HealthCare.gov: What Went Wrong? 400
New submitter codeusirae writes "An initial round of criticism focused on how many files the browser was being forced to download just to access the site, per an article at Reuters. A thread at Reddit appeared and was filled with analyses of the code. But closer looks by others have teased out deeper, more systematic issues."
Here is a thought.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the Govt can design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center for the NSA but can't deploy a website to allow people to sign up for insurance?
So basically (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bitch and moan (Score:1, Insightful)
As opposed to Democrats lying that everyone could keep their coverage? And that Benghazi couldn't have been handled better? At this stage in the game, there is no blaming Bush. It's all Obama's lies and failed promises.
Re:Here is a thought.. (Score:2, Insightful)
But the Anonymous GP may be right suspecting, the failure is deliberate... Obama's personal favorite healthcare model — as well as that of the rest of the Left — is "single-payer" (a.k.a. "Medicare for all"). Perhaps, it was calculated by our benevolent and sophisticated Democratic overlords, that the failure of Obamacare will make introducing the outright Socialist construct more palatable to the electorate.
US constitution anyone? (Score:1, Insightful)
So would blatant violation of the 10th amendment of the US constitution by the US federal government come into play here?
It seems to me that the website tried to do too much and the company tasked to build it were given a no bid contract and had political connections to michelle obama. Government corruption at its finest.
Re:bitch and moan (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess you touched a nerve with tparty mods!
Did they REALLY expect nothing to go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of "what went wrong", you know that the higher ups will just fire some peons, give themselves some big bonuses, and call it a day.
But the BIGGER question I don't see anybody asking, is why is there no apparent fall back or concession to delay requirements due to the problems? ANY significantly complicated computer system can reasonably be expected to encounter problems at deployment. And despite what the talking, drooling, blathering heads on TV seem to think, it is simply IMPOSSIBLE to test a system like this 100.000000000000% against real world scenarios. There will be glitches, there will be people who can't use the systems, there will be all sorts of "people problems" that no technology can fix. They should have been ready with other non webby ways to get people taken care of, and prepared to delay the needs for all of this if they could not get everyone taken care of in time.
Re:then why did some states succeed? (Score:4, Insightful)
By:
Re:bitch and moan (Score:3, Insightful)
All they do is sabotage everyone else's work
Pretty much. It's the "starve the beast" philosophy and strategy. Sabotage something, then point out how it doesn't work, and then say "well, duh, because all government is evil."
It's their raison d'etre and since the Republicans are so invested in it after 30 (40?) years, without it they would have an existential crisis that would end in the same fate as the Whigs.
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BMO
Re:A distraction (Score:4, Insightful)
"free market principles" won't help here. On the contrary, just think of the money that would go into actual health care if the government came in guns-ablaze and forcefully said "no, United Health Care, you can't treat your customers like the deepest turd of a batch of untreated sewer sludge [consumeraffairs.com]", or "no, big drugmaker, you can't throw millions of dollars on advertising niche products like fucking Restasis all over primetime tv instead of putting the money toward cutting the costs of life-saving meds".
Those are two cases where I'd actually be elated to see the NSA and TSA put into use: snoop on the moneyed fuckers involved and No-Fly 'em as soon as it's clear they want to take anything that resembles a business trip to plan their next splurge.
Splat Programming (Score:5, Insightful)
The other part is Government Projects. You don't have to worry about errors and omissions because the standard government contracts do not hold the contractor liable if the final result is approved. Finally, unlike commercial projects, there is an infinite amount of money available to pay for years of bug fixes and upgrades.
Thankfully this site only effects a small percentage of people so there is really no cause for alarm.:)
Re:On Further Examination (Score:3, Insightful)
This article is dated oct 8. I had assumed it would be more recent.
Obligatory: You must be new here...
In other news, it's still a relevant and current event; Just because something's a month old doesn't mean it might as well have been written on stone tablets. I know the iThingie generation has the attention span of... oh who am I kidding, they didn't even finish reading the summary let alone the comments. :) But more seriously, it's pretty clear at this point the problem isn't because of the technology, but rather that the implimentation was divided up into two teams without much regard for communication between the two, or management oversight.
The fact is, what happened with ObamaCare happens in government IT all the time. Too many chefs, not enough cooks. When the dust settles we will undoubtedly discover that the true cause of failure was not in IT, or even the contractors, who I am sure met their contractual obligations, but rather that it was setup for failure by political interests who are right now getting a lot of play over its failure, without being identified as the cause. They will undoubtedly have plausible deniability of the "Well, I was sure this wouldn't happen because of my inserting language into the bill requiring process xyzzy be followed instead of yzzyx!" ... and a half-dozen co-conspirators all did similar to structure it in such a way that there was no other possible outcome than failure.
