Fixing Healthcare.gov
The government has had three and a half years to construct the website, and two months to fix it after its disastrous first opening.
Before I talk about the re-opening, here’s a hypothetical: let’s suppose that Healthcare.com really had been “fixed” in those two months. What would that have said about the failure of the previous three and a half years? What was the Obama administration and the people it hired to design the website doing all that time, if it was that easy to reach the goal in a concentrated two-month push? Do backs have to be against the wall and political futures starkly at stake in order to create a functioning website? And what does it all say about the administration’s ability to perform more complex and important tasks—including, for example, designing a system by which all Americans will have effective health insurance without impacting negatively on the economy and the health care system itself?
Of course, if the website really isn’t yet functioning all that well—if (as is highly suspected) the security is still bad, or it can’t handle a large amount of traffic, or the information it conveys is often incorrect, or the website continues to be unable to interface with insurance companies to get payments to them—that also doesn’t say much for the efficiency and competence of the government.
I think we can safely say that either way, this is not government’s finest hour.
In fact, Jeffrey Zients, the man chosen to fix the website, doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of faith in the government’s ability to do this, either [emphasis mine]:
“If you bring this all together ”” private sector speed and execution; the command center in Columbia with real-time monitoring; troubleshooting when things go wrong, and overall coordination and direction; a hardware-upgrade team, and then a software-fix team ”” what’s happened is the site has gotten better and better each week,” Zients said.
If you read the entire article, it’s clear what extraordinary efforts have been made during the past two months. It’s hard not to wonder how much that has cost on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent.
It also seems clear that the last two months were spent concentrating on how the site would appear to the person using it, rather than how it would actually function. The whole thing may now be a sort of Potemkin village:
One example of the “ruthless prioritization” was to focus first on fixing the site for consumers, officials said. That decision has meant that insurers are still getting faulty reports on those who have signed up for coverage, which could become a major problem once more people buy insurance and try to use their benefits.
Great.
[NOTE: Because my main source for the information in this post was this article in Politico, I’d like to point out that Politico is ordinarily a pro-Obama pro-Democratic website. So if that’s what Politico is saying, just imagine what the truth is.]
Focusing on fixing the site for consumers is a disingenuous tactic that will allow the Obama administration to once again falsely blame the insurers with the MSM running interference for the administration. Anything is allowed that advances the agenda.
Three and a half years and $4.4 billion*, right?
I’d really like to know where that money was spent and how many more millions – billions have been wasted on other related efforts, such as grants to organizations like Enroll America to sign up folks (yeah, that’ll never happen).
Probably not the biggest boondoggle in US history, but definitely one of the highest profile f*@k-ups evah. And that’s not even counting the enormous fraud used to sell the bill. Obama’s list of precedents continues apace!!
*I may have lost track of the total cost – not sure if that includes state exchange site grants, advertisement, etc..
On a side note, spent Thanksgiving with a person who is fairly high up in the local office of a well-known insurer. Her co. is Obamacare friendly in that they are the only ones in the state participating in the Obamacare exchange (wonder what % of the states have a similar participation rate). After Obama gave insurers “permission to un-expire” their plans her co.’s CEO, CFO and house counsel spent the next week on 9+ hour calls with the state’s insurance commissioner to make it happen. I was surprised that they did this, but it clearly took a lot of work, and maybe some arm-twisting and/or incentives, to save Obama’s bacon here. Bet we’ll never know how much money was wasted on just that effort.
If 0-care was Barbarossa…
Then Healthcare.gov is Stalingrad.
If you recall, the Nazis spun and spun and spun…
they even faked radio broadcasts from Stalingrad — from studios in Berlin.
German morale never recovered.
Likewise, the maladministration’s minions are now rounding into a circular firing squad.
It’s more than Barry — the Pink House is a hive mind of the collective.
One ought to be very concerned when 0-care prescribes the Bed of Procrustes.
Chop, chop!
For those families with a history of long life: the Tall Poppies must be cut low.
Obama’s goons, thugs, lackeys, cronies, and so on will get least half of the stash. The rest will get an appointment at the next available Death Panel.
The Tall Poppy Syndrome is an unspoken principle guiding progressives throughout the Obama administration.
goddammit. This all makes me insanely angry. It ain’t funny, not the least little bit amusing. We’re talking life and death, pain and suffering, medical progress and death panels here, and nobody’s taking to the streets. Nobody. But they are “striking” at Mc Donald’s for a higher minimum wage.
