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."
On Further Examination (Score:5, Informative)
Re:On Further Examination (Score:5, Funny)
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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 with
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: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.
Re:On Further Examination (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall a study from several years ago (10 years? possibly) that showed the probability of failure increased with the size (budget) of the project. Above about $5 million in then-dollars the probability was near 100%. As I recall failure was defined as either technical failure, or budget overruns going so high the project was cancelled. Of course, I have no citation. That would be too easy. :)
However, I did search for "Probability of Software Project Failure", and got some fascinating results. This is one of them: Statistics over IT projects failure rate [it-cortex.com] - a summary review of several of the most definitive studies over the last 20 years. And this one: Healthcare.gov website 'didn't have a chance in hell' [computerworld.com] notes that:
The Standish Group, which has a database of some 50,000 development projects, looked at the outcomes of multimillion dollar development projects and ran the numbers for Computerworld.
Of 3,555 projects from 2003 to 2012 that had labor costs of at least $10 million, only 6.4% were successful. The Standish data showed that 52% of the large projects were "challenged," meaning they were over budget, behind schedule or didn't meet user expectations. The remaining 41.4% were failures -- they were either abandoned or started anew from scratch.
And I suppose this: £12bn NHS computer system is scrapped... and it's all YOUR money that Labour poured down the drain [dailymail.co.uk] fits into this model pretty well. (Regardless of one's opinion about the Daily Mail.)
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?
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Who says the storage center is implemented well?
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It's probably a lot more well-implemented since those that are permitted to do that work at least need to pass some security checks. This means that it's not just any cheap labor that can be employed to do that work.
But for a lot of work the cheapest bidder is mandated by law.
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Eh.. cheap bidder, high bidder, both are going to scrimp. You have to make your requirements clear and stick to them and have good oversight. I don't think that's what happened with the health care web site, though. There just wasn't enough time to do it right. I'm not sure they had enough time to understand the requirements.
Regardless, there's no evidence either way on the data center. They might have great system. They might have a mediocre system propped by insane hardware investment. They might h
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Yes, because otherwise we'd simply be wasting even more money for the same poor quality. Either the government needs to develop things like healthcare.gov in-house, with government employees, or it needs to leave it entirely to the market. Outsourcing such things doesn't work; it just amounts to massive corruption followed by massive blame shifting.
Re: Cheapest bidder? (Score:5, Informative)
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But the Anonymous GP may be right suspecting, the failure is deliberate... Obama's personal favorite healthcare model
Conspiracy-Theory-Fu (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's the fault of libertarians that seem to make up a significant percentage of the tech demographic; wanting to kill the Affordable Healthcare Act. Or tea party programmers wanting the same thing who managed to get on the project. Come on man! Think of some more conspiracies!! Lovin' it.
Of course it couldn't be the incompetence of contracting companies that seem to make a living because they have or aim to have some sort of inside track [washingtonpost.com] in Washington rather than the chops to do the actual thing that needs doing. Of course that would never happen in Washington or any other political capital [www.cbc.ca]. I'm not saying the way the primary contractor, Quebec company CGI, does business in any way follows recent [thestar.com] Quebec business [financialpost.com] practices [slashdot.org]. They are probably a well above board and good honest corporate citizen (although according to the Washington Post article above they did screw up another medical system based project). I'm just saying that if Quebec ever did separate from Canada, as it is now, they'd have to think up some other adjective to describe it. It's too cold to grow bananas there.
Frankly (and personally) though, I wouldn't trust any company to government contracts with stated aims published in their profiles like: "The ultimate aim is to establish relations so intimate with the client that decoupling becomes almost impossible," (see Washington Post article). Especially not from Quebec.
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So that's why he took it off the table straight away, right?
I imagine he took it off the table because such a proposal would have failed hard.
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Left.
You keep saying this in reference to Obama, when Obama's history since 2009 has been to continue the policies of Bush and implement Republican ideas like Romneycare.
What color is the sky in your world?
--
BMo
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Go to You Tube and search "Obama single payer". In 2009, he was saying that's what he preferred.
He performed a similar flip-flop on the issue of homosexual marriages. It's nothing unusual from a high-level politician.
