Posted on 11/19/2013 11:30:41 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Between 30 and 40 percent of the IT system for the federal health insurance marketplace must still be built, a top official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Monday.
Henry Chao, the agency’s deputy chief information officer, said that a large portion of the behind-the-scenes work has yet to be finished.
“I think it’s just an approximation, we’re probably sitting somewhere between 60 or 70 percent [completed],” he told the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee.
Chao’s comments, which came during a hearing on data security of the federal website, come less than two weeks before the administration's deadline for fixing the ObamaCare website and are sure to disappoint Democrats who had hoped the enrollment system would be in tip-top shape by then.
The disastrous rollout of ObamaCare highlighted by the error-plagued website has been a political boondoggle for Democrats, who have seen President Obama's approval ratings plummet in polls.
Chao said that he was not referring to the federal website for buying insurance, HealthCare.Gov, or to other aspects of the national marketplace that people looking for insurance will interact with.
Instead, he said, the major projects under construction involve back-end work, like setting up the procedure to pay health insurance companies once plans kick in in January.
“There is the back office system, the accounting systems, the payment systems, they still need to be [built],” he added.
Chao said that the back-end portions of the website were being tested as they were completed, and would not have an impact on users’ experience trying to shop for insurance.
“It won’t affect the front end,” he said.
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said that the uncompleted portions of the website were “not necessarily the part that has to be working at this moment,” since they mostly relate to paying insurance companies.
On Tuesday, Chao said that glitches in the website were being worked out all the time, and that users were having a smoother experience each week.
He said that he would have preferred to have more time to test the site, but that would be true of all projects. He told lawmakers that “100 percent” of the website was built when it was rolled out on Oct. 1, even if it wasn't working well.
Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), the subcommittee's chairman, took issue with that claim.
“Then it’s not built,” Murphy said. “If a car is built but you can’t run the car, then it’s not built. If the website isn’t working then it’s not built.”
A website ain't rocket science.
I took Chao’s comment to mean that 60 to 70% still had to be built. He started rattling off the hardest parts of this fiasco.
Let Sebelius write the code.
“Well, we overhauled your engine. It’s fine, except we left out the spark plugs, it only makes a loud grinding noise when you turn the key, and we have this small pile of parts leftover here in this coffee can and we’re not real sure where they came from. But, your car is at least 70, maybe 80% ready-to-go.”
If that’s the case then how could they even have begun beta testing and security testing. That in itself takes months.
No “big deal,” it’s only the part where they make payments to insurance companies.
If Holder can break away from pushing his racist agenda, the inJustice Dept should be pursuing civil and criminal charges against those that too OUR $600 Million+ to build the present website.
The signup piece is the easy half, and it's been utterly botched. I can't wait to see what the rest looks like.
Normally, I'd say "Pass the popcorn", but this mess has screwed up everyone's insurance - including my own, I'm one of the lucky 5-ish million who got dumped - that I just don't have much of a sense of humor about it anymore.
You'd be surprised. And it isn't the user interface that's difficult, it's the back end.
Difficult enough that Oracle Corporation has entirely failed with Oregon's website. Not a single enrollee.
Obviously the.nexr question is how much of the remaining is required, and how much is nice to have.
From prison. Let them all write it from prison, they can be paroled when their code passes integration testing.
Something I've not seen asked and answered about Obamacare, is if they tested it all the way through. As in, WBill, look at all of the options, pick one, register for it, pay for it, have the payment accepted, put a common but moderately complicated claim against it (say, some outpatient surgery), pay for that, have the payment get accepted ....and so on.
That'd be a critical piece of any system that I put in...."Does it work from start to finish?".
All I've heard people talk about is registration. I'm wondering why no one is asking about the complicated stuff.
/rant off. Thanks for listening.
Gall's Law - A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: 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.
I got an email yesterday that compared the efforts of the people of this great country to defeat the Nazis, Japs, and Italian forces in that it took 3 years & 5 months including building all of the facilities to produce bomb grade plutonium and uranium.
These idiots have had 3 years, 6 months & counting to build a website.
Pretty pathetic but says quite a bit about the can do attitude that built this country versus the I want it now mentality of today’s society.
Medicare.gov would be a better model. Medicaid has few similarities and enrollment is handled by the states.
so it took 3 1/2 years toget to 60% completed.
it will take 2 1/3 years more to get the other 40% done if they work as fast as they did in the past.
i think we can now confidently call it:
Obamacare: It’s dead, Jim.
it will crumble to dust. it can’t work and obumba’s insurance’plan waiver thingy is not only’illegal but unworkablefor the companies and would be courtroom nightmares if there were coverage disputes.
obama’s screwed himself. and all of us. time to jettison him to cuba, the commie workers’ paradise.
Point is, there was no need to build it from scratch, other than arrogance and the desire to redistribute as many taxpayer dollars as possible.
The website will be discontinued. Instead, millions will get letters enrolling them in Obamacare “for their own good.”
they didn’t do testing. to test a system this large with so many different sections and vendors writing code would take months to do it right.
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