Jeffrey Zients Appointed To Fix Healthcare.gov 250
An anonymous reader writes with news that the Obama administration has appointed Jeffrey Zients to lead the effort to revamp Healthcare.gov after its trouble rollout earlier this month. Zients said, "By the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users." Obama created a position for Zients within the government in 2009, when he was made the OMB's Chief Performance Officer. The purpose of his position was to analyze and streamline the government's budget concerns. "Healthcare.gov covers people in the 36 states that declined to run their own health-insurance exchanges. About 700,000 applications have been begun nationwide, and half of them have come in through the website. The White House aims to have 7M uninsured Americans covered by the scheme by the end of March." Zients's appointment came after a contentious House Committee hearing about the healthcare website, in which many were blamed and few took responsibility. The government also said that contractor Quality Software Services Inc., a subsidiary of UnitedHealth group, would "oversee the entire operation" of Healthcare.gov. QSSI has already done work on the website, building the pipeline that transfers data between the insurance exchanges and the federal agencies.
End of November (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like a lot of mythical man-months to me.
Re:End of November (Score:5, Funny)
Re:End of November (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. It sounds like a position that should have been filled from the beginning is just now getting filled.
I'm sure Medicare has things to do other than deal with this mess that wasn't even being written until spring. How they got to that point is a discussion we already had, I'm just pointing out that Medicare is probably not the best choice for driving the technology/solution angle here.
The mythical man month does not directly cover the case of being under-manned until a month after release, then bringing staffing up to where it should be. And certainly if that is the entirety of your contribution, I have to assume you mean the most recognized portions of the concept.
More on point is the difficulty of debugging a live system and making changes that don't cascade to cause more problems, which I don't see happening by the end of November. But an unrealistic schedule, again, is not the mythical man month.
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Not really. It sounds like a position that should have been filled from the beginning is just now getting filled.
The mythical man month does not directly cover the case of being under-manned until a month after release, then bringing staffing up to where it should be. And certainly if that is the entirety of your contribution, I have to assume you mean the most recognized portions of the concept.
Under-manned because they hired one more person? I haven't seen any evidence they were understaffed or under-manned. And someone I'm skeptical that a CEO guy with a BS in Political Science and no Software Engineering background is the key to turning this around.
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The mythical man month does not directly cover the case of being under-manned until a month after release, then bringing staffing up to where it should be.
The primary message of The Mythical Man-Month is that adding people to a late project, counterintuitively, makes it finish later. I'd say that putting out an unfinished project, because you were "under-manned until a month after release", qualifies as late.
But an unrealistic schedule, again, is not the mythical man month.
I'm sorry, that's just wrong. The schedule has everything to do with it. The term "late" establishes that the schedule was unrealistic given all other conditions.
Now I would agree that those other conditions did not work in favor of meeting the schedul
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lol.. Going old school Clinton style. That would depend on what the meaning of the word "is" is.
Oh the memories.
Surprising (Score:2)
I take it this appointment did not require a joint Democrat/Republican confirmation?
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I am surprised that anyone got approved for such a post
I take it this appointment did not require a joint Democrat/Republican confirmation?
As surprised as when Obamanation was elected?
It required a Big Pharma/Healthcare Insurance sector approval with a CONgressional rubber stamp.
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He was confirmed as Chief Performance Officer back in 2009. All Obama has to do to give him this gig is re-write the job description.
And he doesn't have to re-write much because the CPO is supposed look at government operations (ie: this clusterfuck) and figure out how to make work better. Fixing specific projects probably wasn't what the Senate had in mind when it confirmed him, but they probably won't complain. The GOP will figure he won't do it, and they'll want Obama to have some more rope to hang himse
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Is this unusual? (Score:2)
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Don't know about the industry, but it is unusual for Exchanges. Massachusetts has run fine for years. Cali and New York State went live on Oct. 1 with relatively few problems.
