Obamacare – legis horriblis (updated 26oct13)

George Rebane

This piece of legislation is turning out to be horrible beyond prediction and measure, and we are nowhere near discovering or experiencing the full extent of the damage that it will do to our republic.  I just want this dated post to become a matter of record on RR, one that joins its precursor forebodings that have populated these pages for some years now.  Every assessment and prediction here has been short of the mark.  The cynically named Affordable Care Act is much worse than anyone who understands a smidgeon of things Austrian, to things bureaucratic, to things about systems design could have imagined.  In short, Obamacare is a disaster already made and still in the making – the ‘best’ is yet to come.

But what the saga to date has corroborated is the absolute depths of hubris, pandering, opacity, and corruption that this administration, along with its congressional minions, has perpetrated.  Every beneficent claim for that abhorrent attack on our healthcare system and economy has been shown to be a purposive lie.  For this, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should be impeached and then criminally prosecuted.  Assuming that she is not stupid beyond belief, she did indeed know her errors and omissions over the last three years, and she most certainly knew the lies she streamed out during this interval.  And if she told the truth to the President, then he is at least equally guilty.

The tragi-comedy for our nation is how many of the ignorant and informationally deprived this administration has still been able to bamboozle.  The only real benefit to its perpetrators that all this has brought about is the disarray into which the affair has thrown the Republicans.  But they are recovering, and given the stream of horrors that Obamacare is generating by the day, the GOP might even come out of this smelling like a rose as the putrid mess begins to sink under its own weight.  Its prescient opponents need only remind people that not only did they tell us so, but they also proposed alternative approaches to improve our healthcare system that were rejected in toto by an all progressive government.  As someone said, ‘Elections have consequences.’

[24oct13 update] The abbreviated criticism above is meant to draw attention to the congressional hearings corroborating the nation’s concerns about the dire straits of Obamacare, and to invite some typical responses from the Left claiming that things are running normally and pretty much as expected (by technically knowledgeable people) in the fielding of the ACA.  Mr Michael Anderson, who runs a computer services business in Nevada County, was able to supply such an assessment in his 928pm comment below.  My response to that is in the sequel.

[26oct13 update] Has everyone googled the growing litany of 'admissions' by the terminally incompetent Sebelius.  The one that really drew some belly laughs was AP's quote that she "admitted" to the President that she has to now fix the website - 'admitted'!!??  I have changed my mind and agree fully with those calling for her to stay until  she again pronounces healthcare.gov ready for prime time.  I do believe that the President deserves the full measure of her services.  We already paid for that entertainment once, so let's now enjoy it.  (The following was sent to me by a reader who admitted pilfereing it from ZeroHedge.)

Comments

[fish]

Sheryl Crow got on a eco trip and was chastising the country about the use of toilet paper and how it was not a good thing in the eco system. She said one tissue square was enough to wipe. She became the butt of many jokes and those that tried her advice got dirty hands. Just like JP on the nasty blog.

Ah....yeah now I vaguely remember something about this....lets just hop she is a compulsive hand washer then!

[George Rebane]

Mr fish, a sincere welcome on your return. See, our coordinated and coherent groveling did work; we do recognize talent ;-)

Administrivia - your kind attention is requested to the 26oct13 update please.

[Russ Steele]

Todd, Here is better paste up:

58. Do you consider yourself part of the Tea Party movement or not?
....Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wm Wht Blk Hsp
Yes 12% 26% 01% 12% 15% 10% 14% 04% 08%
No. 83% 68% 95% 85% 81% 86% 83% 92% 76%
NA 04% 05% 04% 03% 04% 05% 04% 04% 16%

Let see how this looks

[Todd Juvinall]

Thanks Russ,

As anyone can see and read, the Q-Poll does not even tell us the breakout of party. Hell, it could be 90% left! So, these liberal pollsters are not to be trusted. PaulE should find better ones.

[Gregory]

"But it isn't all bad news for the legislative body responsible for the government shutdown." Paul 12:28

Paul, you need to stop taking the Puffington Host seriously... one poll that asked likely voters who was responsible for the shutdown (as if a 17% temporary RIF is a shutdown) and gave as possible responses GOP, DEM or "Both equally", Both got the plurality at 58%.

If DEMs help push through a 1 year delay on the Obamacare individual mandate, it'll be hard to counter Obama and Reid being the bad guys for shutting down, rejecting the House CR funding the government and the same 1 year delay on the Obamacare individual mandate.

[Russell Steele]

What Happened to all of Obama’s Technology Czars? They were suppose to insure his administration had the very best health care that IT the world had to offer. Why do we need a “tech surge” from the private sector to save Obama’s ass? Easy he hired incompetent academic twits to run his technology program. Strong on theory, but clueless when it came to building something more complex than a simple spreadsheet model.

Michelle Malkin has the details here:

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/10/25/what-happened-to-all-of-obamas-technology-czars/

They came, they saw and then ran back to academia to train the next generation of incompetent technocrats.

[Russell Steele]

Oops should have read "the very best health care IT that the world had to offer."