Personally I believe homosexual marriage is one of those "distraction issues", something that never really goes away so you can pull it out and make a controversy over it anytime something else starts making you look bad. I could speculate that he was initially against homosexual marriage because that is generally consistent with his claim of being a Christian, something that was imp
Re:Here is a thought.. (Score:4, Insightful)
>Citing anne coulter as a reference
Yeah, and we're done here.
--
BMO
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>Citing anne coulter as a reference
Yeah, and we're done here.
-- BMO
Jumping on the first flimsy excuse to dismiss the argument is never going to convince anyone who didn't already agree with you. I for one was hoping you would explain why Obama's plan was similar (or maybe, effectively identical) to Romney's. The calmer, more rational person at least provided something to read that I can critically analyze regardless of who's name is on it.
If I had been so deeply affected by a Fox News personality that the mere mention of her Web site made me want to be so childish, I'
Re:Here is a thought.. (Score:5, Informative)
Jumping on the first flimsy excuse to dismiss the argument is never going to convince anyone who didn't already agree with you. I for one was hoping you would explain why Obama's plan was similar (or maybe, effectively identical) to Romney's. The calmer, more rational person at least provided something to read that I can critically analyze regardless of who's name is on it.
Not sure about BMO's response, but I'll give mine.
When I compare Romney's plans and Obama's plans, I'd say most of the theory is the same. The intention and the general guidelines have a huge overlap, just a small amount of difference. I'll go over the differences I saw between them down below. When I talk calmly and rationally with people about the actual details (not the hyperbole) of the law, they also tend to agree with almost everything. My frustration is that when people start saying "I hate Obamacare", when pressed for what SPECIFICALLY they don't like, they tend to not have answers.
Really, look at the major points. With a little calm and careful debate we can see why these are mostly good ideas, and even if you don't agree with a specific point we can likely debate it to the point where you can at least understand why it is good at a societal level if not an individual level.
The devil is in the details of course, but when arguing any specific point it is easy to get consensus that we should do SOMETHING even if there is some disagreement of the specifics.
The biggest difference between the two is that Romney's plan was building a framework for others to implement rather than the federal government doing everything and forcing it on others. Romney's plan had an individual mandate for catastrophic coverage only, not for general insurance. Romney's plan had a cost that was initially nearly budget-neutral (estimated at $100M which is fairly small relative to the size of a budget) with a long term reduction in cost, compared to the federal plan that has a roughly $500B init
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Insurance is very simply a way to redistribute risk. Let's say there's a 1% chance per year of having to undergo an operation that costs $10,000. A hypothetical "perfect insurance" policy would not change the expected amount I have to pay per year at all - it would cost exactly $100/year. That way, if I don't pay insurance, I
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As an outsider, the political problem with Obamacare is obvious - it simply overpromised massively. Not surprisingly, it turns out that many people will have to pay a bit (and in a large number of cases a lot) more so that other people can pay a lot less and/or get a lot more out of the system - that's just how the maths works out. So Obamacare is, and always was, fundamentally a political deal between generations and between classes about who pays for what - but that was never made clear enough at the time
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It could be, the observed failure exceeded the planners' expectations... The site does not merely suck, which could've been blamed on the evil insurers somehow. It completely does not work.
But I'm not sure, the suspicion is correct myself: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's Razor [wikipedia.org])...
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It could be, the observed failure exceeded the planners' expectations... The site does not merely suck, which could've been blamed on the evil insurers somehow. It completely does not work.
But I'm not sure, the suspicion is correct myself: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's Razor [wikipedia.org])...
The real question is, if they so badly mismanage something so common and widely implemented elsewhere as one Web site, why should they be trusted with anything more complex?
Re:Here is a thought.. (Score:4, Informative)
The real question is, if they so badly mismanage something so common and widely implemented elsewhere as one Web site, why should they be trusted with anything more complex?
You mean like Medicare (single-payer) or the VA (government-run?) Both have high satisfaction ratings.
Re:Here is a thought.. (Score:5, Interesting)
> You mean like Medicare (single-payer) or the VA (government-run?) Both have high satisfaction ratings.