In Obama's defense he was not actually supposed to make any Exchanges. The people who were supposed to do that were the states, but a bunch of states bailed and the backup plan became the plan. Which meant a $1 Billion budget line that was basically an Oh Fuck option became the Exchange for something like a third of the country, and Ob
It's NOT going to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
There are more lines of code in Healthcare.gov (500m!) than Google Chrome, the Linux kernel, XP, Facebook, Mac OS, and the Debian 5 packages combined:
http://www.alexmarchant.com/blog/2013/10/22/healthcare-dot-gov-lines-of-code-comparison.html [alexmarchant.com]
Windows 8 supposed has 80m lines of code:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/ [cnn.com]
It would take a miracle of computing programming and program management that no governmental program has ever accomplished to get this epic cluster f*ck fixed in 2-3 months.
If they actually want it to work, it should be taken out behind the shed, shot in the head, hung, drawn, quartered, burned, and the ashes scattered to the four winds. And then everyone starts over. And then take 2 years (minimum) to recode it again with an almost entirely new team. But that's not going to happen. They're going to try and band-aid it, and it won't work.
So things are going to get interesting. It's unfixable in a politically acceptable way for the Democrats and the Obama administration.
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They're going to try and band-aid it, and it won't work.
But the boss has already promised his customers that it would be ready by the end of November.
Re:It's NOT going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't customers if they're forced to buy.
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If you already have health insurance, you probably don't care when, or even if, the site becomes functional.
Except perhaps in a "hey, look at the train wreck" sort of way....
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more than HALF of the country does not have health insurance,
I really hate to do this, because it always sounds dorky, but I'd like to know where you're getting that figure. Wikipedia says around 16% [wikipedia.org], which is much less than a half (and more like the remainder past a standard deviation). The NY Times gives about the same figure [nytimes.com]. Medicare covers another 16% or so, which is the other past-one-standard-deviation end of the curve, and the big lump in the middle (around 64%) has private insurance. If adults have a 16% non-insurance rate, children have an even lower ra
Re:It's NOT going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
There are more lines of code in Healthcare.gov (500m!) than Google Chrome, the Linux kernel, XP, Facebook, Mac OS, and the Debian 5 packages combined:
http://www.alexmarchant.com/blog/2013/10/22/healthcare-dot-gov-lines-of-code-comparison.html [alexmarchant.com]
Alexmarchant cites a NYT article [nytimes.com] in which the author wrote:
"According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size."
I, for one, find this claim difficult to believe, especially when the actual source cited is "one specialist" who remains nameless.
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how many lines of code did the Jurassic Park UNIX system have?
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Things get pretty big pretty fast when you do it that way.
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What I'm wondering: how did they spend 600 million bucks on this?
I bought health insurance from an "exchange" a few years ago; I was between jobs and wanted gap coverage. I went to a website, ran a search, picked a plan, and enrolled -- it was pretty simple. The website didn't look that complicated, and I'm sure it didn't cost $600M or even $60M (and it worked). Now, maybe the government wants to do something a little more complicated, but $600M is roughly 10,000 developers' salaries for a year. What were t
Cheap, Fast, Good, you can get two. (Score:2)
But.. maybe you don't actually get to pick which two, and they tried anyway.
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$600 million is not a lot in the world of government contracting. There are several models of Jet in the Air Force that cost that much. Moreover this was a really big job. They need enough servers to complete 15 million orders, they need to talk to the IRS (mostly for income data), several other agencies, fairly sophisticated GIS systems (many plans aren't available in all counties), and insurance company computer systems.
Your little exchange probably had to handle talking to the insurer's computers, but it
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There are more lines of code in Healthcare.gov (500m!) than Google Chrome, the Linux kernel, XP, Facebook, Mac OS, and the Debian 5 packages combined:
You're looking at the wrong metric, because not all of those 500m lines of code have to work perfectly before the site is minimally usable.
