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Emails Cast Unflattering Light On Internal Politics of Healthcare.gov Rollout
An anonymous reader writes with this report from The Verge linking to and excerpting from a newly released report created for a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, including portions of eight "damning emails" that offer an unflattering look at the rollout of the Obamacare website.
The Government Office of Accountability released a report earlier this week detailing the security flaws in the site, but a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released yesterday is even more damning. Titled, "Behind the Curtain of the HealthCare.gov Rollout," the report fingers the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversaw the development of the site, and its parent Department of Health and Human Services. "Officials at CMS and HHS refused to admit to the public that the website was not on track to launch without significant functionality problems and substantial security risks," the report says. "There is also evidence that the Administration, to this day, is continuing its efforts to shield ongoing problems with the website from public view."
Writes the submitter: "The evidence includes emails that show Obamacare officials more interested in keeping their problems from leaking to the press than working to fix them. This is both both a coverup and incompetence."
If you think it's limited to government, you must be very, very young.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
US politics at its finest. We select the most popular people around to lead, and then act surprised when it turns out that they're not necessarily the best leaders...
There is no failure to see here - move (on) along - the websites have brilliantly served their purposes - they've managed to transfer $5 billion so far from taxpayers to the carefully selected chosen ones - who will carefully contribute to the next group of chosen ones. http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/...
Yup, just no clue. I mean, in 2014 alone twelve million Americans who did not previously have health insurance were covered, adding to the estimated 20 million who have obtained some form of insurance benefit and access to health care since the law took effect in 2011. Plus pre-existing condition coverage, lowering overall national spending on health, etc. Horrible, horrible stuff.
1) The administration didn't knowingly force people to use a badly designed, insecure web site that wasn't ready for prime time. That's just something the administration's critics made up, out of context.
That is correct. The administration did not force anybody to use the website at all during the period it was non-functional. There were alternative ways of signing up, and the enrollment periods were extended to allow time to use the system once it was in better shape.
2) The administration has fixed all of the security concerns, and that the whole platform is now working as they promised it would, and that anyone saying otherwise is lying and spinning the glorious real facts on the ground.
I'm sure that not all security concerns have been addressed. I'm sure that 20 years from now they won't be addressed. In fact, I doubt there is a single government or corporate website functioning anywhere where all security concerns are addressed.
I think the issue here is unrealistic expectations. This is an incredibly large undertaking, and problems with large undertakings are fairly common.
If it were up to me I'd greatly simplify the whole mess which would make rollout much less complex. I'd start by simplifying medicare so that there is just one deductible, coinsurance rate, and out of pocket limit for everything. Then I'd just start ratcheting down the eligibility age a few years at a time until everybody is eligible from birth. No new systems to deal with, etc. Then I'd start fixing the provisioning of healthcare services (start opening public providers and gradually transition the system to one where the coverage network is government-run). But, the various vested interests don't want to buy into something like that, so we end up with the affordable care act instead of a system like one of those that has already been tried and tested elsewhere.
To be fair... I have worked on many software projects in my life and have also worked with government software projects. A simple fact of life is that government funded software projects are only given to blood sucking leeches that intentionally underbid and lie their asses off about delivery schedules. Legitimate software houses who actually can plan projects and meet schedules are never evaluated.
From what I can tell, the site is up and running "mostly" only a year late and not nearly as over budget as I expected. What do you expect from a project initiated by uneducated people like politicians and sales people. They of course ask "computer experts" for help, but let's be honest... Politicians wouldn't know a qualified computer programmer from a Barbie doll.
I support ObamaCare aka ACA on a federal level simply because it requires one big ass database system to be made by one company with a whole nation of people to kick the crap out of the company making it. And let's be honest... Whether the system is for all of America or just a state, the system is almost the same.
Imagine if a state like Mississippi or Oklahoma had to get a system made? They'd hire a guy named Jom Bob from church to do it. They'd piss away the entire budget before they even found Jim Bob. They'd run it on index cards and toilet paper in type writers with no correction ink.
Is there anyone dumb enough on Slashdot to think :
A) a government sponsored software project can be done without corruption, delays and major budget problems?
B) all 50 states in America could actually manage to get a system up and running at a state level... Why not ask Florida about their prepaid college project and how bad that for screwed up. I worked at the company writing that one and that project was doomed to fail before it even started. They built the damn thing on Tandem computers with Thomas Conrad ArcNet and had a total of one guy who even knew how to boot the machine.
