Another question reporters could have asked Obama today, but didn’t
Why was the Obamacare government website design outsourced to a Canadian firm?
And this is exactly and precisely the question I’ve been asking myself for days: “Why is healthcare.gov so bad, when Obama’s digital campaign was so good?”
Priorities, I guess. Although you’d think anything with the name “Obamacare” would be a high priority as well.
And as a follow up question – how much did they contribute to US political compaigns?
I hadn’t thought about it from that angle precisely, but did have one explanation occur to me today:
Obamacare is law and won’t be repealed while Obama is in office; that gives him up to 3 years to fiddle with it. Perhaps he always knew the sticker shock would be a problem, and so is drawing out the implementation process in accord with the “how to boil a frog” hypothesis…heat up the water gradually.
Perhaps the Obama campaign LOOKED so good because
1) It is pretty easy to look good when the press never says anything bad about you and refuses to publish your blunders. They can’t cover-up a website that users are actually trying to use.
2) All of the problems with the current web-site – lack of security, lack of proper authorization, failure to meet minimum legal requirements for accountability, etc – are a positive PLUS when your fund raising website is raising money illegally
3) Illegally obtaining tax and operational data on your opponent helps win elections, but illegally obtaining info and spying does not guarantee you a decent user interface
4) The amateur nature of the .gov (I have read of 56 separate java script calls on the opening page – really? Dude…) crushes performance IF there are a lot of attempts to use the site – but what if the election websites were not visited by all that many Actual Living People…
I could go on, and you were probably afraid that I would…
Why was the Obamacare government website design outsourced to a Canadian firm?
probably for the same reason we have an italian company making planes that we ship directly into mothball retirement
The Obama campaign software was good because top techies from Google, Facebook and other companies volunteered to work on it, For them, it was a labor of love.
The Romney campaign’s project Orca was contracted out through political consultants, developed in haste, never stress tested, and failed dismally on election day. In that regard, it closely resembles the Obamacare Exchange software.
For some reason, this Atlantic puff piece published in June 2013 doesn’t mention CGI. I went to CGI’s website and they weren’t claiming credit for the Exchange software. Be that as it may, the best pull quote from the Atlantic article is this:
The Exchange system is at least an order of magnitude more complex than the Obama campaign system. Probably more.
The problems that are visibly apparent now – can’t access, slow, down, etc. – are the least of it. There are intrinsic problems that will never be solved.
..Insurance regulations are unique to each State. Each has a commission that write the rules.
..The PPACA is over 2,000 pages and the regs from HHS exceed 10,000 pages. These rules were written by different groups and inevitably conflict with one another. The programs will not be able to determine what should be done.
..It requires the interfacing of a number of systems, a historically difficult problem that takes a lot of time to solve.
I was in the computer business for almost 50 years. The disaster stories far outnumber the success stories. Ed Yourdon estimated that as many of 80% of DP projects are abandoned before they are delivered.
The ignoramuses in our government looked at existing systems – airline, credit card, hotels, etc. – and thought “easy peasy”. They didn’t realize that those systems are 50 years old. They’ll be lucky if they can get the exchanges functioning within 10 years.
I’m always going to wonder given how well that went if Barry thought to himself, “That was easy, I can do it myself since I’m so much smarter than them anyway.”
I assume Obama wants chaos and confusion, worry and guilt, fear and internal division as a means to power and control. He does not care about “looking bad” since he knows the MSM will eventually make any bad optics go away. Therefore…
1. It was probably outsourced to Canada as a political payback of some sort.
2. His campaign ran so well because it had to.
3. The other thing does not because it is not supposed to work. The goal is single-payer, total government control. The thing called “Obamacare” is a way to get there. He wants it to fail, and it will fail.
Already Jon Stewart is “criticizing” Obama for this and asking for a single-payer system. His audience gave him a huge round of applause when he said that.
Roy Lofquist:
Interesting.
I’m thinking back to a time before we had computers for most things, a time I remember well. We had insurance, welfare, the IRS, all sorts of complex things functioned without them. Could the exchanges be run without computer signup? Would it require way too many people? Or would it negate part of the purpose, to keep easy tabs on us all?
I had a summer job with a major insurance company when I was in college. I was hired with some other students for the task of coding a bunch of their policies (small groups) for computer entry, which was just starting. It was very tedious work. I remember that, till then, each file was an actual folder containing many pages of the history of the policy for that company and the relevant facts.
Mike,
I agree with that. In fact, I’ve heard that from Obamacare proponents who’ve acknowledged the problems, haste, and all the criticisms but still support the ACA because it moves the chains toward a single-payer system. The 1st step was to destroy the status quo. The 2nd step’s purpose is not a solution but rather to set up the 3rd step.
Mike:
I agree that the goal is single payer.
I wonder, though, if the confusion on the website is deliberate. I don’t think so, because those are “optics” the MSM might not be able to control, if enough people have direct and personal experience of major frustration and decide the government isn’t competent to run things. That perception could be dangerous in general to Obama’s mission.
That website is not just any website. It’s much more difficult than people realize, what they are trying to do.
Basically, they are recreating facebook portfolios that detail every private information about a person, feeds it directly into the government bureaucracy, and allows the bureaucrats to privately, selectively, or generally administer to the subjects.
It’s technically a High Value Target intel profile hit list, plus a button for each target with a bunch of different options next to it on how it can be taken out. Push the button and all the action teams are mobilized automatically.
Even without the government bureaucracy corrupting things, it would still be immensely more difficult than some regular old propaganda campaign for votes, dead or alive.
Neo,
Our best hope now is that more people see the truth before it is too late – that the “government” can’t run things and will make it worse.
If Obama gets over that hurdle before the people bolt, he’s won.
Just heard a sound bite on Rush of Wolf Blitzer talking with someone who’d told him the WH knew it wouldn’t work when they rolled it out. Wolf said they shoulda listened to the Repubs and delayed it.
I have a bit of a problem with this “plan” to get to single-payer. Sure, that’s what Obama wants…but how?
Step 2 HAS TO FAIL in order to justify trashing it and going for single-payer. Obama is so invested in his “signature legislation” that the failure would have to be massive to be believable.
In that case, with the system just having collapsed, what outcry will there be to turn over even more control to government? How could anyone seriously make that case?
Matt_SE:
Harry Reid explicitly described single payer as the goal, and explained:
Read the whole thing. The gist of it is that they passed what they could when they could to get their feet in the door. And that there would be problems, and ultimately people would accept single payer to deal with the problems. I don’t think an epic fail of Obamacare was factored into it, exactly. Smaller failures were expected to push the thing along to single payer.
Obama said in 2008:
And here’s a lot of background on it as well.
“The best laid plans of mice and men…”
A story of hubris coupled with incompetence.
In that case, with the system just having collapsed, what outcry will there be to turn over even more control to government? How could anyone seriously make that case?
They can and they will. You may not understand why, but there’s plenty of research and reasons for why.