Sh*t. As a polity, though not as individuals, we deserve what we’re getting; just like the Brits deserved what they got when they voted Labor after WWII.
And the pig we call POTUS fed his “extended family” 9 different kinds of pies for Thanksgiving. Oink. Snort. Fart.
Neo said:
” So if that’s what Politico is saying, just imagine what the truth is.”
Indeed.
Looking back over my life of 62 years, I cannot recall any threat to the Republic that was this….existential. I can barely recognize the country in which I grew up; sometimes it feels like I’m living in the old USSR. Or maybe East Germany.
The unceasing propaganda. The Statism. The government oppression (EPA, FEC, ATF, DOJ, IRS, HHS, State Dept., you name it). The corrupt MSM
Maybe we didn’t really win the Cold War, after all.
War is indeed life and death. An enemy exists because they are an existential threat to one’s community or society. If everyone could be negotiated with and harmony of life obtained, there wouldn’t be enemies. Just sport rivals.
The Cold War was ended because Russia gave up the arms race. Their weapons, the Left, inside the US never gave up.
Taking to the streets at this time would be a mistiming in strategy. They would just use police and military forces to round up the internal dissidents, what they would call domestic terrorists, and nobody would hear from them ever again.
Insurgencies need preparation and logistics first, not wasting strength fighting useless battles on streets.
Eventually though, insurgencies must contest the armed occupation directly and conquer territory and hold it. Otherwise the insurgency can never become the ruling body, just mere rebels and criminals.
What Ymarsakar said. Embrace the spirit of ‘Prior Planning (which prevents Piss Poor Performance)’ and a certain degree of dogged, sullen defiance. Bankrupt the printed media organs by cancelling subscriptions, cable channels, not going to their movies. Poke fun at them, rebel against political correctness, pass along disparaging jokes about them – and quietly support those alternative voices.
Yeah, I’ve got a good samizdata-style joke for you all. I’ve heard a rumor that aspirin is going to be taxed at several times the current rate – because it’s white and it works.
OK – got the general idea? Let the mockery begin.
Sgt Mom…
I agree that the schwerpunkt is the MSM.
They are also reeling from solvency issues.
I’m wondering if I can hold out longer than these fanatics.
Without his media aegis the Wan would’ve taken many a quip from the ‘hip’…
These shamans of dissimulation have the proles prostrating to Gaia — how pagan can you get?
Supplicating to plannished icons of gold would be a step UP for them. Instead, we’re given the bull.
======
Crowd ‘unsourcing’… it ought to be the goal of every citizen to thwart any and all advertising revenue vectored towards the MSM.
Spread the word: no more classified listings — use CraigsList etc.
Go after space advertisers, get them to drop out. Find media assets in Red States that are owned by Buffett et. al. and throttle them back. Make them so uneconomic that he has to throw them clear, take a beat down. He’s not in them for the losses.
Dethrone Citizen Kane!
It’s only BEGINNING to sink in that Healthcare.gov is a FAKE website.
It still has no backend — and said backend has not even begun coding!!!!
Which is to say that its construction will last past the 2014 election cycle…
Making it impossible for most to enroll.
The only citizens that can enroll are those tossed into Medicaid, because it’s single payer (actually dual payer: Fed and State) and there is no shopping to be done.
As for the rest of the so-called healthcare marketplace: most locations have only one provider network – – perhaps two. So it’s monopoly and oligopoly all the way down.
The talent is rejecting 0-care to the point of epic failure.
The maladministration is trying to force a cram-down upon the entire medical-pharma cartel. This is NOT the way to restrain avarice.
Medicaid should’ve just been rebudgeted…
And the cartel should’ve been taken apart by rescinding the slew of Federal exemptions to the Sherman Antitrust Act it has received over the years.
This latter drive is the ONLY way that the avarice of the cartel can be restrained. As it stands, we’ve got an entire sector of the economy on a Cost-Plus economic diet. No wonder it’s bulking out like defense contractors in WWII.
They’re just collecting the medical information so they can have pretexts to disappear individuals.
Look at what’s going on in Britain. The Left in the US will steal a few of their ideas soon.
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2013/12/01/quick-links-3/
Britain is kidnapping women and doing a forced C section and abducting the kiddies. Soon they’ll have an entire slave army setup for these “kiddies” they took from mommy.
If it comes from Politico, it’s an admission againt interest.
According to Law and Order, that means it has extra truthiness.