You must be joking? The VA with high satisfaction ratings? And Medicare is an insurer of LAST RESORT, of course people are going to at least appreciate that aspect of it. It's that or NOTHING.
No, I am not joking:
http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=14560 [defense.gov]
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/News/News-Releases/2009/May/Elderly-Medicare-Beneficiaries-Give-Their-Coverage-Higher-Ratings.aspx [commonwealthfund.org]
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That's not a valid argument for this. The main problem is the complexity of getting all the insurance companies coordinated. Kneecap those bozos and the problem becomes much easier.
Yes, yes, I know the argument. Government Death Panels. In the insurance industry, they are called Actuaries. See what a change in name can do even if they do the same job?
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).
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Who says the storage center is implemented well?
Angela Merkel
Re:Here is a thought.. (Score:5, Funny)
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?
At least we can be comforted by the fact that the NSA data center is likely operated at the same levels of efficiency and competency.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I had assumed that the work was large performed by Americans
Canada is American too even though it isn't part of the US. And CGI might have a US subsidiary for the contract work.
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The shutdown — whosoever's fault it was — began on October 1st — exactly the day, the site was to open. Sorry, try again [healthcare.gov].
Be sure to include more insightful arguments like this one, please.
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neither Obama nor anyone in his immediate circle has any experience as a, well, Executive... The opposition were crying about this point in 2008 — Obama never ran anything (except for a small failed charity)
The same argument could be made about many (most?) people, including George W Bush. Here's a 1999 CNN article about Bush as Businessman [cnn.com] that concludes with:
So Bush the businessman did prosper. But not by his bootstraps -- with help from wealthy friends and taxpayer subsidies.
In many cases, his companies, co-investors and taxpayers came out much worse for working with him.
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George W. Bush was — a fairly successful — governor (Executive) of a major State.
Well... it's Texas. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Compared to the governors of other U.S. states, the governorship of Texas is a fairly weak office. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, who presides over the state Senate, is considered a more powerful political figure, being able to exercise greater personal prerogatives.
And, according to this reference [state.tx.us], the Texas legislature only meets every two years for 140 days, so how fucking busy could the Governor actually be, except for executing people and fund raising.
And, as far as Texas itself goes, according to The Texas Observer [texasobserver.org], The Texas Legislative Group produced a study saying:
How’s Texas doing? Not so great: The state ranks 50th in high school graduation rate, first in amount of carbon emissions, first in hazardous waste produced, last in voter turnout, first in percentage of people without health insurance, and second in percentage of uninsured kids.
So, even ignoring their tendency to push Creationism over Science in their school curriculum, Texas is certainly a big state, but "major" is questionable - unl
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You are swallowing a line of bullshit propaganda rather uncritically.
Texas is in fact doing quite well. As Rick Perry bragged, one-third of all jobs created in the whole USA were created in Texas, which doesn't have anywhere near one-third of the population of the whole USA.
http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2013/may/09/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-texas-accounted-33-percent-nations/ [politifact.com]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carnegie-corporation-of-new-york/texas-immigrants-and-econ_b_3745379.html [huffingtonpost.com]
So a liberal new
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.
Re: Here is a thought..not much of one (Score:2)
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Nope. Because it is always possible to spend MORE money on a project in an attempt to get X results.
The trick is to get X results with the lowest cost. Someone who spends $1,000 on a loaf of bread may not be the best person so send grocery shopping. And that loaf of bread may not be worth $1,000. And when the project was
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For example, the TSA has a huge annual budget. Yet they've never caught a single terrorist.
The purpose of the TSA is to get Americans (even more) used to the idea that government agents can search you whenever they deem it necessary, without a warrant. Sure, a long time ago some old white men wrote a 4th Amendment saying they can't do that, yeah sure, but by stepping into the airport you automatically agreed to waive your inalienable right, EULA-style. So you see it's all legitimate and there's nothing to see here.
We, the people. (Score:2)
The Govt can't design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center. It can hire people to do it for them. Badly.
http://storageservers.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/nsa-prism-data-center-stops-working-due-to-electrical-problems/ [wordpress.com]
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I bet that the requirements document for that data storage centre was considerably shorter than the requirements for healthcare.gov, and there was probably more input from the people tasked with building it into how long it would take and what was a reasonable deadline.