The correct metric to look at would be the number of lines of code that are (a) currently broken, (b) actually executed in the common cases, and (c) cause painful or fatal consequences to the process. Those are the parts that actually need to be fixed sooner than later, and it's likely that that number is significantly smaller than 500m.
I've worked on a number of projec
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Well, if it's true, then one of the problems with the site is that there's too many lines of code. (Even if, as someone suggested, you are counting every line between two html tags as a line of code.)
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More importantly this is not inventing the Apollo Program. California's Exchange is serving 10% of the country's population fine. Build six of those and Obama's golden.
I doubt it can actually be done in 5 weeks, but in theory they should have the hardware to do it (that $600 million went somewhere), so installing the right software could do the trick.
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You do realize that California and Massachusetts have Exchanges that work?
Which means that an awful lot of this code can be brought in from those states.
It's not 500m LOC (Score:2)
If you have any experience with even medium sized software projects, you will realize it's a typo. They started coding this spring, of 2013, I doubt they even have 5 million lines. Maybe 500,000.
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And what, pray tell, will you do when it is fixed in 5 weeks as promised? When people, by and large, are signing up with few errors, by the end of November, what will you do?
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I suppose at that point, I'll be busy enjoying having a harem of all the most famous starlets of the past 200 years, and taking occasional trips in my time machine for fun around the early Babylonian period.
What will you do if God comes down from heaven in 5 weeks, and personally offers you a latte?
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Re: It's NOT going to happen (Score:2)
I will eagerly look forward to buying the epic tome on software engineering that will finally reveal to us all (after over 40 years) how to really get it done....
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The Obama administration hasn't cornered the market on arrogance and self-righteousness; that's part of what makes politics politics, and has been going on since before the Roman Empire.
Very true, the one thing you can be certain of; if this somehow goes so badly that Obama gets voted out and Republicans seize control; you can be certain then, Republicans will over-extend their advantage, and do something equally crazy that makes people want to vote them out.
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So, lets be honest about this. This is a web application. It is not software. It's a bunch of forms on a bunch of web pages that connect to a bunch of databases. And a whole shitload of that can be markup. FAQs, Privacy Policies, tons and tons of TEXT. Which can be called "code" if you stick a tag around it.
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Even in a template heavy system such as Magento (which I work with daily), I'm not this many lines of code is necessary. I mean, really, the number seems grossly absurd at its face value.
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Wouldn't people be somewhat less likely to do that, given that giving the keys to the car to the kid who just wrecked his tricycle seems like a bad idea?
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It's hard to say. It is pretty typical for the government to create a problem, and then someone proposes a big new government program to fix the problem that wouldn't exist if not for the government. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
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Obama told us it was intentional in his stump speeches before he even became president. Something about wanting single-payer, but you can't get there overnight. You have to do it in stages.
One of those stages is the collapse of the free-market insurance industry. It is a necessary condition to single payer that there can't be any other payers.
One thing I don't understand is why they didn't make the individual mandate severable. They could have done a lot of damage if that specific part of the law was st
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No.... I like Ann Coulter, but she loves hyperbole. I'm going to apply Occam's razor here and go with the much more likely explanation: utter incompetence and managerial indifference. Yes, Obama and friends want to control a large swath of the US economy, but couldn't rip themselves out of a wet paper bag. (Although they're really, really good at running a campaign. Especially if the IRS can slap down opposing groups and prevent them from raising money...) Obama's utter lack of any management experie
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As far as I can tell Ann Coulter's gig is to be controversial so she remains in the public eye and to sell her books.
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The 500M lines of code is attributed to "one specialist".
I don't care who you are, writing 500M lines of code is impressive. ;)
What you're missing... (Score:5, Funny)
Zients said, "By the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users."
Yeah,November of which year?
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I used that in a meeting once when management asked how we can get the project finished by the arbitrary deadline. I said we could build a time machine. The great part is that it doesn't matter when we finish that project because all of the other ones will be on time.