Failure like this requires planning; You can't accidentally crash and burn this badly. And what we're going to find when we do the autopsy is that a few dozen people conspired to create the conditions necessary for it to fail, but we'll never be able to prove the conspiracy, and because the blame will be on this group of individuals, each of whom can legitimately claim their own contribution shouldn't/couldn't have caused the failure, nobody will be held accountable.
Except of course the people who implimented it, and the guy who's name was on the proposal.
Just like every private sector IT project that blows up.
government spending in action (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical of what happens when an organization is too used to spending other people's money. It's ike a 16yo girl's runaway spending habits with daddy's credit card...and she's got him by the balls, too, along with her mother.
What went wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
First and worst, politicians were involved. Everything else pretty much is a cascade effect off that.
Second, cronyism.
Third, you had a bunch of non-technical people setting up moving goalposts for the technical people to hit, with regard to the technical specs of the site.
Fourth, distinct lack of firm, single-message communication to the technical teams with regards to whether the project was or was not going forward.
I could go on and on about all the fuckups with regard to this. But I'd just piss off a bunch of people who aren't worth my time.
Re:then why did some states succeed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yea, check this out [politico.com].
Other than being the opposite of what you claim, all the kickbacks and bribes were for DNC votes. Then we can add on the ONLY part the GOP had a hand in writing was an amendment from Ghram where the Congress would be required to purchase and get their healthcare from the exchanges, which Obama override with executive order so they can be exempted from the prices by subsidies. Yep, Congress gets a 75% subsidy on their costs at $172K salary, while you don't get a subsidy if your income is over $46k, so the ONLY part the GOP had anything to do with was removed after it was signed into law without passing another law.
So, yea everything you say is correct, hoever it is provable that it was the DNC that did what you calim. Don't worry, you are a hypocrite so you will be fine with all those tricks since it is "your side" doing it.
Re:Here is a thought.. (Score:4, Insightful)
>Citing anne coulter as a reference
Yeah, and we're done here.
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BMO
Re:On Further Examination (Score:5, Insightful)
Girl - you write some pretty smart, insightful comments from time to time. But your logic is missing a few cogs here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor [wikipedia.org]
Re:bitch and moan (Score:5, Insightful)
One could argue that the Administration's tactic of preventing release of critical design data until after the election, to prevent the opposition from using the true costs as a campaign issue, was sabotage de facto. This put the entire development process several months, perhaps a year, behind schedule.
Re:bitch and moan (Score:2, Insightful)
it's a reflection some plans were actually broken.
My former plan was not broken. It was exactly what I wanted. Now, I have to pay over twice as much for a plan that is not what I want. Obama promised I could keep my old plan. I cannot do that. I am forced into a much more expensive plan.
Quit making excuses for them. If you enable the lies, you're part of the problem.
Re:government spending in action (Score:3, Insightful)
The number of large failed private sector IT projects makes this look like a drop in the bucket.
Re:It's time to kill off the boomers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Social Security is hardly bankrupt. It has about 3.5 trillion dollars invented in special interest drawing T-Bills. Unfortunately, the deadbeats in Congress borrowed the money "invested" by Social Security and spent it on every Congressional wet-dream and war they could come up with.
The "full faith and credit" of the US requires that they pay this money back. This means raise taxes, run the printing press, or weasel their way out of as much of the repayment as they can. Every dollar they actually have to repay is a dollar that can't be spent on future corporate welfare.
Re:It's time to kill off the boomers. (Score:5, Insightful)
I will argue that part of the political problem is the boomers (of which I am one) - we grew up spoiled, filled with neo-socialist propaganda (see "The Closing of the American Mind" by Alan Bloom), and isolated without much chance to learn how to get along with each other or to how to be spouses and parents. For example, never having had to share a bedroom meant we never never really learned the art and necessity of compromise and living with someone else. We're arrogant, self-centered and always convinced we are right about everything. So, now we are running the political system, it is inherently dysfunctional. And that's not even counting those of us who are still lost in the 1960s, and think the hippie utopia was the best of all possible worlds, disregarding the realities of life. Someone once described American liberalism as confusing wishes with facts.
So, politics in the US at least will continue to be dysfunctional until we boomers age out of the power structure. Assuming the next generations aren't even worse... :P
Old article. I can sum it up with three quotes (Score:5, Insightful)
Quote 1: "A complex system that works is found to have invariably evolved from a simple system that worked. . . .A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." (John Gall, Systemantics,p. 80, 1978 paperback edition).