This was not an incredibly large undertaking. The functionality is not complex. Nothing about it is complex or incredible large.
It has to:
1. Allow you to create an account;
2. Verify your identify;
3. Show you available health care plans in your area;
4. Let you select one;
5. Help you pay for it.
In its basic form, this is something that a group of college kids could whip up in a week or so.
The only thing even approaching complex is scaling to handle a ton of load during the registration periods - and those are problems that have been solved at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and any other high traffic site.
Maybe you like this health care system, and that's okay. We can disagree on that point. What I cannot allow is for you to tell me that this website is some kind of horrible, complex, unknown beast that simply could not be tamed, a website so complex that few applications could approach it in terms of functional requirements.
Love sees no species.
In my city, one company owes 80% of the hospitals and doctors. The other 20% are owned by another company. The 80% company is now not letting the 20% insurance plans to use their facilities, to drive that one out of town. So in fact, if you want good health care choices, you have no real choice which insurance plan you use.
Also, 30% of the city has an ISP choice between fiber and cable; the rest has DSL or cable. Get a bit outside of town and DSL goes away. So there is almost no choice in ISPs, and when they have horrible policies they don't care at all what I say.
On the other hand, with government I can vote to change the people and policies. It's not perfect, and it doesn't always work (especially when most people whine about the govt but don't vote), but it often does work. We've gotten rid of a senator who ran on religious bigotry and hatred, for example.
A site intended to serve up to 30 million people execute complex financial changes in a 90-day window was three months late, went live at ~80% capability, and will probably be close to 95% capability at the beginning of its second year of operation is a "disaster"? Perhaps you don't remember the early days of, say, Amazon?
sPh
I have corporate coverage. I did not have to change doctors, and never have, however premiums did skyrocket in the past two years. I'm effectively paying double what I was before, which isn't that big of a deal as I can afford that. The difference is in the coverage. Under the old plans I had since I started at the company (about 10 years) there were reasonable deductibles and simple copays for most services. Now, however, the deductible is nearly $4000. This means that if I need tests done, it's coming out of my pocket. If I have to visit a specialist, it's coming out of my pocket. I still have healthcare coverage should something catastrophic happen, and I would only have to pay $4k. Which isn't the problem, it's that now I'll be less likely to use the services as I'll be paying full price for things that used to be handled simply by paying a small copay.
To me, with a decent job and a decent amount of money, it's a first-world problem though. However, I also know that it has affected the part-time workers and the working poor more significantly than it has affected myself. People considered "part time" who would be working 35-45 hours a week (but still averaging under 40 to be classified as part-time), now get 20-25 hours per week. This has forced many people to take on two jobs to support their families when previously they could get by with only one. Also, these same people (many young and/or otherwise healthy) are now forced to buy healthcare coverage, further stretching their already thin dollar. Yes, they have insurance. Insurance they may not need or want.
I know, personally, that at the company I work for, every part time/temporary employee who was working over 30 hours now is set at a maximum of 25 to ensure that the company won't be forced to pay for their coverage. It hit them right where it hurts, and it sucks for them. Once again, something championed to actually help people ended up turning around and fucking them, but that's standard procedure these days it seems. I'm not, in any way, shape or form against trying to give healthcare to anyone who wants or needs it. But the way this system is set up and designed is completely ridiculous. It is the same system, essentially, that was proposed by Republicans and written by their Big Healthcare ilk in the 90s and was shot down unilaterally. It only serves to get the most amount of money extracted from people's wallets, by law and hand it to the big insurance companies.
> BTW, this is emblematic of the Obama administration
It's emblematic of EVERY administration going back thousands of years. Right wing present that this is something new but their world view seems to be completely uninfluenced by an appreciation of human nature or history.
For example:
Augustus was a shrewd and effective manager of his own public image. Itâ(TM)s now easy to take for granted that images of political leaders decorate our currency â" Augustus was among the first rulers to widely disseminate images of his own face on coins.
Itâ(TM)s hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Books...
Democrats helped the House, the Senate, for years under Obama - what is your excuses for those years?
The GOP is hindering the bankrupting and distraction of civil rights in America... Yes they are. They tried to block Obamacare, but failed to by one vote. If only Ted, (A blond in every pond) Kennedy had died a little bit earlier, it would have never seen the light of day.
