Obamacare / Affordable Care Act : classic or dud?

Officials Were Warned About Health Site Woes

The McKinsey report found that the effort was at risk because of issues including “significant dependency on external parties/contractors,” as well as “insufficient time and scope of end-to-end testing,” and “parallel stacking of all phases,” all predictions that have turned out to be accurate. Briefings on the report were held in the spring at the White House and at the headquarters of the Health and Human Services Department and for leaders at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, congressional investigators said.

...

House Republicans have latched on to a final report by the Mitre Corporation, one of the main firms hired to assess the security of the site, which said on Oct. 11, 11 days after the site went live, that it was “unable to adequately test the confidentiality and integrity” of the health exchange. Mitre went on to say that a “complete end-to-end testing” of the site “never occurred.”

Important:

...And it is unclear how many fixes remain to be made, because the list keeps changing.

This issue (which is very common in software development) is going to make things complicated for the near term.

walkercare: "a plan that allows Walker to reject Obamacare and turn down federal money offered to help states pay for expansion of Medicaid [but] also may make it possible for Wisconsin to still provide health coverage to many of the state's poor and working poor residents"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/19/246003602/wisconsin-chooses-its-own-path-to-overhaul-medicaid

"will cost state taxpayers an additional $460 million through 2020..."

Yeah, but that's $460 million of their money, not taken from the stupid tax-and-spend government! Oh wait, I mean, look over there ... !

(runs away)

the funny part about that quote is the idea that walker gives half a shit about wisconsin's "poor and working poor residents"

"will cost state taxpayers an additional $460 million through 2020..."

― reggie (qualmsley), Tuesday, November 19, 2013 2:28 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the price tag of self-reliance

So, uh, no surprise: health care site works where states allow exchanges to happen.

the state sites work, not the fed one, right?

Federalism rearing its beautiful head.

federalism > feudalism

$174MM for the fed's broken website. I wonder what California paid.

Less contractors involved, less options needed

The backend theoretically would be way less complicated for sure.

So if every state built their own, would the fed one even be needed?

yeah I don't think so.

maybe it says in the FAQ

http://obamacarefacts.com/insurance-exchange/california-health-insurance-exchange.php

yeah the oregon article posted above indicates that the states with their own websites are running them independently of the federal version. oregon is working with oracle on its (non-functioning) website, and in the past week they've taken down their claim that online registration should be working by the end of the month. instead they're pointing people to PDF applications and local "application fairs."

Since google is giving the government all of our emails and stuff you'd think we could ask them to set up our health care website.

http://www.texasobserver.org/a-galveston-med-student-describes-life-and-death-in-the-safety-net

New Tech Worries Loom for Health Law

...He said people are working around the clock, "fixing the functional defects" of the site. "There's still a lot of moving parts. It wouldn't be prudent to give 100% guarantees about where we are going to be, but I think we are on the right track," he said.

...But Mr. Swedish said it was too soon to write off the Affordable Care Act. "I'd say the potential is there for a significant uptake" in consumers wanting to sign up for coverage, he said. Then "we will be communicating with the young. We will be communicating with the Hispanic community."

Connecticut, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Washington [are] on track to exceed their enrollment targets. [. . .] Last week, [New York] officials reported that close to fifty thousand people had signed up for health insurance through the state’s new Web site, NY State of Health, with about half of them taking out private plans and half enrolling in Medicaid. “I would say we are seeing great interest in New York, and we are very pleased with our enrollment numbers,” Danielle Holahan, the deputy director for NY State of Health, said.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/11/americans-like-obamacare-where-they-can-get-it.html?currentPage=all

California Won't Let Insurers Reinstate Policies, Pitting Backers Against Each Other

Meeting Thursday, the board of California's health-insurance exchange unanimously decided to stick to its stance blocking older policies that don't meet the law's coverage requirements. It won swift praise from some state lawmakers.

...

Among states with Democratic governors, nine including California have said they won't allow carriers to renew the plans in 2014, seven have said they will and four were still deciding as of Thursday.

good. those plans were bullshit

Re: sign-up rates, isn't it still pretty nebulous how many people have signed up vs. how many people have signed up and, as required, paid the first month's fee?

Obamacare signup delayed -- for 2015

After the many bumps, ruts and roadblocks the Affordable Care Act has run into, health officials in Washington have decided to delay open enrollment in Obamacare -- not this year, but a year down the road.

The Department of Health and Human Services wants to give insurers, consumers and engineers more time to avoid the first go-round's site crashes, coverage train wrecks and cost surprises.
It has moved the start of next year's open enrollment from October 15 to November 15 and extended the sign-up period from roughly seven weeks to eight, an HHS official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told CNN.