That reminds me of a design review I was in. The "safety" engineer asked me what the backup was if a primary structure failed. I said it's a primary structure it's designed not to fail. They responded "What if it magically fails?". I said "We r
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This will only fix the shiny object (Score:2, Informative)
At some point they will have spent enough time and money to fix the nice shiny bauble of a web site..... and they will trumpet their success...... but this will be used to distract from the fact that they will NOT undo:
1. The fact that hundreds of thousands of people have already been thrown off their insurance (so much for "If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance, PERIOD." - Barack Obama).
2. The fact that millions will have lost their doctors both by losing their insurance and also by havi
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You do realize your contradictions contradict themselves? If you don't have to buy until you get sick then young people aren't forced to buy either. What's really going on is there's a tax fine if you don't buy, so both you and your young people can choose between being uninsured (and paying the fine), or being insured.
If your first two points were actually valid, as opposed to conservatives talking themselves into a lather, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.
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, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.
This is a fascinating point. His approval rating is actually increasing. Maybe most people aren't aware of how bad the situation i yet.
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Or maybe... just maybe... it's because it's not as bad as you think.
Of course it's much easier to assume everyone else is wrong than to question your beliefs.
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, one would expect ObamaCare's poll numbers to be dropping. They aren't.
This is a fascinating point. His approval rating is actually increasing. Maybe most people aren't aware of how bad the situation i yet.
My best guess on Obama's number is pretty simple:
People don't actually care about ObamaCare that much. It's a change to health insurance, which worries them, and Republicans they trust just enough to give 48% of their votes have been bitching about it for years, but it hasn't actually hurt them (or anyone they know) yet.
OTOH those silly Republicans just shutdown the government to stop it, which did hurt them. According Matty Yglesias a lot of people he met blamed the websites failure on the shutdown, which
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Gerrymandering doesn't help Dems, but it's only part part of the problem. Much of the problem is that Dems live in areas that vote Obama at ridiculous rates, whereas Republicans tend to live in areas that vote GOP at high rates (but not overwhelming rates). In gerrymandering terms Dems tend to pack themselves into highly Democratic districts, which means that they have a lot of wasted votes in their urban core, whereas strongly conservative rural districts waste just enough votes that Dems shouldn;t bother
It may all be for naught (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck to Zients. He's a good guy and I don't doubt the code can be repaired with enough effort. A lot of effort, maybe, but it can be done.
But it might not matter. The Los Angeles Times [latimes.com] had a story about how the real code running the show (the legalese in the ACA law) may have a fatal flaw in it. The federal government may not be able to grant subsidies to low income people in the states that did not set up their own exchanges. The law specifically says the states must do it in order for the money to flow. So 36 of the 50 may not be able to get the money. But they are still subject to the penalty for not signing up. This means the people least able to afford insurance get hammered. And since they are treated differently than people in the other 14 states that do have exchanges, you can bet an Equal Protection lawsuit will be quick in coming.
Federal judge is due to issue the initial ruling soon.
Reversing REDMAP (Score:2)
I don't doubt the code can be repaired with enough effort. [But] the real code running the show (the legalese in the ACA law) may have a fatal flaw in it
As you recognized, law too is code [slashdot.org]. Get enough Democrats into state legislatures and they might have a chance of reversing REDMAP [huffingtonpost.com], the RSLC's organized redistricting effort that produced the inkblot-shaped districts [businessinsider.com] that turned a Democratic popular vote into a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, which should make it possible to patch this bug in PPACA.
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Get enough Democrats into state legislatures
How likely do you think that is?
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And since they are treated differently than people in the other 14 states that do have exchanges, you can bet an Equal Protection lawsuit will be quick in coming.
