Obamacare And The Fraudulent Turk

andstillipersist.com ^ | 12/5/13 | Bruce Webster

[Lmo56]

... In a tongue-in-cheek fashion, I was merely carrying on a long-standing tradition over centuries of false automata, mechanical devices that appear to act with skill and intelligence but that, in fact, are actually being operated by humans behind the scenes. The most famous of these is the Turk (pictured above), a device built in the late 1700s that appeared to play a very good game of chess against humans. In truth, a human chess player was ensconced within the device’s cabinet with the ability to perceive the current state of the board. Note that the Turk himself was a very real mechanism, capable of picking up any chess piece and moving it to a specific location on the board. But it was human actions behind the scenes that actually allowed it to play chess.

Healthcare.gov at present is largely operating as a false automaton. Most of the repair effort to date has been on the presentation, the front end, the user interface — the Turk, if you will. You can interact with the website — if you’re lucky and it hasn’t reached its current limit of simultaneous users. But you can’t actually buy and pay for an insurance policy through the system — the payment system has yet to be written, or at least finished. Instead, end-users are being told to contact their (new) insurers directly to make payment. Reports have leaked out about how much manual work is being done behind the scenes to clean up data. The much-touted Federal subsidy systems isn’t working, and so the new position is: make a guess and correct it later. Oh, and even if you think you’ve successfully completed your application, you may not have.

[Lmo56]

Bruce Webster is an IT professional with a keen insight as to the REAL state of the Obamacare web site ...

[Little Pig]

Another example of the gov getting away with something that would have been career suicide in the private sector. If my IT team had had 3 years and half a billion dollars to roll out a system this big, and at H-hour had put up something that was not only just 30% done, but the 30% itself didn’t even come close to working the way it should have, I’d not only be on the street, but almost certainly blacklisted in the HR departments of every company I ever tried to apply to.

[pepsionice]

I spent around twelve years of my life with two contracting firms. One was successful, always mindful of deadlines, tracked each project and had regular reviews to ensure a successful schedule. That company was respect for turning the projects into reality.

The second company? They didn’t care. They never made deadlines a big deal. They got and lost contracts on a regular basis. They always underbid on the contracts and knew they were going to win only because of this attitude of “the cheapest”.

Personally, if any of these people with this particular project ever came to apply for work under me.....and I saw they were part of this failed effort, I would not hire them. I think the technicians were at fault as much as the planners, and the White House staff.