Quote 2: "In architecting a new [software] program all the serious mistakes are made in the first day." (Martin, 1988, cited in Maier & Rechtin, The Art of Systems Architecting (3rd ed.), p. 399)
Quote 3: "Indeed, when asked why so many IT projects go wrong in spite of all we know, one could simply cite the seven deadly sins: avarice, sloth, envy, gluttony, wrath, lust, and pride. It is as good an answer as any and more accurate than most." (me, testifying before the Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology Hearing, US House of Representatives, June 22, 1998)
My pre- and post-launch analysis of the Healthcare.gov website can be found here [andstillipersist.com]. ..bruce..
Re:best you can say "even aweful Bush was governor (Score:4, Insightful)
By choosing to starve and neuter the most effective tool for prosperity they have Americans are making themselves, and the countries who follow them poor. Government, and taxes, are a good thing. Corruption is bad, but a little theft is better than selling out the whole system which is what the US has consistently done for the last 3 or 4 decades. Who won each election? The man was bought. Why did Clinton win? He sold out more completely than his opponents. Why did Bush II win? He sold out totally and without reservation. The one exception is Bush I who actually did some positive stuff before being run out of town on a rail for not being bought. Obama was sort of a mistake, it should have been Hilary who was utterly bought, but Obama did the grassroots thing the first election... Too bad he doesn't understand Texan aphorisms like "dance with the one who brung you."
Government is good, Fox news sucks, current conservatism (here in Canada too, Harper is trashing the economy in the typical right wing manner) sucks, propaganda sucks, and going with the gut instead of what works (the economy was better when taxes were high? That can't be right...) sucks.
web sites (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not an easy thing to do.
Re:bitch and moan (Score:0, Insightful)
Well, it was a disaster waiting to happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Use your special system architecture x-ray vision, folks. This is not simple, stand-alone site like Slashdot that just has to do some database queries and generate some XML, then uses JQuery or something to asynchronously load some advertising into a DIV. This is a system that must orchestrate a complex *synchronous* process involving servers that belong to outside organizations.
Case in point; the system requirements say that the site must exclude illegal immigrants, so the system has to request and obtain proof of your status from Homeland Security's servers before it can proceed. Also, instead of issuing the same subsidy to everyone, the law specifies and income dependent, means-tested subsidy, which means the system ALSO has to check your claims against the IRS's computers before continuing. That's before it actually gets to obtaining the marketplace data.
So the most complex aspect of this system is essentially untestable short of a near-full scale roll-out. Hey, IRS, can I try hosing down your servers with JMeter? Even if you could orchestrate the non-functional testing you'd want to do, you won't know how the system works until it's handling real data. It's not like you can shove a test load equivalent to a thousand applications per hour, then another equivalent to ten-thousand, then draw a straight line that will tell you how the system will perform with twenty-thousand. There are some serious discontinuities in performance lurking, and the actual data submitted is likely to change things.
I think if I were in charge of this, the extreme difficulty of realistic non-functional testing might have led me to isolate some of the data interchange into a post-processing step. That is, I'd let people apply and take them at their word about their immigration status and income, then tell them to check back in a day while we confirm the data they submitted. It's more bureaucratic, but a big part of user experience is predictability. If someone knows they can complete their application in half an hour and come back 24 hours later for confirmation, it's not so bad. But if the system is designed to give them the expectation that they can finish in a half hour, but sometimes takes so long their sessions expire, that's a disaster.
Re:Does govt want an insurance website? (Score:5, Insightful)
Grant me the legal authority to print money anytime I want and make everyone else pay the true cost of it (inflation) and I, too, could pay for anything money can buy. In the Apollo days they at least tried to pretend that debt is important and that there's something deeply wrong with running a government in a way that would bankrupt any business or household.
Hold your horses, partner.
A history lesson is in order. (Then get off my lawn.)
The 1960s had a lot of debt.
There was the Vietnam war and it wasn't cheap. There were some questionable political deals in Cuba that included a rather scary nuclear showdown that led directly into the cold war. Also there was the whole space race that you mentioned.
The US was in debt and facing a deficit. Not as big as today's deficit and debt, but it felt bad at the time.
President Johnson was looking over where the money was sitting, and he noticed a huge pile of cash sitting in an off-budget area. It was called the Social Security Trust Fund. It had billions of dollars just sitting there being invested, not being spent.
