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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".