DHHS Preparing 'Tech Surge' To Fix Remaining Healthcare.gov Issues

itwbennett writes "It's no secret that the healthcare.gov website has been plagued by problems since its launch 3 weeks ago. On Sunday, the Department of Health and Human Services said that it's now bringing in the big guns: 'Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the [HHS] team and help improve HealthCare.gov,' the blog post reads. 'We're also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them.' Other emergency measures being taken as part of what HHS calls a 'tech surge' include defining new test processes to prevent new problems and regularly patching bugs during off-peak hours. Still unclear is how long it will take to fix the site. As recently reported on Slashdot, that could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months."

licensing

[AliasMarlowe]

Or bring it into compliance [weeklystandard.com] with the GPLv2 or BSD3 licenses.

Bad Medicine

[drfred79]

How is taking over more of the economy an even better idea when the DHHS can't even take over half of medicine? Single-payer is dead in the water and immoral. There is no real way to kill the entirety of Obamacare but Congress should work to mitigate its impending harm.

Spot-checking healthcare.gov

[dkegel]

Just how broken is it? Let's find out.

I tried creating an account early Sunday morning and failed.
I tried again Sunday evening, and it worked... on Firefox, anyway. On Chrome, logging in took me to a blank screen.
( See https://plus.google.com/u/0/113779301404424240904/posts/2mxh2wPTein [google.com] )

If you try creating an account on healthcare.gov, reply here with what happened. Let's see how broken it is.

Re:How about this...

[Salgak1]

Hate to rain on your parade, but pregnancy is not an illness or a dysfunction. That being said, insurance is willing to pay for birth control if that's what's in the contract. Some employers CHOOSE not to include that in their insurance contracts, often for religious reasons. . .

Re:How about they just scrap it entirely?

[rubycodez]

hahaha, so all extra money goes into R&D? Guess again, I'll start you with a hint, 30% is "administrative" costs

Re:How about they just scrap it entirely?

[Bugler412]

(former HMO IT guy) That 30% administrative cost is driven primarily by the hideous complexity of health care billing brought on by the mutli-payor insurance setup we have today. Every single line item on a hospital bill must be evaluated for who pays for it. That takes a lot of skilled labor in classification of each individual item. Then throw various mixtures into the mix of who allows what to be done, various contractual pricing schemes not seen by the individual consumer, etc. etc. etc. It's a God awful mess in there. THAT is where the administrative costs come from. Not from corporate profits. and seriously, do you think a government operated bureaucracy would have LESS overhead in its' operation? What planet do you live on if you think that?

Re:Not unlike a big-bang private sector project...

[DoofusOfDeath]

As a former government software developer, I can honestly say that it's just not a worthwhile place to work, hiring caps or not.

Well, let me correct that. If you're willing to have that be the last place you work in your career, and you're willing to find job satisfaction outside of work, and you can handle both the intense frustration of being prevented from doing your job properly, with being badmouthed by politicians for not doing your job properly, then it can actually be an okay place to work.

deconstructing Healthcare.gov

[Presto Vivace]

Lambert Strether [correntewire.com] has a tremendous post-by-post analysis of what when wrong.

Re:Not that interested in the teething problems

[Dahan]

Yes, please, lets mention them. Or wait, we can't because they haven't been stopped. Anyone who had difficulty one day, has been able to get through later that day or the next day at worst. Remind me again what your dictionary has listed for "disaster"?

"Anyone"? It only takes a single counterexample to disprove that, and here I am. I signed up for an account on Oct 1--took me a couple of tries, but I was eventually able to do it. Got my confirmation email, confirmed it, and my account should be active. However, I have never been able to actually log in. When I try, I get a red error message under the username/password boxes saying, "The information you entered isn't valid. Review this information." If I use the "Forgot Password" link in an attempt to reset my password and enter my username, I get an email with a password reset link--so my username is obviously in the DB and associated with the right email address. But when I click that link, I get a page that tells me that "We weren't able to process your request because we couldn't find a Marketplace profile that matched the information that you provided." Wut.

