If you want to track progress on the fixes to the web site, the government has set up a new Twitter account.
Please help us. If we don't get this site running, we'll get the worst punishment a government employee can get: Time off with pay.
— HealthCareDotGov (@HealthDotGov) October 31, 2013
The insurance market was “unregulated before ObamaCare“?
Really?
Actually, this is a typical tactic of the left. Decry and lie about problems caused by a “lack of regulation” that are actually caused by overregulation, then demand more regulation to fix them. It’s the same playbook they used in the financial crisis.
By the way, since Sebelius doesn’t seem to think that security is important, you’d be a fool to use it any time soon.
[Update a few minutes later]
I expect a plethora of campaign posters featuring the word, “Whatever.”
Imagine it said as two separate words, accent on the second, Valley-Girl style, like one of Bart’s girlfriends in The Simpsons. “What Evar.”
Hell, we may ever hear it in the opening of SNL on Saturday.
[Update a few minutes later]
HHS knew that it was a security risk, but plunged ahead anyway.
Of course.
[Update a few minutes later]
Of course not: “The system has never crashed.”
[Update a while later]
Five things we learned from today’s hearing: “Sibelius doesn’t seem to know anything about the law she is implementing.”
[Bumped]
The country’s in the very best of hands.
Some interesting prognostications from Ben Domenech:
Obamacare’s struggles have obviously vindicated the positioning of the free-market advocates, too – particularly the ones who have been most vociferous in their distrust of the manageability of Obamacare and Romneycare over the past decade and a half. Conservative and libertarian health policy experts like NCPA’s John Goodman, Cato’s Michael Cannon, Heritage’s Chris Jacobs, Heartland’s Peter Ferrara, and FreedomWorks’ Dean Clancy, who have held to that “this is going to be a train wreck” position despite the efforts of The Fixers, are the victors here. All have their favored alternative approaches to national health care policy reform, whether it be through tax credits, deductions, or full deductibility combined with a bigger investment in the safety net or risk pools. But they all share certain aspects in common: they ditch the mandate and exchange-based approach to health reform, and instead rely on individual responsibility and carrots to achieve universal access to care. And, more fundamentally, they all understood that no group of ”experts,” no matter how wise, could possibly predict and control one-fifth of the American economy – particularly one already so distorted by decades of misguided government intervention.
RTWT.
So am I. As I noted last week on Twitter when the new launch date was announced, it’s based on when it has to be ready, from a political standpoint, not when it can be ready from a technical one. It’s not a case where you can get a baby in a month by putting nine women on the job. And in fact, it has a lot in common with October 1st in that regard.
[Update a while later]
Big-government project, big failure:
The 1960s space program, of course, is a classic example of big government doing something successfully: Promising to put men on the moon within a decade, and doing it. But there are others.
Not far from me is Norris Dam, the very first dam built by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was filled in 1936, less than three years after the Tennessee Valley Authority Act passed Congress. Note that it was not less than three years after construction started, but less than three years after the act creating the agency that built it passed Congress. Norris Dam worked, and it’s still there today, more than 70 years later.
The Obamacare website — which took longer to create — doesn’t work, and certainly won’t be around in 70 years. And if you think about it, it seems like the moon landing was one of the last times the federal government delivered a big successful program ahead of schedule. I can’t think of many others since.
Unlike Norris Dam, the Olmsted Dam and Locks on the Ohio River were authorized by Congress in 1988, but a quarter-century later the project is only half-done. It has also overrun its budget by a factor of four.
Meanwhile, most of the interesting stuff being done in outer space is being done by private companies. (In fact, President Obama’s space policy approach, which emphasizes private enterprise, is one of his greatest policy successes.)
As it’s gotten bigger the federal government appears to have gotten less competent. Apollo was a success on its own terms, but the big government policies that followed — the War On Poverty, the War On Drugs, the War On Cancer — have all been pretty much failures, sometimes disastrous ones.
And that was when people running the government weren’t as glaringly incompetent as the current circus of clowns.