It's the oppositions job to hinder a radical partisan agenda. Obamacare didn't get a single GOP vote. If the GOP were to shove through unpopular legislation without 'bi-partisan support', they would be condemned. Your cognitive bias is showing.
My complaint? My family health cost has tripled. That's 3 times what it did cost. Oh yeah, the level of service we get for that extra is not only missing but the quality has gone down dramatically. I suppose you cold say my problem is with the Education Department, somehow they forgot to teach people about the failures, corruption and down right misery of socialism.
My mother's deductibles wouldn't change if she switched to one of the 'ObamaCare' plans. They're already in the triple or quadruple digits (depending on what services she's needing.) It's actually so bad that both my parents have decided to sit on their hands until their SSI/Medicare kicks in within the next year or two. And this is coming from people who had 150/mo and no more than 300 dollar deductibles at the turn of the millenium. THAT is how fucked up the current medical situation is in the US.
Their provider was Kaiser btw.
2. Verify your identify;
And how do you propose to do that?
3. Show you available health care plans in your area;
Unless the list is 100% based on geography, this is not a straightforward problem. Also, where does this list come from? What data describes a plan for comparison purposes?
5. Help you pay for it.
How much does it cost? I imagine that has a bunch of rules behind it.
The problem is that the website itself could be relatively simple, but there are layers and layers of systems behind it, and those cost a lot more to build.
You really don't believe me? Wow.
Pittsburgh. UPMC has decided that Highmark (and thus all Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurers) can no longer use their facilities because Highmark is threatening UPMC's near-monopoly status in Western PA. UPMC is trying to crush all competition in this area.
If you think being able to vote for the people and policies in government is worthwhile, why does your city have the problems you have described?
So you dislike the government but believe that it should be used to solve every company-vs-company dispute? Huh. No, the local government is finally trying to clean the mess up but they can't really do much to interfere with private contracts between companies. Turns out that anti-competitive behavior is mostly legal, and the state and federal governments haven't gotten involved.
These problems exist because being anti-competitive is a good way to make money. Seriously, you are blaming a company-vs-company problem on the government... how does that make any sense? If I get mugged, I should blame the police and not blame the mugger?
Politics? Darn, I should have read the article - I thought this was about http://obamacare.com/
My point is that democracy doesn't put competent people in charge most of the time. That's just the nature of the beast.
Do you think that anybody else who has been elected in the last 20 years would have pulled off Obamacare? Heck, put Obama in a different period of time and he probably couldn't have done as well as he did either. The forces that move the nation are far bigger than the president.
Obama correctly outlawed them. He did them a favor.
What? Obama's new wonder-plan is what TOOK AWAY our low deductible plan and forced us, for more money, to buy one that will cost us thousands more each year in premiums, and ten thousand more a year in deductibles. The people you're defending - Obama, Pelosi, Reid - forced us to buy a high deductible plan with fewer benefits, minus the doctor we'd used for years, and more. Obama didn't "outlaw" bad, expensive coverage, he just forced us into that exact situation. Thanks for shilling for him, though - it's nice to see that BS so transparently on display for all to see.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Is 12 million the number this week? You can never tell. It goes up and down willy nilly depending on the talking head.
I bet the reality is they have NO CLUE how many people signed up, paid, or used it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
My numbers don't work. Now I'm not sure how I got that number. Perhaps I should use paper and pencil when calculating Obama-sized costs.
I'm going to show my work like this is fourth grade, so if I blew it again someone can easily point it out.
Direct federal cost: 1 300 000 000 000
people covered: 12 000 000
(roughly double the cost once you include premium increases, but let's start with just the cost we'll pay as federal taxes).
Cost:
1 300 000 000 000
_______________
12 000 000
Start dropping zeroes from both to get reasonable sized numbers for numerator and denominator:
1 300 000 000 000 dollars to cover
_______________
12 000 000 people
1 300 000 000 dollars to cover
___________
12 000
1 300 000 dollars to cover
________
12 people
108 333 dollars to cover
______
1 person
With premium increases, maybe $200,000 per person. So that's expensive, but not nearly as expensive as I had first calculated.
I see you have a very selective memory. Please read the original plan and then follow the idiotic path of compromises that Republicans forced onto it rendering it into the watered down ridiculous mess that it is.
