The Billion-Dollar Website 194
stoborrobots writes: The Government Accountability Office has investigated the cost blowouts associated with how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) handled the Healthcare.gov project. It has released a 60-page report entitled Healthcare.gov: Ineffective Planning and Oversight Practices Underscore the Need for Improved Contract Management, with a 5 page summary. The key takeaway messages are:
- CMS undertook the development of Healthcare.gov and its related systems without effective planning or oversight practices...
- [The task] was a complex effort with compressed time frames. To be expedient, CMS issued task orders ... when key technical requirements were unknown...
- CMS identified major performance issues ... but took only limited steps to hold the contractor accountable.
- CMS awarded a new contract to another firm [and the new contract's cost has doubled] due to changes such as new requirements and other enhancements...
Technical People (Score:5, Interesting)
Non technical people are not competent to commission technical work from technical people.
If you (as a government or large company) don't have your own technical people on staff to oversee the process and comprehend or write the specs, you're doomed. The contractors know well how to milk a cash cow, simply by adhering to the specs written by people who don't understand how to write specs.
Re:Technical People (Score:5, Insightful)
Non technical people are not competent to commission technical work from technical people.
If you (as a government or large company) don't have your own technical people on staff to oversee the process and comprehend or write the specs, you're doomed. The contractors know well how to milk a cash cow, simply by adhering to the specs written by people who don't understand how to write specs.
Sadly this is true, but it shouldn't be. Technical people should have the professionalism to analyse requirements and check that the requirements fit the purpose. Unfortunately the way of the world is that technical people would be quickly shuffled out of the way by sales and marketing if they started to reduce revenue by telling a customer what they really wanted instead of what the spec says.
Re:Technical People (Score:5, Insightful)
Technical people should have the professionalism to analyse requirements and check that the requirements fit the purpose.
Typically, they do. However you overlook one key component of this and then dump the blame completely on sales & marketing (not entirely unfair, they are typically huge scumbags). This requirements analysis and design phase costs more money than development. The cost for architecting software is far higher than simply building it. Clients typically do not want to pay for this and assume they know how to do it themselves. This is exactly what happened to healthcare.gov.
I have seen this happen with both state government and private corporation projects alike. I've never done a federal project, so I can't speak first hand about that, but I know people who have and they report the same is true when working for a federal agency.
So yes, part of the blame definitely should go to the sales & marketing bastards, but a very large chunk is on the client for not wanting to fork over the cash up front. This almost always results in spending even more cash later on to fix what people think are bugs but are really design failures which result from poor architecture and design processes.
Re:Technical People (Score:5, Insightful)
PLEASE Mod Parent up! I've been working on large government funded systems (defense and commercial) for 35+ years, and in my view programs are screwed from the beginning by overly-aggressive schedules for the up-front work. When the incomplete/absent requirements/architecture/design results in coding, or more often test and integration delays, they'll find more money and time. By then, it's too late.
Back when we had explicit waterfall milestones (requirements review, preliminary design review, etc), we could tell at PDR a program would fail as a result of incomplete or even incorrect requirements & architecture.
Unfortunately, the adoption of "Agile" in these organizations has reinforced the culture of "We don't need no stinking requirements! We can draw an architecture on a whiteboard in an afternoon", resulting in systems where you really can't say anything intelligent about how long it will take to complete them, because you have no fscking idea what "complete" actually is.
And this -should not be a revelation-, at least to anyone who has read "Mythical Man-Month," which will be 40 years old next year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Thank God I'm getting ready to retire.
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Thank God I'm getting ready to retire.
Stock up on essentials now. Or even sell everything and retire to a warm island. It's only getting worse here.
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My proposition isn't about getting what you want, directly. It is about getting the current system of Dem/Rep out of shared power. For that, you need every fringe and near fringe voter to choose against the current system. Take the 20% far left, and the 20% far right, and make them believe they can change Washington politics, and we will see a change in Federal control.
The two groups aren't aligned on many things, but the issues common to both are privacy rights and government spying, our latest wars, and b
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I'd say it unless they nominate Hillary Clinton in 2016. I don't care what the candidate is like personally. I just want to break the deadlock we are living under right now.
Besides, it's not like they are going to be able to do anything anyway. Congress certainly isn't going to change enough in one election allow it. But it will eventually change if my split ticket won in 2016. Basically, long term, it is the only hope I see for the country, and it's only a glimmer at that.
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Agile is not about not needing requirements. It's about the fact that any complex project will have requirement changes and the project and the people on the project need to deal with those changes quickly. It's like that saying, "the only constant in the world is change." Rather than avoiding change and try to spec out everything in advance (which cannot be done), embrace it and deal with it so it minimizes disruption.
There are meetings to gather requirements, but those meetings are two-way; you also prese
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Kool-aid...
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Agile is not about not needing requirements. It's about the fact that any complex project will have requirement changes and the project and the people on the project need to deal with those changes quickly. It's like that saying, "the only constant in the world is change." Rather than avoiding change and try to spec out everything in advance (which cannot be done), embrace it and deal with it so it minimizes disruption.