I met a traveler from a fallen land
Who said: A trashed and useless interface
Sits on a website. And linked on the page,
ne’er clicked,, a tattered image lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its artist well those passions read
Which yet survive, displayed on the useless screen,
The man that mocked us and the heart that bled:
And under the picture these words appear:
“My name is Barack Obama, President:
Look at my prices, ye insured, and despair!”
Nothing aside remains. From the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The sick and desperate souls stayed far away
As well they should.
Is it a black swan event?
An IT project with a cost overrun of 150% or more is in the black swan category. Such projects seriously disrupt businesses and costs some workers their careers, he said.
“You can’t really forecast which [IT projects] are going to blow up,” said Budzier, though in hindsight reasons like too tight deadlines may become clear. A tell-tale clue of problems ahead is a categorization of a project as “unique,” he said.
“If your system integrator, if your in-house IT, if everybody tells you that this project is unique, that’s a clear sign that this is going to go massively wrong,” said Budzier.
As Bruce Webster notes in email:
Of course, the natural tendency on the part of HHS & the Administration will be to minimize [as opposed to underpromise and overdeliver] the estimates of how long it’s going to take to fix things — and those estimates will almost certainly be wrong. So what we may see is the ‘Never-Ending Story’ pattern, where for several months they’re perpetually 4-6 weeks away from having Healthcare.gov working properly.
If I were in charge? I’d pull the plug completely and give no completion date at all until the website reconstruction was at a point where I felt comfortable opening it up for public alpha testing. Based on how the alpha testing went, I might announce a subsequent date for beta testing; and if that went well, then and only then would I announce a planned date to go live.
But they’ll find it politically impossible to do that. They’ve put themselves in a box with this legislative atrocity. It’s a Rubik’s cube that someone took apart and put back together to render it unsolvable and, so far, ObamaCare has caused far more people to lose their insurance than to get it.
I hope this costs more than “some workers their careers.” It should be an asteroid slamming into an ideology.
[Update while later]
More from Bruce Webster: ObamaCare and the Project of Doom:
Let me start by saying: there is no royal road to software. Good intentions, earnest efforts, and noble causes don’t count for jack. As I told John Fund over at National Review, saying (as SecHHS Kathleen Sebelius did), “We needed five years but only had two” boggles the mind. It is an admission, inadvertent or otherwise, of profoundly irrational and childish thinking, of magical thinking, if you will. “Clap! Clap to keep Tinkerbell alive!” That type of thinking.
There’s a lot of that type of thinking going on in this administration.
[Bumped]
[Afternoon update]
Kirsten Powers isn’t in denial. The ObamaCare roll out was a disaster for “progressive” politics.
Good.
…cracks:
Alternate headline: The rats are jumping off the sinking ObamaCare ship. Remember all that talk about how damaged the GOP was after the Obama/Reid government shutdown? My, how things change in just a week. No longer able to obsess over Ted Cruz, the media realizes what a shambles the Democrats have become.
They’re not happy about it, either, but they’ve reached a point at which they can’t ignore it any more.
It’s time to propose some.
Yes, I think it’s ripe now, thanks to the monumental cluster effery of the administration.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Republicans next strategy to kill this monstrosity:
Alexander, the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has a plan for replacing Obamacare. It includes providing governors with more flexibility in operating state Medicaid programs, strengthening workplace wellness programs, permitting small businesses to pool their resources and offer lower-cost insurance plans for employees, expanding opportunities for consumers to purchase insurance across state lines and providing greater access to health savings accounts.
Alexander said his plan offers “step-by-step reforms that would reduce the costs of healthcare.”
Alexander isn’t alone in advocating for a process known as “repeal and replace.” The House Republican Study Committee, a conservative group within the GOP caucus, also has offered an Obamacare alternative that it intends to continue pursuing.
“American families and businesses deserve and demand real solutions to the serious problems that exist in our healthcare system,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the committee chairman. “The RSC’s American Health Care Reform Act is a common-sense bill that will lower costs using conservative, free-market solutions which give American families more choices without the unworkable mandates and billions in taxes included in President Obama’s healthcare law.”