Nothing to do with an election. Nope.

Don't know if it's been discussed here but...

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=086_1385148641

Four in Ten Uninsured Americans Still Haven't Heard Anything About the Obamacare Exchanges
http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/11/four-out-ten-uninsured-american-havent-heard-anything-about-obamacare-exchanges/355422

What, don't they go on the internet?

my gf the unicorn

http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx

secretary kerry and all the ayatollahs covering for healthcare.gov's glitches?

CNN analysis: No Obamacare subsidy for some low-income Americans

One of the basic tenets of Obamacare is that the government will help lower-income Americans -- anyone making less than about $45,900 a year -- pay for the health insurance everyone is now mandated to have.
But a CNN analysis shows that in the largest city in nearly every state, many low-income younger Americans won't get any subsidy at all. Administration officials said the reason so many Americans won't receive a subsidy is that the cost of insurance is lower than the government initially expected. Subsidies are calculated using a complicated formula based on the cost of insurance premiums, which can vary drastically from state to state, and even county to county.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-rural-kentucky-health-care-debate-takes-back-seat-as-people-sign-up-for-insurance/2013/11/23/449dc6e0-5465-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_print.html

If the health-care law is having a troubled rollout across the country, Kentucky — and Breathitt County in particular — shows what can happen in a place where things are working as the law’s supporters envisioned.

One reason is that the state set up its own health-insurance exchange, sidestepping the troubled federal one. Also, Gov. Steve Beshear (D) is the only Southern governor to sign on to expanded eligibility parameters for Medicaid, the federal health-insurance program for the poor.

duelling links!!

i bet the poor won't be able to afford romneycare, and the old will be subject to death panels

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/26/wonkbook-is-obamacare-turning-the-corner/

This guy is so horrible:

One of the Beltway's best-known pundits gave credence this week to perhaps the fringiest of all Obamacare conspiracy theories.

In an interview on Monday with the conservative Newsmax, Time's Mark Halperin said that so-called "death panels" are enshrined in the Affordable Care Act.

"It's going to be a huge issue," Halperin said. "And that's something else about which the President was not fully forthcoming or straight-forward."

"So, you believe there will be rationing, a.k.a 'death panels'?" host Steve Malzberg asked Halperin, the co-author of the 2012 election chronicle "Double Down."

"It's built into the plan. It's not like a guess or like a judgment. That's going to be part of how costs are controlled," Halperin said.

Anyone who's ever done a widespread implementation across multiple systems with competitive constituencies knew that this shitshow was going to happen. Nobody does this well--not Amazon, not Facebook, not Snapchat, not Obama, not anyone. Anyone remember this? And yet the planes keep flying.

The failure rate of big government IT projects is mind-croggingly huge. Just off the top of my head there's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-to-blow-6-billion-on-a-tech-project/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/why-us-government-it-fails-so-hard-so-often/

Shocked that any of this works...

To be clear: the ACA website was created by a private company.

Most of these sites are created by a private corp.

they're talking about death panels again so I guess the website is almost fixed

can't wait to be put to death by a death panel frankly

take heart. the audit will end someday.

been reading a lot of gleeful columns by byron york lately, heavily slanted and piling-on about the aca's inherent, fatal failures, and how it will doom not only the act, but poison the public against the notion of big gov't programs overall. so it was good to go back and re-read this exchange, in 2008, between york and matt taibbi.

Got three e-mails this morning from the "Health Insurance Marketplace." They've got a logo and everything. My account has been created, they've confirmed my subscription change, I've apparently signed up for e-mail updates, and I can join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.

Either the real ACA outreach is in even more disarray than advertised, or the grifters are doing just fine.

so now too many people are signing up?

http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/12/03/us-usa-healthcare-idINBRE9AR05M20131203

uh oh, we'd better cut taxes, and eliminate long term unemployment insurance

I checked out the plans and punched in our income and discovered that I don't qualify for any kind of subsidy, so whether or not I sign up this december or sign up maybe next fall seemed less urgent. The tax penalty in year one of ACA is low, so it isn't a big incentive, yet.

Margaret Talbot's experiences.

haha somehow amongst all the migrating of old plans to new plans, my company incorrectly changed the addresses of 2.3 million customers, nice work applause all around

hey play fair ALEC!

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2013/12/obamacare_california_gop_website.php

ratfucking!

Gallup: Majority of Americans Want Major Changes to Health Law