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Dude. The NSA has the same mission as most other government agencies. To protect the GOVERNMENT. If and when protecting the country and it's citizens is convenient, they will do so. But the MISSION is to protect GOVERNMENT!
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.
So basically (Score:2, Insightful)
Health Insurance Companies = RIAA (Score:3)
It's about profit model.
The problems that were reported as "problems with the website" were either standard IT issues (no excuse, but no need to exaggerate) solvable with routine IT engineering work or they were problems inherent in the profit model of the insurance companies.
Health care is like clean water, plumbing, or roads...it is something virtually every American would want or need.
The very definition of government is to group our resources...and any time humans group for any reason...it is to somehow
I had a problem with the Inforworld site (Score:4, Interesting)
It was slow to load, I couldn't sign up, my browser hung waiting on lost connections with the too many other files it was trying to download and there seem to be server sync problems with the back end databases.
In other words it acts like PayPal, Google, Facebook and Slashdot.
Systemic (Score:4, Informative)
Not "systematic."
A distraction (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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They had 55 contractors. Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's hard enough to work with one spotty vendor, let alone 55. That number, 55, represents somewhere between 55 and 55-squared lines of possibly iffy communication between possibly iffy organizations. When I first heard that healthcare.gov had 55 contractors working on it, I was surprised that the damn thing ran at all.
simple reason that a complex system fails (Score:3)
it's simple: they didn't do enough testing and bug fixing. there should have been at least 6 months of testing and debugging to get this system working well. the information i found was that 248 people were able to sign up on the first day. so it works... kind of. there were bugs like spouses sometimes ending up being filed as children.
it's obviously a complex system but i take the 80m lines of code number with a grain of salt because i'm sure that includes all the libraries they (re)used too and maybe even an entire JVM. as such, it's probably all in house crap for each and every contractor, 55 if i remember correctly. there was obviously lazy coding involved to get that much bloat. there could be a swath of libs included that arent even used but were thrown in there "just in case i need it".
i hope the companies helping them gut the use of most proprietary libs because they are an easy way to get terrible bugs and gaping security holes. i also hope they move to a unified OO language to get a handle on this feral system. however, if i find out that google convinced them to rewrote it all in Go, i'll just cry.
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.:)
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.
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The number of large failed private sector IT projects makes this look like a drop in the bucket.
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.
Root cause depends how deep you dig (Score:3)
What went wrong is we created a system which requires extensive paperwork for insurance. It should have been a web form that asks "Are you a US citizen?" and if you answer yes, it says "OK, you're covered."
You can make the system (not just the web site) even more efficient by eliminating that question and simply serving static HTML.
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..
Government (Score:4, Informative)
What went wrong? Government.
The ACA has some great theory behind it. Assuming that the federal government will be able to operate and maintain a system like this in a cost effective fashion is lunacy. It as bound to fail.
Also don't tell me it was Republican "starve the beast" strategy. The ACA was fully funded and largely untouchable. By any reasonable standard the roughly $400m spent on implementing this was incredibly excessive. If a private company had wanted to build this system for profit, it would have been done for under $100m. The big mistake of the ACA was that it did not allow for the creation of privately run and owned exchanges.
web sites (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not an easy thing to do.
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.
then why did some states succeed? (Score:3)
Some states succeeded with their websites. The federal government succeeded with its employee insurance marketplace which has much wider coverage.
http://www.opm.gov/healthcare-insurance/healthcare/
Republicans refused to allow people onto this plan, or to buy into Medicare.
ACA is not designed to fail intentionally but it probably will because it only addresses one part of a profit-making system. There is no competitive substitutability or clarity on prices (not just costs!). Ever try to find out how much
Re:then why did some states succeed? (Score:4, Insightful)
By:
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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 i
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Turns out a lot of decisions in Congress are made in these things called Committees, not just on the floor votes.
I know, difficult to comprehend, but Republicans participated in those debates and conferences. I know, their amnesia caused them to forget about it, which is why they act like there wasn't any discussion on it, but don't pretend it didn't happen.
