The GOP Underfunded The IT Part Of The ACA

[TheMastersNemesis]

The start up was underfunded from the very beginning. And 4 years of sabotage has had its effect. What can you expects when the ACA has been obstructed all along. It was crippled from the beginning like a duck with a broken wing.

And if ACA fails probably over 100 million Americans will be without health care because the GOP plan will leave that many people without insurance or access to a doctor. There simply won't be any health care for 70% of the population. Add up what their policies would do. And how many seniors will lose their health care with vouchers? And how many poor people would have no health care with no Medicaid.

This country will not survive if only about 30% of the populace has health care. If an epidemic ever happened under such conditions we would be toast.

[sakabatou]

1. That's there plan: get sick and die

[FarCenter]

2. They have spent about $500 million on ACA IT so far -- That's a lot of IT.

[TheMastersNemesis]

3. The Many States Not Creating Exchanges Added To The Complexity To The Site.

The original plan was to have a federal pass through to the state exchanges. They had to design a system for all the states that refused to participate as well as the federal system.

[KY5]

4. FALSE.

Update, Oct. 30: In testimony on Capitol Hill, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, in response to a direct question: “Congresswoman, we have spent about $118 million on the website itself, and about $56 million has been expended on other IT to support the web.”

That adds up to $174 million.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/24/how-much-did-healthcare-gov-cost/

[FarCenter]

6. I was using the earlier Sunlight estimates. $174 is still a lot of money.

[KY5]

12. Fair enough.

But they wipe their ass with that amount at the DoD.

[VanillaRhapsody]

5. You have no idea the scope of this thing....

[FarCenter]

7. For $174 million I could build a site that handles more than 248 signups per day.

BRUTAL: OBAMACARE HAD JUST 248 SIGNUPS IN FIRST DAYS

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-obamacare-had-just-248-signups-in-first-days-2013-10

[VanillaRhapsody]

8. its NOT just about putting people into one database dude!

signing up is not purchasing....THAT's where it gets complex...and THAT's why so many were not successful.

Passing data from one system to another...to hundreds of possibilities ALL with their own eccentricities...

You are obviously not a programmer or you would know that.

A minor flaw in one spot...could make traffic everywhere come to a standstill.

[FarCenter]

9. No, my responsibilities only covered a portfolio of 200+ applications on mainframe, Unix and Windows

Which communicated with systems in a few hundred other companies.

But you are correct -- I was no longer writing code. At least not much.

[VanillaRhapsody]

14. So I take it you were in Networking?

and even if you were "hardware and networking"....you should know better.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

22. did you even read the post you responded to?

coding 200+ applications is NOT 'hardware and networking' ...

sP

[SoapBox]

13. I agree!

I am anything but an expert, HOWEVER my common sense tells me that this is a massive and hugely complex undertaking.

I tire of the lame media and "armchair experts" blathering on about the failures. Give it a rest folks while problems are fixed. All the bitching, pissing and moaning is play'n right into the hands of the PukeBaggers.

[jtuck004]

15. Sebelius said the hub, the piece that handles the transaction procesing between

the various sources, is the thing that is working the BEST.

That is the piece that is working - so proud of it they did a whole page: http://www.hhs.gov/digitalstrategy/blog/2013/10/marketplace-data-services-hub.html

One doesn't need to be a programmer to read it, btw.

[VanillaRhapsody]

16. those pages are written for everything done through HHS...that's nothing new.

What they are saying IS all the other pieces that the HUB connects TO are the problems now...THAT is a GOOD sign!

[jtuck004]

18. In the post above it said "Passing data from one system to another...to hundreds of possibilities"

That act of passing data from one system to another IS the hub. And that part is working fine, if that writing is to be believed. Then again, there is so much smoke being blown about this it's hard to look at most anyone talking about it as anything but some lying used-car salesperson.

If what you are saying is true, then all those people who sat before congress and said their pieces were working committed perjury. Yet there seems to be no public recognition of those people being taken to task for what would be an obvious failing and in violation of a contract which they were paid taxpayer money for, so I doubt that is a valid excuse.