Here is the Equal Protection Clause:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Note that the boundary of the clause is the State. Different states have different laws all the time. Massachusetts has had statewide healthcare for a long time, and Vermont passed a single-payer healthcare. Oregon has vote-by-mail. Minnesota abolished the death penalty while it remains in the majority of states. Some states have legalized marijuana, while in Pennsylvania you can only buy wine and spirits from state owned shops. Taxes are different, environmental la
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States rights won't survive gay marriage.
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States rights survived the civil war. Or maybe you feel they didn't. In either case, that was the point at which we decided the scope of states rights. Gay marriage is nothing compared to that.
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1. ACA is Federal law. The fine / tax/ whatever is Federal, imposed on the residents of the states.
2. You might look a bit further up, to Amendment 16, where it says
The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.
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Two points:
1) They have lots of servers, presumably enough for the load. What they don't have is software. California has software that's working. I don't know how easy it will be to port Cali's exchange to the Feds, but I do know this is a lot easier then the media are making it out to be. I will be surprised if they make their November date, but I won't be surprised at they get it done pretty close to that.
2) The legal argument is BS.
Even if it wasn't, how long do you think Bobby Jindall will remain Gover
Easily fixed (Score:2)
Suppose that were true (I don't know) ... who could fix it?
1) The states by setting up exchanges. I mean, they wouldn't be so spiteful as to punish the poor because they don't like a federal law.
2) The house by passing legislation that fixes this gap. Representatives from states without exchanges wouldn't want to punish the poor in their states, and most others should also be willing to fix the unescapable slight gaps in large legislation.
Oh wait ...
Obama Blinded Me With Zients (Score:2)
There, that had to be said. Now, just redirect those healthcare.gov links to the insurance companies, as should have been done in the first place:-)
Nightmare (Score:5, Informative)
After doing software development in the healthcare field for over a decade, I finally made the wise decision to never work in that industry again. Government is even worse, because the rules the software have to follow change on the whim of elections and the rug is constantly being pulled out from under you. Now this mess? Well it's healthcare taken to the bureaucratic power (h^b). Sounds like a good way to shave 10 years off your life in stress.
Re:Nightmare (Score:4, Interesting)
So here's a serious question... why can so many other countries do it well? They combine healthcare and government and it's fine. So is the US functionally retarded? I don't think we are, but if this is really the undoable task that half this thread implies, what's wrong with us?
A suggestion for an easy fix. (Score:4, Insightful)
Pass single-payer, as we should have done in the first place, and send everyone to medicare.gov.
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I, for one, am willing to confess that the U.S. won the Cold War, and is losing the sequel.
Apollo 1 (Score:2)
From the soaring triumph of the Apollo Project
I'm told enrolling on glitchy healthcare.gov is already easier than enrolling on insurers' own web sites was pre-PPACA. But at least healthcare.gov hasn't killed three astronauts [wikipedia.org], has it?
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It's early days yet.
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From the soaring triumph of the Apollo Project, to the sub-Hades goat-ropery Healthcare.gov in just half a century. I, for one, am willing to confess that the U.S. won the Cold War, and is losing the sequel.
Hey, we're still giving trickle down and job creators a chance.
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The Apollo project cost 200 billion modern dollars. It's easy to accomplish a lot when you have the complete backing of every person in the government and a blank check.
Half of the people in the federal government are actively trying to sabotage the ACA.
Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call (Score:5, Insightful)
Half of the people in the federal government are actively trying to sabotage the ACA.
Is that the half that wants to repeal it or the half that voted for it without knowing what was in the bill?
Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call (Score:5, Insightful)
It was debated for 8 months.
What was debated and what was in the final draft are two different things.
Everyone knew what was in it, regardless of what Rush Limbaugh told you.
Lame attempt at character assignation, you've lost the debate. I'm neither a Republican nor a Limbaugh listener. I am however someone who was paying attention during the debate and drafting of the ACA, it was quite the bipartisan cluster**k.
Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call (Score:5, Informative)
The thing you have to keep in mind about the US Health System is that it's a series of kludges. Active Federal employees on the civilian side use a version of the Dutch system. There's a bunch of Federally owned hospitals (aka: the British system) for military retirees. To insure retirees in the 60s we stole Canada's system, even keeping the name "Medicare," and simply added the words "over 65" to the bill. Which means we have three entire countries worth of health regulations simply for retirees and Federal employees. Most people are insured by their employers , which is a fourth country worth of regulations. Roughly 10% of the country buys on the individual market, which is regulated at the state-level by 50 different regulators, for a fifth country. Medicaid for the poor is a federal/state mixture, which makes it sixth. The uninsured pay their bills a variety of ways, from charity care to sticker price. So we don't really have a health system, we have seven health payment systems.
If we were Canada or the UK, and we didn't have significant Checks and Balances in the policy-making arms of the government, we could do what any smart engineer would do in this situation and start a massive project to replace these seven systems with one system. But we aren't that country. Every American is convinced that his health insurance is great, therefore he will simply not believe your new system will be better for him, therefore he will bitch at his Senator if you try to (for example) let poor people formerly on Medicaid visit his VA Hospital. And getting 51 Senators (or 50 and the VP), and 218 House members to agree to do anything like that has proven to be damn near impossible. You can get them to agree to pour money into one section of the system or another, but they don't change people's health care very often.
So what Obama did was take the least popular one of those systems (the uninsured), and send half of them to Medicaid and half to the Individual Market in a manner reminiscent of the Dutch. He changed the individual market so it is more affordable. In other words the Affordable Care Act had to have the same amount of regulations in it as the entirety of Dutch law relating to Dutch health insurance. Since it kept five of the other six system it also had to include a lot of language/code to insure compatibility with those systems. For example a student whose dad (with custody) is on Medicare, Step-mom is eligible for insurance through her job and the VA, and Mom-mom (no custody) has a policy on the Exchange. Is the kid eligible for the Exchange policy, the VA policy, or does stepmom have to switch over to her job's insurance?
It possible that in China the technocrats who run the Communist party could all have learned a proposal this complicated in a year or so's debate without majorly neglecting their other duties. But we aren't China. We aren't led by nameless suits whose entire role is to exude policy confidence. We are led by us. And it turns out we aren't smart enough to learn a half-dozen slightly different versions of the Dutch system in eight months. Frankly I don't blame us.
What we are smart enough to do is learn the outlines of the ideas, to a surprisingly high level of detail in many areas; and then muddle through the rest the best we can. This is what happens in a democracy with Checks and Balances, entrenched interests (ie: people calling their Congressman in panic when their insurance changes), and an independent legislature whenever anyone tries to fix any major problem.
Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call (Score:5, Informative)
There was ***NOTHING*** bipartisan about the Affordable Care Act. It was passed without a single Republican vote and lots of dirty parliamentary tricks.
The Democrats and the Obama administration own this.
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... the debate and drafting of the ACA, it was quite the bipartisan cluster**k
There was ***NOTHING*** bipartisan about the Affordable Care Act. It was passed without a single Republican vote and lots of dirty parliamentary tricks. The Democrats and the Obama administration own this.
I'm referring to the entire process, not the final vote. The whole process brought out lots of idiocy from both political parties.
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ObamaCare “adopts the ‘individual mandate’ concept from the conservative Heritage Foundation,” Jonathan Alter wrote recently in The Washington Post. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews makes the same claim, asserting that Republican support of a mandate “has its roots in a proposal by the conservative Heritage Foundation.” Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and others have made similar claims.
The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through “adverse selection” (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.
My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid “with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy.”
My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.
But the version of the health insurance mandate Heritage and I supported in the 1990s had three critical features. First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on “catastrophic” costs — so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.
Second, we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage, rather than by a stick.
And third, in the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the “mandate” was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement.
Complexity sucks.
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"debate" Isn't that kind of the point? Bipartisanship I mean.