Re: then why did some states succeed? (Score:2)
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I guess you touched a nerve with tparty mods!
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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.
--
BMO
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You are completely wrong on this.
http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/enough-of-this-nonsense-george-bush-grew-the-sec [businessinsider.com]
The SEC grew in size and scope under Bush. What you probably meant was the repeal of Glassâ"Steagall. But this was under Clinton with the Grammâ"Leachâ"Bliley Act. I cannot say for sure if this was what you meant because with you being factually incorrect in your statement, I can only assume based
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Off the top of my head?
FEMA.
FEMA was a functioning agency until Bush II took office.
And then Katrina happened.
But that's not the only example. I'm not going to tediously list all the "starve the beast" examples, especially when "starve the beast" is a publicly stated philosophy of the Republican party.
--
BMO
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FEMA was still a functioning agency once Bush took office. The Posse Comitatus Act prevented FEMA from taking control in the Katrina ravaged areas before the governor ceded control to them. The Governor and mayor of New Orleans refused to cede control of the situation until it became obvious they couldn't handle it. Had the Governor and more precisely the Mayor of New Orleans stuck to the emergency preparedness plans they already filed with FEMA, the Katrina response would have been completely different.
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The problem is that you cannot attribute those fuckups to Bush and a lack of funding. The Katrina problem is well documented and while it sounds good, it was no where close to reality.
As for the Mexican field kitchen, I'm pretty sure they were attending evacuees and relief workers from parts of Texas hit by the storm.
At least that is what the DOD seems to think. You might think they could have been used better or something, but they did serve a welcomed purpose.
http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?I [defense.gov]
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Area man upset that govt is open also upset that govt website is slow!
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Right. So, the Heritage Foundation wrote 1000 pages of law and 11,000 pages of Federal guidelines? Why do liberals keep hiding behind the Heritage Foundation?
So, what we have is that a conservative think-tank floated an idea that Republicans (congressmen and voters, both) absolutely wouldn't support, but the Democrats were willing to go to any lengths to get passed, in the process making it far worse. A terrible system, that liberals will unwaveringly support, until they are so embarrassed by its deep
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.
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Re:bitch and moan (Score:5, Interesting)
From Kevin Drum's blog [motherjones.com]:
So basically, these insurance companies sending out these cancellation notices were gaming the system so that they could both undermine the law and blame it for "forcing" their customers to buy more expensive coverage.
Re:bitch and moan (Score:5, Informative)
Read for yourself the actual regulations [dol.gov], published in mid-2010, for grandfathering of existing plans. Less than 35 pages of single-spaced small print, so not too hard of a slog as these things go. A few recommended highlights:
In short, it seems clear from HHS's own pen that the concept of "grandfathered" plans under the ACA is (1) highly Orwellian; and (2) was deliberately set up for failure. It's disappointing that the latest distracting meme is blaming the insurance companies for doing what, as shown above in black and white, HHS fully intended to force them to do from the beginning.
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Insurance companies are greedy corporations; they don't leave billions of dollars on the table in order to make a political point. Most of these cancellations are required by ACA: the old plans don't satisfy the law's requirement; this was designed into the ACA.
If insurance companies "game the
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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.
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the INSURANCE COMPANIES were not suppose to CHANGE OR MODIFY plans that were to be grandfathered. BECAUSE companies made material changes to plans between 2010 and 2013 but did not make the plans COMPLY with the government rules, they do not QUALIFY to be grandfathered. They knew what they were doing because they read the law and found their way out.
the INSURANCE COMPANIES played folks for suckers, by taking their customer's money another 3 years and quietly nullifying their grandfather status. This is all
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Insurance plan != insurance company.
Nobody is talking about dissolving companies, and your post does nothing to address the point that people are, in fact, not able to keep plans that are supposed to be grandfathered in. The law has resulted in people losing their plans, and prevents people from buying plans prior to its enactment that would be grandfathered in.
It's amazing how scared some people are of actual facts being discussed.
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Who says health care ever was a free market? There are a number of ways of arguing it was never and could never be a free market.
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
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Re: What went wrong... (Score:2)