And that leaves us with a botched up management of the task where it all ties together. Either people who were incompetent, which I don't believe, or people who were truly clueless when it came time to figure out that they needed more help..

After having worked with more than one government installation, with tens of thousands of users, and thousands of servers all accessing data in different places, all tied together in various ways, both in networking and programming, and that's just the non-classified side, it's my own personal opinion that it was the latter.

You can, of course, think what you want, but given that we have installations with a billion unique hits a month that don't fall from such traffic, working with far more connections as well as larger and more numerous databases, some so vast that one must actually program the queries rather than using queries which are normally run against very large databases, as well as server technology which spins up pre-configured servers as demand appears, there are very few valid technical reasons for this thing to be falling on its face like it is. As well, if it were money problems, or contract problems, or congress holding things back, or any of the other dozens of excuses people are making, those would have been far more pubic. It's 2013, not 1980, for cryin' out loud.

Apparently the pres thinks so as well, so I am not sure why people seem to keep making up excuses that makes one think they are pretending to only deal with stupid people. There are a lot of people out there who have dealt with technology just as complex as this, and they have seen the same things happen over the years with the organizations they work with. It's nothing new. It's not the technology. It's the people that managed the project, who are now desperately scrambling for the help they should have gotten before.

[cui bono]

21. So wait... it's more complex to have someone sign up and not purchase as opposed to

having someone sign up AND purchase?

That doesn't sound right.

Are you a computer programmer then? You write code? What is your expertise in this area, I take it it's your profession?

[gopiscrap]

10. figures, the fucking GOP doesn't care about America

[cui bono]

11. I believe the GOP would do that. But who hired the company?

Not a very smart decision considering their track record.

[VanillaRhapsody]

17. their track record?

because you have seen one black mark against them....suddenly their track record is bad? You do know that Kentucky's site has been working all along...Guess who did theirs? That's right...CGI

[cui bono]

20. Well, it is a much smaller site. I think all the states' sites are functioning well.

But a lot more people need to use the Federal site.

So to what do you attribute the poor functioning of the site? I mean I realize that every site has its issues when it first goes up, but there's some reason behind this considering the amount of time there was for them to get it working. Perhaps it's whoever decided that people should have to sign up before browsing plans. I think it would have been better if they could just browse and then sign up when ready for purchase. I don't know, it's just disappointing though. Would've been nice for it not to have been quite as bumpy a start as it was.

It's a shame since we all knew the GOP was just looking for something to latch onto for criticism. Even though this is actually a small issue it's the one that is the first public experience with ACA so it's got the potential to have a great impact on public perception.

[VanillaRhapsody]

23. the Federal site has to work with all of these sites..

each has their own languages and idiosyncrasies. That is one of the hardest things for coders to overcome.

Writing code from scratch is one thing...making hundreds of applications "play nicely together" is much harder...

even IF the sites work as stand alone...the main hub has access them. This is no easy feat and WHY you cannot compare it to other large sites like Amazon.

This is like building a giant intranet that has to speak to many many many other "intranets" which are all different....all of them spit out data differently....that has to be overcome...on each and every one of them!

[Skittles]

19. aw, who could tell they would sabatage the ACA?

I mean, it was something they practically ADVERTISED

[IronLionZion]

24. But they can't do shit to underfund the blue states' systems

except try to discourage their uninsured conservatives from looking for themselves. My condolences to any liberals who have to live in these red states that are blocking the ACA exchanges and medicaid expansion.

so we are in a situation where poor people in blue states and poor liberals in particular are going to be healthier and more financially secure than the poor people in red states and poor conservatives in particular. Those folks may eventually notice they missed out and get royally pissed.

Is team GOP really that suicidal?

And on the IT point, this country has existed for 2 centuries without any websites all. People have signed up for stuff without instant gratification by using paper forms and local offices not that long ago. People complained the online systems were killing local jobs for things like travel agents, retail, and so on.