Posted on 10/16/2013 6:02:18 AM PDT by Lakeshark
In a much-discussed post titled "Five Thoughts on the ObamaCare Disaster," the Washington Post's Ezra Klein manages to cycle through the first three of Elisabeth Kübler Ross's five stages of grief:
• Denial. "In the weeks leading up to the launch I heard some very ugly things about how the system was performing when transferring data to insurers--a necessary step if people are actually going to get insurance. I tried hard to pin the rumors down, but I could never quite nail the story, and there was a wall of official denials from the Obama administration. It was just testing, they said. They were fixing the bugs day by day."
**snip
• Anger.
**snip**
Klein is also angry at the administration, demanding: "Is anybody going to be held accountable? Is anybody going to be fired? Will anyone new be brought in to run the cleanup effort? Does the Obama administration know what went wrong, and are therr [sic] real plans to find out? . . . Heads should roll." Bargaining. "One thing has gone abundantly right for the Affordable Care Act: The Republican Party," Klein writes. "Their decision to shut down the government on the exact day the health-care law launched was a miracle for the White House. . . . The law has been knocked off the front page by coverage of the Republican Party's disaster."
There's no denying Republicans have had a horrendous couple of weeks. But as we've noted, Sen. Ted Cruz's rationale for the futile effort to defund ObamaCare was his belief that once it got started, it would be successful, at least in political terms--that it would deliver enough benefits to enough people as to ensure its continued political support.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The article has a lot to say, go to the link, it’s pretty good.
So here was the grand plan:
1. Sign millions upon millions up to the exchanges.
2. Wait for private healthplan premiums to go through the roof so that people would be left without coverage.
3. Offer a single payer alternative or pay the tax.
But something on the road to single-payer socialism got in the way.
CRUZ.
Cruz politically. But John Gall’s Law on complex systems for healthcare.gov.
The thing is they usually start mass killing before anyone has the time to do anything about it.
NO ONE THOUGHT OBAMACARE WOULD WORK!!! It was designed to fail. The RATS know that once people get the entitlement starting in January continue it.
THE GOVERNMENT WILL COMING TO THE RESCUE BY PROPOSING A SINGLE-PAYER SYSTEM.
This is the template for SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE, NEITHER OF WHICH IS SUSTAINABLE LONG TERM. Entitlements are growing our of control and threaten to eat the entire budget in just a few decades.
I haven’t heard of Gall’s Law but complexity is an academic topic with lots of mathematics that I am sure predate Gall.
What is overlooked also is that a lot of healthcare is mired local politics, just like energy. Thinking that the Fed Gov would be successful at infringing on local powers is about as valid as FERC thinking they can dictate local energy policy.
Galls Law says that complex systems built from scratch will always fail, and that there’s no way to patch them in order to make them work. That wherever there’s a successful complex system you’ll find that it started as a simple system that evolved.
The Law comes from his treatise “Systemantics” (later called The Systems Bible).
He does such a good job explaining why complex systems fail that I’m surprised he isn’t being quoted a lot more than I’ve seen.
Gall's Law is implicitly hostile to grandiose "visions" of software systems. Managers who are inclined towards a "grand vision" perspective of software development are in turn hostile to Gall's law because they see it as a tool of the enemy. Many think they can achieve success by building a consensual perception of success. This turns legitimate systems thinking into an implicit bad practice, since it tends to undermine subjective measures...if you can get paid based on consensual reality, then building that consensus is of paramount importance, exceeding even the delivery of an actual working system. A complex system description which is difficult to understand can actually be easier to sell to the uninformed, because unexpected objectives or requirements are more likely to find a fit to the systems description. As a result naive project managers tend to conflate technological complexity with technological sophistication.
This stuff is really good for government contractors, of course. The natural feedback of business which would inform the customer of bad decisions is usually completely missing, and the vendor can usually influence the consensus well enough to get paid.
The fairly standard government cost-plus contract only requires “best effort” from the vendor. The government, with a systems development effort gone bad, has three options: terminate for default, terminate for convienience, or wait for the contract’s period of performance (PoP) to end and then drop the effort completely or rework the project and recompete.
Most governmental orgs naturally leans towards the last option. The first one usually results in a decades long legal battle and the middle one is perceived as a failure on the government managers part.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.