But then again, the democrats didn't help things either since they were so desperate to get SOMETHING through that they were willing to do just about anything without really thinking through the consequences of their actions.
And of course, the ones ultimately to blame are ourselves. Congress's successes and failures are a direct reflection of the voting population. It's not democrats or republicans. It's this bizarre us vs. them mentality that prevents anything useful or effective being done. It's not a fucking football game. The leaders we elect are supposed to get shit done, not to act like spoiled 2 year olds when they don't get their way.
~X~
I used to have affordable insurance for my wife and I. The ACA killed it. Were forced to go to a new plan that:
I used to not have insurance at all because I couldn't afford it, because teaching jobs want to pay you part time salary with no benefits, and two part time jobs don't magically qualify you for benefits. The ACA helped get me that insurance for the first time this year.
1) Has much higher monthly premiums (we went from roughly $230/month to about $500/month)
The premiums in my area were about $500/month for a single person (never mind a family plan). They are now about $150/month, and actually cover more medications and scenarios than before.
2) Has a hugely higher deductible (we went from $2,500 a year to about $12,000 a year). This means that we are much, much farther out of pocket every year, especially if we actually need medical care beyond one or two simple visits annually.
The deductibles for the plans in the past were, if I could even afford them, roughly $6-10k per year here. After the ACA, our deductibles are down to about $2500-3500 depending on the plan. Again, huge savings.
3) We are past any risk of pregnancy. None the less, we are being forced to pay for elaborate maternity care that we cannot possibly use.
This is, from a strictly money point of view, true. But instead of thinking of "I'm paying for something I don't use!", your family tree very likely has some daughters/granddaughters/nieces/cousins somewhere. Your premium helps keep it cheap for them. So why the complaints here? Your maternity care portion of your premium can't be very much, what, 5% of the total?
4) The new plan forced us to give up the doctor we've been using for 15 years unless we want to pay cash for that in a way that doesn't help with our deductible. 5) The two best local hospitals are no longer available to us unless we want to pay retail for their use, and get no benefit against our deductible.
I can't visit every hospital in the area either, but this isn't because of anything to do with the ACA, as much as it is a major insurance provider in the area is acting like a huge douche, and refusing to negotiate new contracts with the city and other insurance providers that allow the prices to remain low. This is a corporate decision, not a government one.
I share my story, not because I am trying to belittle your situation -- I definitely feel for you, having been insurance-less for a long time because of high payments, I understand worrying about costs -- but because I do not like the immediate jump to "I'm having a lot of trouble, therefore, this law was evil and wrong". It has its problems, but two things: (1) it has helped a lot of people, so completely scrapping it isn't helpful, we need to explore ways to keep the benefits in place while lowering your premium so everyone gets help; and (2) a lot of your complaints regarding losing doctors and hospitals and even premiums to some degree rely on the free market. It largely depends on how much competition is in your area, and the decisions made by your employer, the insurance company, and the doctors/hospitals themselves, as to what insurance they will provide or take. Nothing in the law says they are required to drop plans; that was a business decision they made, and businessmen are not always that smart. So instead of directing all the anger at the law, you should also be questioning why your company and insurance feel they need to raise prices so much.
If you are having trouble with your current premiums, the people on the Healthcare.gov hotline are very helpful. I would call them up and ask about private insurance plans are in your area. They can price check plans for any provider in your area, and check different levels of coverage, and tell you the cheapest one. From there you can contact the insurance company directly if it sketches you out to a
Please read the original plan and then follow the idiotic path of compromises that Republicans forced onto it rendering it into the watered down ridiculous mess that it is.
The Republicans forced no such thing. Not a single one of them voted for it. The Democrats were the only people who wanted, and who rammed through, the law they put together.
democrats didn't help things either since they were so desperate to get SOMETHING through that they were willing to do just about anything without really thinking through the consequences of their actions
What are you talking about? Everything that's happened was predicted in plain language for everyone involved before they "deemed" it passed in a 100% partisan maneuver. Larger deficits? Playing out exactly as predicted. Huge jump in premiums and deductibles for those that don't get entitlement subsidies? Playing out exactly as predicted. That's what the Democrats WANTED: get insurance for more people by taking more money from one group and giving to another. It's a transfer tax that reduces benefits for those that actually pay in order to give SOME benefits to those that don't, or who pay only part of the way.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Well, when you consider that, by law, people were required to use this website to sign up for a health care plan before the government deadline, anything less than 100% is failure.
