Posted on 10/18/2013 8:45:45 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Full Title:
Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.
Very important to understand: Between this and the fact that HHS deliberately hid the price of insurance behind a reg wall on Healthcare.gov to reduce “rate shock,” the grand takeaway about the website’s failure is that O and his team made it much worse than it needed to be because they were terrified of transparency. And the reason they were terrified of transparency, both in the case of hiding the cost of the premiums from web users and hiding the site’s architectural problems from contractors who might be hauled before Congress, is because they know they’ve delivered a bad product. Put the premiums on the front page and the public, expecting “affordable care,” would recoil at the truth. Put the contractors at the witness table before Issa’s committee and the public, expecting that the government would “fix” health care, would recoil upon discovering that they can’t even build a website with three years’ lead time.
I don’t know what’s more amazing, that they’d place their own political comfort above creating a smoother user experience for the uninsured or that they somehow didn’t realize that a botched rollout on October 1 would be far more embarrassing than contractors talking to Republicans under oath. Or … would it? What was HHS so worried that outside contractors would tell the GOP that they preferred to risk total chaos on the exchanges during launch month instead?
Apropos of nothing, Reuters is now reporting that the budget for the site exploded earlier this year as the Hopenchange brain trust realized they were way, way, way off course. And by “exploded,” I mean “tripled”:
How and why the system failed, and how long it will take to fix, remains unclear. But evidence of a last-minute surge in spending suggests the needs of the project were growing well beyond the initial expectations of the contractor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Why this went from a ceiling of $93.7 million to $292 million is hard to fathom,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group that analyzes government contracting.
“Something changed. It suggests they ran into problems and knew last spring that they couldn’t do it for $93.7 million. They just blew through the original ceiling. Where was the contract oversight?”…
The Obama administration was issuing regulations and changing policy regarding how the reform should be implemented late into this summer. Many required significant changes to the IT running Healthcare.gov, which kept contractors scrambling.
We’ll need congressional hearings to find out which regulations forced the IT team to scramble at the eleventh hour to rework the site, but this could be another example of the White House’s desire to hide the uglier parts of this boondoggle creating problems for the website architecture. Remember, it was only this past summer that HHS suddenly decided to eliminate income verification for subsidies for the first year. Applicants will be placed on the “honor system” in reporting their wages, which is basically an invitation to commit fraud — but which serves the end of making those subsidies nice and robust for anyone willing to lie, which encourages enrollment. Could be that they built the site with the income verification tech integrated and then had to tear it out quickly and haphazardly once HHS changed its mind, leading to bugs. Like I say, this is what congressional hearings are for.
Nancy Pelosi, by the way, thinks there’s no reason at all to delay ObamaCare if the exchanges are still a disaster come December, which also happens to be the deadline for enrollment if you want your coverage to begin in January. I’d be surprised if there’s a single manager anywhere in the insurance industry who agrees with her, given the Thunderdome-levels of chaos Glitchapalooza will be causing them next year if this persists much longer.
Update: Merry Christmas, Barack.
The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY…
Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer’s cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.
Those steps shouldn’t be necessary, experts said.
“I have never seen a website — in the last five years — require you to delete the cache in an effort to resolve errors,” said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group by former Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt. “This is a very early Web 1.0 type of fix.”
You’ll have to read the rest to find out how clearing your cache might actually cause new errors.
Update: Icing on the cake from health-industry consultant Bob Laszewski, who says the system’s scarcely improved after another week of frantic HHS triage:
At the end of week two of the Obamacare launch, health plans were generally seeing no more enrollments per day then they saw in the first week.
As troubling, the backroom issues plaguing the connection between health insurers and the federal government had not been resolved and there is no indication from the feds when they will have these things cleared up.
My sense is that the feds, based upon the number of enrollments they have sent to the insurance companies, enrolled about 10,000 people in the first week (about 5,000 single and family contracts) and another 10,000 people in the second week in the 36 states using the federal exchange.
I guesstimated that the feds were up to 95,000 or so enrollments in my earlier post, less than 20 percent of HHS’s target for October. Laszewski thinks even that number is wildly optimistic. If he’s right and they’re only at 20,000 enrollments total, they’re at less than five percent of their goal.
Update: No one’s getting fired, huh?
The root cause of the problems was a pivotal decision by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials to act as systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program. Usually this role is reserved for the prime information technology contractor.
As a result, full testing of the site was delayed until four to six days before the fateful Oct. 1 launch of the health care exchanges, the individual said…
“Normally a system this size would need 4-6 months of testing and performance tuning, not 4-6 days,” the individual said.
The source said there were “ever-changing, conflicting and exceedingly late project directions. The actual system requirements for Oct. 1 were changing up until the week before,” the individual said.
How could they have done a worse job?
I gotta wonder.. do you think that was a stock photo or did she pose for it knowing it’d be used on the fedgov site?
either way, I’ll be we don’t see her in public for a while.
She’s become the face of failure.
Do you think the American people will be excited about a “new improved 0bamaCare plan” after this debacle?
Stole as in ripped off the code without crediting.
See #13.
All the more reason to take the seneate in 2014, and most importantly remove McShame’s cadre of moderates.
Seems like the contract would have provided “shovel ready jobs” to the US IT sector - but he doesn’t want people to have jobs so it had to be outsourced where it became a shovel-ready failure.
Ping.
What’s the story on that?
That's practically saying that Republicans forced Democrats to become intractable, for fear that they would open themselves up to criticism or appear weak to their own base if they gave in on a point or two in the name of "compromise."
In other words, just the existence of Republicans forces Democrats to do the things they do, which is why it's always the Republicans' fault.
-PJ
Total trainwreck.
Sebelius gave assurances, but nobody of either party asked for a demonstration, fishbone chart, or beta testing run analysis.
We elected congress to trust but VERIFY! I do not blame Sebelius. She and Obama just abused congressional ignorance. They were more interested in assurances that congress and staff would be exempt from the processes and personal costs.
Most transparent administration EVAH!
Nope. but that won’t stop them from pushing forward.
They are not “moderates” we must call them what they are. Democrats posing as republicans to win elections.
I believe I read where the company they hired had been fired from their last job because of incompetence. So that would be one issue. I lived in Kansas and have friends who worked in Topeka when Sillybus was the Governor and they all said she was as dumb as a box of rocks. Going from being the Governor of Kansas to writing regs to cover a huge program like this is way beyond her capability. All of it was destined to fail.
Seems to me like Obama could have just said what the plans had to cover, that everyone had to be insured and then let the insurance carriers handle the enrollment. Once people found out what their premium was then they could apply for financial aid from the appropriate agency.
QbamaCare is a conspiracy to push through a frame work to tie Government power centers together in such a way they could be used to institute a coercive force to enable an authoritarian, dictatorial government under the guise of health care.
To run a conspiracy, you need a small, tight knit group of dedicated co conspirators who can keep silent and maintain secrecy to carry out the conspiracy.
ObamaCare is showing all the signs of being such a conspiracy
So subpoena the bastards!
I think it's easy to understand that this as intended as a stepping stone to single payer, but I can't see the rollout fiasco as part of that plan.
It seems to me that the segue would require the exchanges to get up and running, but be seen to be unsatisfactory for reasons of expense and coverage, etc.
To have the thing not even get off the ground makes it hard to sell the idea that well, we couldn't do that, but we can easily absorb the entire industry. So, I say it's a genuine fiasco. Of course, when chaos is afoot, who knows where it will lead.
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.