Will Obamacare get its act together in time?

[Imran Siddiqui]

I don't mention Hitler nearly as much.

There is still time!

[kentonio]

You'll know when the time is reich.

[DinoDoc]

Obamacare Website Failure Threatens Health Coverage For Millions Of Americans

[F]ailure of this magnitude would discredit a core premise of this presidency, that government can do big things to improve Americans' lives.

So which paper do you guys figure will have the first story detailing the WH quietly a delay in the individual mandate if these issue persist into November? Follow-up question, If that happens should the GOP allow it to happen?

[Nikolai]

but then i might have to argue with people on the comments section of news stories

What news stories?

[Sava]

What news stories?

The ones where people falsely accuse others of making death threats.

[Captain ******* Kirk]

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan"...

The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration's regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.

These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law's benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.

But unless they live in Washington state, Nevada, Colorado, and Kentucky, they can't now get on an exchange site to see their plan options, new prices, and provider directories so they can make an informed decision before they lose their coverage.

This is a fine mess.

Week Two of the Obamacare Federal Health Insurance Exchange Rollout––No Improvement

[Captain ******* Kirk]

Disclosure: I really like the principles of universal coverage under the Affordable Care Act, and I hope it will succeed. But the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov represents everything that President Obama promised would be different about his administration—but isn’t. Obama promised open innovation and transparency. Yet startups and hackers are forced to take a backseat to state-run websites, a mediocre government contractor secured the lucrative deal to build the federal exchange, and both HealthCare.gov’s code and enrollment numbers are locked up by tight-lipped bureaucrats.

The president’s signature bill is a cluster of authoritarianism, cronyism, and secrecy. While there have been dozens of reports about the symptoms of Obamacare’s technical problems, there is a single cause: HealthCare.gov was designed as an innovation-free zone.

Obamacare’s Rollout Is a Disaster That Didn’t Have to Happen: How cronyism, secrecy, and authoritarianism doomed Obamacare, and why it was all so unnecessary

[Aeson]

I hear healthcare related traffic gets big bids from advertisers. They should slap up some ads and help pay down the debt ...

[DinoDoc]

The One Disheartening Number That Suggests HealthCare.gov Will Not Be Fixed Anytime Soon

We all know by now that Healthcare.gov is an utter mess. The next question: How long will it take to fix?

The New York Times this weekend had a pretty dispiriting answer:

Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.

That sounds bad already. But then there was this head-turner: “One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.”

Five million lines of code? Well, if that seems like a lot, consider that the site as a whole apparently contains 500 million lines of code. “By comparison,” the Times notes, “a large bank’s computer system is typically about one fifth that size.”

OK, so the site is gargantuan, as measured by lines of code. These numbers are clearly meant to underscore the enormity of the task at hand in building (and fixing) a site the size of Healthcare.gov. But the software developers I’ve talked to see it a little differently. If the site really contains 500 million lines of code, they say, that’s a strong hint that the programmers involved are doing something wrong. (Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, by the way, contained some 50 million lines of code, and was criticized for being slow and bloated at that.) And if they’re using the number of lines of code as a metric for progress and project scope, that may be indicative of serious dysfunction in the process.

Dan Check, Slate’s vice president for technology, puts it this way: “If you contract something out and get 500 million lines of code back, there’s no way it’s going to work correctly.”

Why? Because as Jeff Atwood, co-founder of the coding question-and-answer site Stack Overflow, wrote in 2006: “Here's the single most important decision you can make on your software project if you want it to be successful: keep it small. Small may not accomplish much, but the odds of outright failure—a disturbingly common outcome for most software projects—(are) low.”

Sure, big projects require more code than small ones. But my programmer friends tell me a number like 500 million suggests the Healthcare.gov contractors may be writing their own code in many places where they'd be better off relying on open-source external libraries. They may also be solving problems via copy-and-paste rather than more elegant programming techniques such as inheritance or polymorphism.

If true, that could be a product of incompetence, but it could also be that the contractors' incentives are misaligned. In the 1996 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer explained the problem with using lines of code as a key metric for software contractors:

In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand lines of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 50K-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. … And we kept trying to convince them—hey, if we have—a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less K-LOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh! Anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing.

So if, as the Times piece suggests, the contractors responsible for fixing HealthCare.gov are already thinking about the task in terms of millions of lines of code, the situation may be even worse than we thought. It’s not just that the problem is large in scope—it’s that the people in charge of fixing it are going about it all wrong.

This is getting ridiculous.

[Sava]

This is getting ridiculous.

So win some elections and get the law changed.

oh yeah that's right... you can't

[DinoDoc]

Agreed Sava. After all, All is Well with the law:

[Ben Kenobi]

So win some elections and get the law changed.

Which is what happened in 2010, did it not?

[Sava]

Agreed Sava. After all, All is Well with the law:

You'd be much more credible if you offered solutions... instead of believing in an ideology that wants to take us back to... well... a social order that resembles prehistoric human societies.

At least the libertarians only want to take us back to the 19th century.

[DinoDoc]

You'd be much more credible if you offered solutions...

Why do I need to offer a solution in order to tell people that what is being done currently seems to be akin to something you might have put together in a drug addled haze?

[Captain ******* Kirk]