier lives is.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Where did you hear that?
'The health department has provided some information on spending. It paid $174 million on contracts tied to Healthcare.gov and supporting technology through August, a sum that jumped to $319 million by the end of October, according to Albright of the Medicare agency.
The figures suggest a late surge in spending before the website’s opening. Only $18 million was spent in October, Albright said in an e-mail.
The Medicare and Medicaid agency owes $630 million for the work through September, Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the health office, has said. The agency didn’t provide updated information on the amount owed, or obligated, for work since the October debut of healthcare.gov.'
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-10/hidden-obamacare-website-costs-show-lack-of-transparency.html
why didn't they find out who did ebay's or amazons websites and get them to do it?
a lot of them are no better...
They need it to be "too big to fail."
The private sector has just a many fuck ups. If I had a nickel for every half baked project I've come across in in the "private" sector.... Bottom line is people cut corners in IT just like they do in every other occupation in life. I not defending this botched rollout, just saying that kind of thing happens all the time. It just tends to be more noticeable when the details of a failed project can't be hidden behind closed doors like it so happens when the failures are with private companies.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Why not have an "issue desk" staffed with people who can fix insurance applications etc. manually? That's what we did in the old days before I kicked everybody off my lawn. Why must the user have to do everything on the web?
Table-ized A.I.
A baby is a major change from the normal process of events.