There are meetings to gather requirements, but those meetings are two-way; you also present and let clients play around with whatever you have and gather feedback and incorporating those feedback into the next iteration. By the time you deliver the product, there shouldn't be any surprises to the client about how the product behaves. Both parties are happy with their experience.
I know that. You know that. A lot of people (specially people in power do not), which is what the OP was referring to.
Re:Technical People (Score:4, Interesting)
Last place I work was run by millenial developers.
They told me "the code is the documentation".
I asked them "ok, what are the requirements?"
They gave me a blank stare.
"How can we write code until we know what we're trying to accomplish?"
"You want to write a 300 page Word doc that nobody's going to read?"
I was at a loss... "no, but a doodle on a napkin might be enough. I need *something*"
Possibly the most educational 6 months of my life. Didn't accomplish much, everything got thrown out for not fulfilling the non-existent requirements. Despite the maddness, the people were nice. It took a long time for me to really understand what was going on. In the end, I was glad to leave the gig. The company was made of three one-man developer shows who didn't understand that the stuff in the heads of three developers were separate and unrelated requirements documents for separate projects. It was impossible to contribute to any project without reading the mind of the developer.
They measured their own success in achiving goals after they were accomplished. Which meant that the stars shone, but contributors rarely had successes.
Re:Technical People (Score:4, Interesting)
sales & marketing (not entirely unfair, they are typically huge scumbags)
I'm a web developer who works in the marketing department of a large organization. The people in my department are smart professionals who are tasked with keeping the organization on-message and professional in its communications with the outside world. This is an immensely difficult herding-cats kind of job because so many different departments and individuals are communicating with the public every day, and many of them do so in a way that unnecessarily casts the organization in a negative light. Sometimes it's just a matter of professionalism (poor grammar/spelling, rudeness, childishness), and other times it's because they're uninformed and telling people things that simply aren't true, which ends up confusing everyone.
Our department has a broader and deeper understanding of this organization than anyone else here, including the top leadership. We're the ones who have to continuously remind everyone else of the organization's guiding principles and priorities. And every time someone sends out yet another bulk email to 20,000 people in pink Comic Sans containing information that was no longer accurate as of 2007, we're the ones who have to beg them, yet again, to run their communications by us before they send them out. In fact, how about we just start sending your materials out for you? We'd be happy to. No, really, it would be our pleasure.
Contrary to common opinion, that's what a lot of marketing jobs are really like. Maybe some marketing people are scumbags, but not the ones I work with.
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> The cost for architecting software is far higher than simply building it
Say what? This makes no sense. How is nobody else commenting on how backwards this is? Using colorful language "simply building it" to characterize a falsehood, doesn't make it true. Building out a complex system is the only way to find undocumented or unknown conditions and redesign interfaces to deal with that. You don't usually "rearchitect" the whole project because 1 resource has a snag, but investigation and rework NEVER overruns the cost of implementation. It IS the cost of implementation.
Yet it is true.
My single data point is and average of ~3 years of thinking about how to build a system to ~6 months of building. It has never been a mistake to think through the whole thing from as many angles as you can and not commit to build until you know everything fits. I could spend 6 months thinking, 6 months building and 3 years fixing and patching, but no one is happy with that.
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Unless the project is R&D or entirely new and unknown architecture should be the larger job. Building without planning really only works when you aren't working with a team.. so it hardly ever works in a corporate or government environment.. as demonstrated by the article.
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Re:Technical People (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly this is true, but it shouldn't be. Technical people should have the professionalism to analyse requirements and check that the requirements fit the purpose.
Most I know do. The problem is that they're not sufficiently expert in the domain (in this case, health care) to determine the purpose, and the purpose the client gave them is wrong.
Specs aren't just some bureaucratic hoop that needs to be jumped through to get a developer to sit down and code, and they're not something a developer can just wing, and get right anyway, because they already knew what they were and were just being anal about getting you to write down.
They are important, and if they're not done properly, the dev will likely spend a lot of time doing the wrong thing correctly, and you will be billed for it.
Re:Technical People (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately the way of the world is that technical people would be quickly shuffled out of the way by sales and marketing if they started to reduce revenue by telling a customer what they really wanted instead of what the spec says.
Disclaimer: I'm a software engineering contractor that works on contracts for the federal government.
A solid majority of the contractors (the grunts doing the work) I've worked for/with in my career want to get the job done and do it well. Sales/marketing has a say at contract award and for mods, but during the actual work we rarely, if ever, hear from them or take guidance from them. The people commissioning the work (the government) usually have no clue what they want and, if presented with multiple solutions of varying risk and value, they still have no idea how to make a decision. The most altruistic contractor still, at the end of the day, needs to know loosely what the success criteria are...the government half the time has vehement disagreement about that among themselves and never comes to a unified decision.