[Bill Tozer]

Mr. Fish! Is that really you? Great Caesar's Ghost!! Welcome back to the Daily Planet no matter how brief. I take back nothing nice I said about you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPT5KIbSuzM

Yep, I missed your mug. Speaking of mugs, some of the misguided may feel quite sorry for this poor young lassie. Not me, I'll have none of that "Pretty thing, poor dear" stuff. Yesterday I was blaming them evil Republicans (along with Kathleen Nimbless Sebelius) for putting pressure on Healthcare.gov to launch by Oct. 1 (as per the law of the land) signed by 0-Zero and Company 3 years ago. But TODAY, I am taking all my misplaced anger and frustration on the poster girl for Barrycare. Its all her fault. Hang her on the tree of woe and cast her innards to the turkey vultures.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/25/who-is-that-girl-mysterious-face-healthcaregov/

[Bill Tozer]

Todd, they built the Great Wall of China one stone at a time and that was before somebody squeezed the Charmin.

Kinda nice to hear crickets from our leftist May 1st Day friends concerning "the website roll out." This is something that is hard to sweep under the carpet. And even the leftist blogs and our own MSM are actually looking into the basic what-when-why-how-to what extent of rudimentary journalism. Shocking. Seems weird.

Even reporters that fear examining the roll out will give us nasty Republicans fodder for criticism of Obama and mockery of Healthcare.gov are telling each other "Make a choice: Follow Obamacare and report accurately on it or save liberalism from damage." It is quite a dilemma for the little blue smurfs. What would Grandpa Smurf do?

Even Salon mag is in on the fun. And Jon Steward of course. And SLN has decided to join the festivities was well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtw1ERYapjQ

All is not lost. North Dakota has reported 2 people have successfully enrolled. South Dakota reports 4 souls are saved. And Kentucy has saved 7 souls by having them successfully seek and obtain health insurance through the exchange. Looking good.

[Russ]

First let apologize for such a long cut a past post, but it an authoritative analysis of why ObamaCare and HealthCare.gov will not successfully emerge after some minor tinkering with the front end code. Read the full post and you will understand the problem. From the comments (Dan Hanson on ACA) at Marginal Revolution

The front end technology is not the problem here. It would be nice if it was the problem, because web page scaling issues are known problems and relatively easy to solve.
The real problems are with the back end of the software. When you try to get a quote for health insurance, the system has to connect to computers at the IRS, the VA, Medicaid/CHIP, various state agencies, Treasury, and HHS. They also have to connect to all the health plan carriers to get pre-subsidy pricing. All of these queries receive data that is then fed into the online calculator to give you a price. If any of these queries fails, the whole transaction fails.

Most of these systems are old legacy systems with their own unique data formats. Some have been around since the 1960′s, and the people who wrote the code that runs on them are long gone. If one of these old crappy systems takes too long to respond, the transaction times out.

Amazingly, none of this was tested until a week or two before the rollout, and the tests failed. They released the web site to the public anyway – an act which would border on criminal negligence if it was done in the private sector and someone was harmed. Their load tests crashed the system with only 200 simultaneous transactions – a load that even the worst-written front-end software could easily handle.

When you even contemplate bringing an old legacy system into a large-scale web project, you should do load testing on that system as part of the feasibility process before you ever write a line of production code, because if those old servers can’t handle the load, your whole project is dead in the water if you are forced to rely on them. There are no easy fixes for the fact that a 30 year old mainframe can not handle thousands of simultaneous queries. And upgrading all the back-end systems is a bigger job than the web site itself. Some of those systems are still there because attempts to upgrade them failed in the past. Too much legacy software, too many other co-reliant systems, etc. So if they aren’t going to handle the job, you need a completely different design for your public portal.

A lot of focus has been on the front-end code, because that’s the code that we can inspect, and it’s the code that lots of amateur web programmers are familiar with, so everyone’s got an opinion. And sure, it’s horribly written in many places. But in systems like this the problems that keep you up at night are almost always in the back-end integration.

The root problem was horrific management. The end result is a system built incorrectly and shipped without doing the kind of testing that sound engineering practices call for. These aren’t ‘mistakes’, they are the result of gross negligence, ignorance, and the violation of engineering best practices at just about every step of the way..
…“No way would Apple, Amazon, UPS, FedEx outsource their computer systems and software development, or their IT operations, to anyone else.”

You have to be kidding. How do you think SAP makes a living? Or Oracle? Or PeopleSoft? Or IBM, which has become little more than an IT service provider to other companies?

Everyone outsources large portions of their IT, and they should. It’s called specialization and division of labor. If FedEx’s core competence is not in IT, they should outsource their IT to people who know what they are doing.

In fact, the failure of Obamacare’s web portal can be more reasonably blamed on the government’s unwillingness to outsource the key piece of the project – the integration lead. Rather than hiring an outside integration lead and giving them responsibility for delivering on time, for some inexplicable reason the administration decided to make the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services the integration lead for a massive IT project despite the fact that CMS has no experience managing large IT projects.

Failure isn’t rare for government IT projects – it’s the norm. Over 90% of them fail to deliver on time and on budget. But more frighteningly, over 40% of them fail absolutely and are never delivered. This is because the core requirements for a successful project – solid up-front analysis and requirements, tight control over requirements changes, and clear coordination of responsibility with accountability, are all things that government tends to be very poor at,

The mystery is why we keep letting them try.

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/from-the-comments-dan-hanson-on-aca.html#sthash.uHVL0roh.dpuf