And although it only takes a single counterexample to disprove a universal, I'm certainly not the only person having the exact same problem. Do a web search for those error messages and you'll find many others saying the same thing.

Re:How about they just scrap it entirely?

[clarkkent09]

Annual per taxpayer cost of healthcare in the UK (NHS budget/number of taxpayers) is higher than the average health insurance cost per year in the US.

Re:How about they just scrap it entirely?

[nine-times]

How about the time available to doctors and nurses to treat people? They can only treat so many people.

I'm not sure that counts as a limited resource, since it doesn't explain why we can't scale up on doctors or nurses to meet the demand. After all, we do have unemployment. I'm not saying you don't have a point, but you're being very picky that we get down to the reason why things are so expensive, and your explanation doesn't quite seem adequate. Scarcity of materials for MRIs could be a real limit, but it would only explain why MRIs are expensive. Why is the aspirin in hospitals so expensive? Aspirin isn't meaningfully limited.

This isn't a simple supply and demand issue.

Re:How about they just scrap it entirely?

[iserlohn]

I don't know where you get your numbers but UK healthcare spend is 8% of the economy while in the US it is over 15%. You can compare all of these stats and more at the Commonwealth Fund.

Hey, how about some graphs to illustrate the point?

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/Issue%20Brief/2011/Jul/PDF_1533_Anderson_multinational_comparisons_2010_OECD_pfd.pdf [commonwealthfund.org]

Re:Spot-checking healthcare.gov

[khallow]

Apparently, the performance varies between states since some of the states have their own systems which work rather than the federal default one. I recall hearing that California and New York both had working systems.

Re:really?

[Idarubicin]

Why do Canadians often come to the States for treatment?

The number of Canadians who receive any health care in the United States for care is vanishingly small. In a country of 30 million people, it is relatively easy to find a few who do so, and who can offer a sound bite for a newscast or an anecdote for a blogger. The fraction of Canadians who receive medical care in U.S. hospitals and clinics appears to be around the 0.5% mark. [healthaffairs.org]--of whom roughly 4 out of 5 do so because they happened to fall ill while visiting the United States, and not because they travelled there to receive medical services.

For certain urgent care services, communities close to the Canada-U.S. border can and do make arrangements to share facilities. (If someone has an urgent need for specialized cardiac or neurological care, you want to go to the nearest major hospital, not just the nearest one on your side of the border. Patients flow in both directions under these agreements; there are regular transfers from northern Washington state to Vancouver hospitals.)

Why does the Elderly death rate in Britain start climbing, late in the summer, and start going down again after the new Fiscal Year starts ??

Because high temperatures combined with substantial swings in temperature - typical late-summer weather, and likely exacerbated by climate change - are physically stressful. The same pattern is observed in the United States. [harvard.edu]

For that matter, why are so many doctors from Single-payer countries practicing in the States, instead ???

I don't have all the data at my fingertips, but in every year since 2004, there has been a small net migration of doctors out of the United States and in to Canada [aarp.org]. Further, doctors practicing in Canada (and in the UK) report being significantly more satisfied in their jobs that their colleagues in the United States.

Re:Government Thinking

[Bloomy]

The bill did originate in the House, but as a bill concerning tax breaks for members of the military. After it passed the House, Senate Democrats added the healthcare provisions to it, and were able to pass it during the few months when they had a filibuster-proof majority. After they lost their supermajority in the Senate, Congressional Democrats decided the clearest path to law would be to drop the House's original legislation and try to pass the bill the Senate amended. To get enough House Democrats on board to pass it, it was agreed to pass a follow up bill removing some provisions and Obama reinforced the Hyde Amendment preventing federal funds from being used for abortions. The amended bill barely passed the House and was signed into law. The follow up bill originated in and passed the House, and since it was written to only cover budgetary items, it couldn't be filibustered in the Senate and passed there as well, though with an amendment that was re-passed by the House.