The 200-page bill offers $20,000 in tax deductions to families and a $7,500 deduction to individuals to purchase insurance from vendors in any state — thus, supporters say, allowing people to save money by selecting lower-cost providers.
The measure also offers altered proposals to some of the more popular aspects of Obamacare – creation of a $25 billion fund to lower costs for those afflicted with pre-existing conditions, permitting people to carry their insurance from job to job and permitting coverage for adult children up to age 26.
That last remains stupid, regardless of how popular it is.
Why ObamaCare is similar to it:
…the Affordable Care Act’s insurance market reforms have created a system prone to what Charles Perrow dubbed “Normal Accidents.” By “normal,” he didn’t mean “minor” — the lead exhibit was Three Mile Island. Rather, he meant something like “hard to avoid.” The system is both complex and tightly coupled: All the pieces are interdependent, so a failure in one part is apt to cascade throughout the market. This is not a system where you want to start pulling out one piece to see how well the rest can get along without it.
The administration clearly understood this — right up to the point where a major component failed. Now it’s apparently planning to keep the reactor running with as many pieces as possible in the hopes that none of it will unexpectedly blow up. This is not sound policy thinking, or even sound political thinking, and I think that all of us who care about keeping insurance available for ordinary Americans should try to talk them out of it — for their good, as well as our own.
Sound policy thinking is not their hallmark.
As an aside, Perrow’s book is excellent — I used it for doing case studies of various tightly-coupled complex disasters when I was doing contract work for S&MA at NASA HQ a few years ago.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The buck stops with Obama:
He’s not very competent, and like most people who aren’t very competent, he tends to hire people who are no more competent than he. As they say: First rate people hire first rate people. Second rate people hire third rate people.
Except he seems to be a third rater hiring fourth raters. And this was obvious to some of us in 2008, but not enough, then or four years later.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama and Sebelius: The dog ate my homework:
The collapse of the Obamacare project over the first three weeks offers no such pathways away from responsibility. Obama and his team demanded that Congress pass the Affordable Care Act so that they could impose their own ideas of central-planning reform on the health-care industry, which makes up a sixth of the American economy.
It passed with no Republican votes, and thanks to its tax provisions, provides most of its own revenue streams. The Department of Health and Human Services has had 42 months to prepare for the rollout of the web exchange, the critical tool that would allow people to purchase mandated insurance policies under government supervision.
In short, the ACA was the Obama administration’s own bid to prove that activist, large-scale government was superior in innovation and competency. Instead, it has become a signature example of the lack of accountability, incompetence, and rank dishonesty that activist, large-scale government creates and protects. And that was just on performance. Despite the 42 months lead time and the outlay of $400 million, the web portal failed immediately, and two successive weekends of repair couldn’t make it work.
That’s actually the best news. One couldn’t have demonstrated Hayek’s thesis of the knowledge problem more spectacularly than this belly flop of a swan dive.
[Update a while later]
OK, if you don’t like the TMI analogy, how about the Titanic?
The Obama administration had three years to build Healthcare.gov, a website that is not fundamentally revolutionary when compared to the likes of Progressive.com or Amazon.com. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare during a window when they controlled all power in Washington, and were more concerned about passing a health care law than with passing a good health care law. Most of them never bothered to read the law they passed. Many of them sold their votes for pork or empty promises. While the Titanic had little advance warning of the iceberg, the Obama administration was warned by stress tests months before the site’s launch that Healthcare.gov would crash. But they did not heed those warnings.
Similar unjustified arrogance and hubris was involved.
Who knew so many of them were Democrats?
“If the problems are intense as they are this morning, then maybe we would have to consider a short delay in terms of the individual mandate,” New Jersey Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell, told Yahoo News on Wednesday….Pascrell joins Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Sens. Jean Shahaan and Joe Manchin in expressing support for extended enrollment and individual mandate deadlines.
Why isn’t Harry Reid denouncing these terrorists, these people trying to sabotage settled law?
[Update a cou0ple minutes later]
Joe Manchin is an anarchist Democrat who hates poor people and wants them to be sick:
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is burnishing his “blue dog” credentials and working on a bill that would delay Obamacare’s mandate by a year.
What a monster.