The good president looked over the budget, noticed that he could make himself look better (and presumably look better on the world stage) if the US didn't appear to be in debt. So President Johnson decided to move the Social Security Trust Fund into the general budget. There was a bit of a complaint at the time, "you cannot spend that money, it is for retirement". Not a problem they assured us, there would be plenty of money available in 2010 when baby boomers start to retire. We might not even be on a cash society in the future, let's spend it all today! The President made a proposal to Congress, and then all of them started rolling up the Social Security funds into cigars and enjoyed a smoke.
The Apollo program and several other major programs were funded by TODAY'S social security problem. Much of the reason we have so much debt is because the social security fund was robbed to pay for the war and the space race. Government took out a loan from the people and only recently started feeling the pain of paying the loan back. Baby boomers who don't suffer from society's generally short term memory can clearly recall that the focus was divided on the war, the protests, and the space race, and how those few people who noticed the money was missing were quickly written off as being anti-war or pro-war (whichever was a better distraction) and somehow the messenger was blamed and the message quickly forgotten.
Much like groups like WikiLeaks today; we all remember the name but the hundreds of soldiers who were documented committing clear acts of murder somehow escaped the court martial. Back then if you mentioned the social security funds you were branded a hippie or communist and you didn't believe in America. (Anything to make you look like an unpatriotic troublemaker rather than someone who wanted to see where the money went.) Then Johnson lost to Nixon and another scandal followed, most people forgot about Johnson's scandal taking the money and moved on to Nixon's spying scandal that evicted him from office, which is NOTHING compared to today's spying scandal that people don't care about.
Enough rambling, get off my lawn.
Re:On Further Examination (Score:1, Insightful)
Personally, I insist that Obamacare's worst enemies are the people who are working hardest to make it work. Incompetent lackwits wrote the specs, hired more incompetent lackwits to build the site, and failed to test anything. Had Obama and his supporters actually been competent, they could have at least made the site work. Had they been smart enough to hire competent contractors, they could have made the site work. Bottom line, we have a bunch of idiots who can't even get a web site up and running, but maintain that they will be competent to oversee life and death decisions made hundreds of thousands of times every single day throughout the nation.
I can't help but wonder if Obama supporters are colluding with Obama detractors.
Re:Here is a thought.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people object to the concept of the government being the final arbitrator of life and death. If an insurance company refuses to cover something, I can attempt to get funding elsewhere. When the government does so, I have little to no options left- even if it is to have the hospital perform the procedure and take the charges off as part of the charity work needed to keep their tax exempt status which does happen all the time.
Wait, what? So when an insurance company denies you a service, you can "attempt to get funding elsewhere"? Like where, pray-tell? You basically have 4 options:
1. Appeal the denial & hope you can get them to cover it anyway
2. Pay the cost of the procedure in full and figure out how to cover it (debt, fundraiser, etc)
3. Negotiate with the hospital for a self-pay discount or charity care
4. Don't get the procedure.
Those are the same 4 options you have if your plan is provided by the government, and that gov't plan doesn't cover the procedure.
The simple fact of health care is, we can't afford to do all the procedures, for all the people, all the time. We have finite resources - so they HAVE to be allocated. And someone HAS to decide HOW they are allocated, which means someone has to say "we will pay for this" and "we won't pay for that". That's the reality - no getting around it. What "this" and "that" are -- plenty of room for reasonable debate there, with parameters for profitability, ethics & morality, etc.
Personally, the biggest problem that I see with our current system (which is starting to change), is we don't have "health care", we have "disease care". Your doctor is paid to do services for you, not for keeping you healthy. And the impression I get is that many patients are not "partners" in their own health -- they have a problem, they want to go to a doctor and have that problem fixed, and not have to change themselves. "I don't want to change my diet & lifestyle - just give me a pill to pop to make it all better." I think if doctors were reimbursed for keeping you healthy, and patients had a shared stake in that (besides the obvious benefit of living longer, healthier lives), we would have a very different healthcare system (and probably much, much more effective & economical).
Re:On Further Examination (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I insist that Obamacare's worst enemies are the people who are working hardest to make it work. Incompetent lackwits wrote the specs, hired more incompetent lackwits to build the site, and failed to test anything. Had Obama and his supporters actually been competent, they could have at least made the site work. Had they been smart enough to hire competent contractors, they could have made the site work. Bottom line, we have a bunch of idiots who can't even get a web site up and running, but maintain that they will be competent to oversee life and death decisions made hundreds of thousands of times every single day throughout the nation.
I can't help but wonder if Obama supporters are colluding with Obama detractors.
There's no need to ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Take any random large-size public or private IT project. Odds are that it will be a disaster.