Acres of coverage has been written about how bad the government website for Obamacare is. From the brilliantly insightful (
Borepatch on the inevitable failure of the "Surge" to fix it) to the completely asinine (some moron on the Book of Faces who said, "The reason Republicans are so upset about the Obamacare website is because they're used to how easy it is to buy a gun"). I won't try to match the sublime or the ridiculous. I'll just say this.
The flowchart to getting the website done was probably three or four steps. Executive orders HHS to do it. HHS signs the crony contract with CGI (
what?) (and look!
The crony loves terrorists, too!). CGI creates web site. Maybe another step for auditing.
Since they couldn't get that flow right, what chance do you think there is they can get this flow right?
(
Source - This is a bit dated, so I don't know if it's accurate. It dates back to 2010, when the law was fresh, so chances are there are some errors in it, but the complexity is approximately right.)
I worked on a project once that had 8 months to the deadline. The analyst fooled around and took 7 months and three weeks to give the programmers a final design so it had to be written in one week. But wait! The analyst went on vacation to Sweden for two weeks and was unavailable to even answer questions about the design. As I understand the problems with the Obamacare on-line site one thing stands out. The administration would not make any decisions and wrote no regulations until after the 2012 election because they didn't want anything to leak that would make Obama look bad. After the election the government bureaucracy took over and they spent months writing the regulations and requirements in the manner only the government can do. This was doomed from the start because of these decisions. It never mattered to the decision makers if it worked or if it was even a satisfactory system, all that mattered was that it be delayed and kept secret as long as possible. This is something the government shouldn't do and hiring a college buddy to do it was incredibly stupid. This will never work right. There is good news though. The bar has now been set so low that no matter what happens the compliant media can call it a success. Watch and see, when sometime down the road we discover that the Chinese hacked into it and stole 50 million medical records someone will have the gal to say it could have been worse.
ReplyDelete