Except it didn't really happen in a bipartisan manner. For example one night I watched CSPAN and republicans were suggesting quite reasonable amendments and the democratic controlled committee voted each proposal down immediately without debate or further consideration. It seemed that the democratic party leadership had negotiated something in the back rooms between themselves and their lobbyists and no changes were permitted.
This demonstrated the most fundamental problem with the health reform legislati
Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call (Score:5, Informative)
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Of course, that's from Fox News so not only is it out of context, it's not even the full sentence: “But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.”
Politifact [politifact.com] has a little write-up on it, if you'd care to educate yourself.
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Far from a sympathetic character, that one.
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Re:Somewhere 10,000 contractors get a call (Score:4, Interesting)
As for your hyperbolic nonsense about the Independent Payment Advisory Board: someone has to decide what should and should not be covered, and that person can not and never has been your doctor. Right now it's your health insurance company, seeking to maximize its profits. In the future it will be a panel appointed by the president and subject to senate confirmation. This is an improvement.
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In Mass. but the Netherlands uses a similar system also. They spend less, have lower mortality, and greater life expectancy than we do.
It's totally true that the ideas underlying the ACA have been hashed about since they were first proposed by the GOP in 1993's HEART act, tested in the real world, and proven.
The idea of making people register in order to view plans though, that was just bad web application
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Its the mandatory coverage levels that will sway most Americans to abandon this. Retirees don't need birth control. Most people don't need psychiatric care. Most people won't be seeking gender reassignment surgery. But now everyone has to pay for it and it isn't cheap.
Central planning sucks, no matter who is at the top.
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Prove it.
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> > "Everyone knew what was in it"
> Prove it.
Prove they didn't.
Oh, is that a stupid reply? Yes it is. You can't prove either thing in a meaningful way but you can look at the situation and draw a reasonably solid conclusion.
1. The basic structure of the law was fleshed out a more than a decade earlier by the Heritage Foundation. It was a well known idea.
2. The basic model was put into effect in Massachusetts years earlier. People knew how it worked in practice.
3. The ACA was discussed for months in
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It was debated for 8 months.
That gave the politicians extra time for bri..er..um..donations
Everyone knew what was in it,
Sweeping generalization that cannot be proved
regardless of what Rush Limbaugh told you.
As is he is the conscienciousnes of America. He is just another noise on the media stream with too much money, drugs, hot air, etc etc.
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People keep saying this, but they really don't understand the scope of what healthcare.gov actually is.
This system integrates every health insurance company, in every state. Each health care company will be using a different, internally developed proprietary system, potentially more than one, each state will have different laws which affect the manner in which healthcare can be offered. It then attempts to present all that data to the consumer in a meaningful and comparable way. The fact that it works at al
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I'd just like to point out that Obama has presented all the required proposed budgets to Congress. Of course the Presidents budget is just a wish list and it's up to Congress to actually develop and pass one.
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Not really. Or not really in the sense of it being bad or good or anything. People hatch schemes all the time that are just plans with big pictures in mind. The problem we face is that schemes we hear about are usually the ones that either go wrong or do wrong to somebody. But there are a lot that do good or don't do anything at all.
In other words, I think you are reading into it too much.
And as a disclaimer, I'm positively against Obamacare on lots of grounds outside but including the hogwash presented as
Calling it a thcheme (Score:3)
In reality, it is also delivering a subjective opinion about the plan by calling it a scheme.
Unless Zients's plan is to sprinkle parentheses liberally on the project [wikipedia.org].
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But he's not analyzing something, he's trying to fix a broken incomplete project. He might be brilliant in his field but that doesn't mean he's an expert project manager or knows enough about software for his "end of November" prediction to have any credibility.
Of course that's not really a bad thing, if your priority is simply to get it up and running the current team who bungled it is still the best bet. Zients might just be shuffling deckchairs in an effort to satisfy critics while they try to fix the co
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Re:Raft of failures (Score:4, Insightful)