Posted on 10/12/2013 4:40:47 AM PDT by don-o
The federal health-care exchange that opened a dozen days ago is marred by snags beyond the widely publicized computer gridlock that has thwarted Americans trying to buy a health plan. Even when consumers have been able to sign up, insurers sometimes can’t tell who their new customers are because of a separate set of computer defects.
The problems stem from a feature of the online marketplace’s computer system that is designed to send each insurer a daily report listing people who have just enrolled. According to several insurance industry officials, the reports are sometimes confusing and duplicative. In some cases, they show — correctly or not — that the same person enrolled and canceled several times on a single day.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I’m guessing that the reason some are finding difficulty is ON PURPOSE while others,the chosen low information voters are getting everything including a walmart gift card for thier troubles. This is set up for redistribution. What ever little FREE healthcare this bill will provide dwarfs the real reasons behind it, CONTROL in many other sectors and areas.
snip “Federal health officials declined to discuss the problem with the enrollment reports. “As individual problems are raised by insurers, we work aggressively to address them,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the branch of HHS that is overseeing the insurance exchange.”
HA! It is impossible to fix software that way. Some changes will have effects on other modules, that some other programmer is working on for some other fix. Change management is a lot more difficult than writing new modules. The faster they demand the fixes to save the face of Obamacare, the more messed up the software will get. Since they are in crisis operation for fixes, the changes will not be adequately documented so that when someone works on a module he will not know what other changes were already made.
They can’t do Obamacare, they can’t do single payer either. That is the lesson of this failure. They don’t get it. You can’t get a working software system from thousands of pages of regulations that no one fully understands.
I have a feeling some people sign up. Then they learn how much it costs. So they cancel and sign up for a different plan. Then they cancel it.
it wont show you the rates until you register.
So people register, see the rates, gasp in shock, then cancel.
The really BIG STORY is not about the confusion in enrollment data it is the ABSENCE of enrollment data.
Although I haven’t done a survey of the news yet today, here is all I have found for Obamacare sign-on-the-dotted-line ENROLLMENT data after two weeks:
Iowa 5
Kentucky 171
Maryland 326
Washinton 916
Total 1418
And most of this data is a week old. The silence is, as they say, deafening.
I neglected to mention that control of the real data files is a vital aspect of change management. The data have to be converted from the old software version to the new. etc.
This team of HHS and the contractor are not capable of disciplined change management. They proved that by going over budget from $93 Million to $664 million. That proves inadequate specification of requirements and inadequate project management. If they could have done it, it would not have been rolled out in this condition.
Fixing it is going to introduce more problems. Downward spiral methinks.
There should be an Inspector General investigation as we speak.
What's the "or not" part??? They're calling, enrolling, and then cancelling and all the website tracks are the enrollments not the cancellations.
Glitch!!!???
This is a major malfunction. As people hear about what a mess this is, they will decline to even explore the system until they learn that it is operating properly.
I need to purchase a new plan as my current one is being cancelled. But I'll be darned if I'm going to go anywhere near healthcare.gov until it's working like it should.
Another matter of concern is that new laws/exemptions are always being enacted at whim and that would necessitate changes on the website. Good luck with that.
You are obviously a programmer. I have been writing a real estate database program the last 5 years that is fairly sophisticated now and has many of the same types of update problems you mention. While everything is modular, which is the current theory on how you are supposed to write code, I constantly have problems when introducing new fields.
I can only imagine the dry heaves the Obamacare program managers are having right now, updating a live massive database program on the fly.
My favorite is doing an update statement that rips through unintended data, screwing up what would in this case be millions of records.
update enrollment_table set enrolled=0 where last_name=’Smith’
Bwahahaha
Correct: "The problems stem from a feature of the online marketplace’s computer system . . . "
“updating a live massive database program on the fly”
That describes it.
A person enters data under one version of a live program. If he calls it up under the later version, will the data still be the same? And sent to the insurer under another version, etc.
The old adage was Garbage In ==> garbage out
but they are likely creating garbage without disciplined change management . . . and no one will know where it is or what caused it; garbage will surface randomly; and you can’t reverse engineer a bug from last week if the software changed 7 times in the mean time.
A system like this should have been validated by an outside accounting firm before going on line — people’s lives and identities are at stake.
The point is that now, it CANNOT be validated! You cannot take the input, put it through the processes, and ensure that the output is correct. No one HAS the input! It was entered online! Nothing to validate what is on their data base against!
Yes, I was a programmer who became lead systems analyst and project manager, and I got my projects ON TIME and ON BUDGET! And they operated correctly and accurately.
I am serious that the Inspector General or someone needs to investigate and shut this thing down until it can be validated.
How about your neighbor doesn’t get any coverage, but people in Nigeria & Kenya will find themselves suddenly covered???
This is another nightmare to make the insurers go bankrupt.
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