Worse than a faulty assumption. Cmms and HHS were responsible for the site, not the president's campaign team.
And I doubt the knowledge domain transfers that much to a site with so many interactions with other sites. Nor to do many business rules.
It is ignorance combined with lack of thought to consider the two remotely connected.
I wouldn't worry about it. Once a Republican is back in the Oval Office the MSM will be interested in journalism again so there will be more places to find corroborating stories. Besides, the MSM won't have much choice, they'll need a break - carrying all that water wears on the arms and Obama has called for more than most. If only his presidency had turned out as well as Jimmy Carters. If only ...
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
Do you think that anybody else who has been elected in the last 20 years would have pulled off Obamacare
They were smart enough not to try.
Heck, put Obama in a different period of time and he probably couldn't have done as well as he did either
Obama is hands down the worst president so far in my lifetime. Even Jimmy Carter was better and that's saying something.
The forces that move the nation are far bigger than the president.
What a lame excuse. President Obama is a pompous, preening and vainglorious windbag, in the best Harvard tradition, who doesn't know a damned thing about how to run anything, least of all the United States. The only bright spot is that the people who voted for him are still taking it on the chin economically while the rest of us enjoy our stock profits. Maybe they'll learn their lesson this time and think more carefully about it before they vote in 2016, but I'm not holding my breath. After all, the working class seem to be suckers for self imposed economic punishment with their recent election choices.
"War on Women" is a Democrat campaign scam - the Obama administration itself (and the Democrats in congress too) have been caught paying their female staffers less than their male staffers.
As for Issa's wealth... and whether it's "bad", let's see here:
Issa built his own wealth by starting and running businesses BEFORE going to Washington
The Kennedys (beloved by Democrats) all inherited their vast fortunes from their prohibition-era alchohol smuggler patriarch (whether you like that law or not, Joe senior was a criminal and the family fortune was built on crime dollars). This would be like somebody today building a financial empire on drug money, then after drug legalization pretending that the money was "clean" without regard to all the crime and dead bodies that contributed to the stash.
former Senator John Kerry (now SecState) got rich by marrying a rich widow.
Senator John McCain got rich by marrying a girl rich with inherited wealth
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) inherited a MOUNTAIN of money from a so-called "robber-baron" and then, in one of the planet's most hypocritical acts, struts around pontificating against the wealthy (while hanging-onto that inherited wealth and all the power it bought him).
Politics is an expensive game, so more and more of the members go there already wealthy, but most politicians who go to Washington NOT rich, (and spend MILLIONS on campaigns for jobs that pay $174K per year) somehow amazingly end-up quite wealthy after only several years. There are many ways this happens; members of congress, for one example, are exempt from "insider trading" laws (they can hear things about companies and markets, even in closed-door meetings, and then call their investors and place orders). Many of them sit on comittees where they direct taxpayer funds... and direct those funds to companies run by their relatives, like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is an example, Former Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) (Who both have rich husbands who are investors - remember that insider trading exemption??).
What's the difference between Bush's illegal wars and Obama's illegal wars?
In terms of the economy, Obama has done at least as much damage over time, based on his own administration's charts, even. Remember all those rosy predictions?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Back in 2008, I only expected Obama to be as bad as Jimmy Carter. He surprised me by having all the badness of Bush (Dubya), Carter, and Nixon.
Also, the "economic mess" at the end of Bush's term was in large part due to the collapse of securities based on bad mortgages that were encouraged by Democrat members of Congress, in particular Barney Frank. In particular, they wanted to call it racist to deny loans to people who clearly had no ability to pay them off, using the race card by claiming it was "redlining". And it is also possible that they expected the timing of these loans imploding to happen at the end of Bush's term. While you can blame Bush for our presence in the mid-east because he was actively leading that, it's a much farther stretch to blame the economy on him. However, I do put the blame that we are still in such a bad economy almost six years later on Obama's policies. And now he wants his own "illegal wars".
Are you talking about the War in Iraq, which Obama boasted continuously about ending, despite loud criticism at the time that he was creating the conditions for what's going on right now with ISIS?
I wouldn't be boasting about that anymore, his related words are now one of those things his opponents publish on Twitter so as to illustrate how incompetent he is.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.