The GAO's report is exemplar of what I've experienced...the government has no clue what requirements are or should be, how to execute, how to manage a contract. My contracts have routinely consisted of us contractors drafting requirements and handing them over to the government, only to have them ask us if they were sufficient and would accomplish the (loosely defined) task, then sign them, hand them off to contracts and they appear on our desk weeks down the line modified by contracts to be 1) more generic, or 2) incorrect. The government oversight at the program manager level is almost entirely a rubber stamping process.
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The GAO's report is exemplar of what I've experienced...the government has no clue what requirements are or should be, how to execute, how to manage a contract. My contracts have routinely consisted of us contractors drafting requirements and handing them over to the government, only to have them ask us if they were sufficient and would accomplish the (loosely defined) task, then sign them, hand them off to contracts and they appear on our desk weeks down the line modified by contracts to be 1) more generic, or 2) incorrect. The government oversight at the program manager level is almost entirely a rubber stamping process.
Exactly. But what I love most about the study is how this ineffective oversight will be solved by ..... MORE oversight!
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Sadly this is true, but it shouldn't be. Technical people should have the professionalism to analyse requirements and check that the requirements fit the purpose.
I have a friend who bids government contracts (highways,schools,sewage plants,etc).
He says that there is no advantage to fix the contract before the bid because then all the other bidders get those same cost savings.
Also, you also can't have multiple people bidding and making suggestions on what to change as then you have no way of comparing the resulting bids.
Likewise, after the bid, you can tell them how to fix it but then you're fighting an uphill battle because you're basically trying to change the cont
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All too true, sadly. Tendering processes seem to exacerbate this: when a government control freak puts out a document announcing that the government is rea
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I anonymously mod you up +5.
Wait. How'd you do that?
Re:Technical People (Score:4, Interesting)
Google translate thinks it's English, but it's Latin. Here's what I found it to mean:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet pretty easy. Unfortunately, lots of orange gear, but every time a commercial truck.
Gets certain warm-up is a lot of life from which the film's style is. I'd now look at a wide range of law enforcement.
Residents drink
Currently, my, lump in the throat, it's the sauce.
To learn how Warren financing, but the emotional temperature, the element of surprise.
Tomorrow protein recipes. He was smart, maybe he was always in need of a lake in Japan.
No matter who or how inexpensive and easy-to-time only. In order that on Monday, but the laughter of a wide range of airline, travel agency employee is the ugly, and not before or it's just the likelihood of the company. In fact, it has been said it is in the interests of the quiver.
Unfortunately, the keyboard of the United States in the very soft impact.
So it looks like this page, a page that many would go to looking for advice on what to do since no doctors take medicaid now (Many are no longer accepting obamacare at all), is left blank (feeling that perhaps what's there is some default junk included with whatever web-hosting software they use). Seems like someone would have done something to fix this by now.
Re:Technical People (Score:5, Informative)
"Lorem ipsum" is industry standard "filler" text for incomplete web pages - typically used to show clients what a page will look like when it has some useful content.
Not that it isn't appalling that it's appearing on a page in production, but it isn't "random Latin" - there are even browser extensions to make it easy to C&P for you.
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"Lorem ipsum" is industry standard "filler" text for incomplete web pages
But it never occurred to me to pop it into Google Translate! Many thanks, BringsApples!
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Not that it isn't appalling that it's appearing on a page in production ...
Well the site is not complete, its still under heavy development. Remember that the only part that got "finished" was the sign-up portion.
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, no dico autem labore pro. Cu molestie verterem sit, te pri nobis aperiri. Mei et saepe efficiantur. Cu mei liber signiferumque, sed consul delectus no. Et quot cetero ius, eam illud audiam constituto at, cum epicuri definitionem at. Delicata tincidunt definitiones no per, no liber tantas usu, no mel scaevola platonem.
Mel no nostro aliquip, exerci assentior qui ea, no sententiae philosophia conclusionemque vim. Et pro postea audire appellantur. Eu nonumy qualisque has. Ne habeo iu
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Page has been taken down.
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>They mean government meddling in healthcare.
How does that work? How does a doctor reject an insured patient because 'government meddling'? Do people have special 'government meddling' marks on their insurance cards so they can be singled out? I think not.
In programming this would be called a type mismatch. In the normal world it's called something much more offensive.
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That's for people like you who can afford to purchase insurance. Guess what card poor people and the working-poor whose employer has dropped providing health insurance and opts to pay the penalty instead carry under ACA/Obamacare?
That's right, Medicare/Medicaid.
I'll give you three guesses on what type of new patients GP doctors (the ones that haven't yet joined the increasing numbers of doctors who are retiring early to
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You are continuing to conflate Medicaid with the ACA. Is your problem with Medicaid or the ACA?
> just look at the VA and the recent news stories concerning it.
Unlike you, I've recently had cause to spend a lot of time at a VA hospital. Unlike other hospitals, it doesn't fund itself by employing people to spend all day on the phone with insurance companies. The issues you pretend to understand around Medicaid do not have any relevance to how the VA hospitals are run. Trying to suggest that the VA hospital
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You are continuing to conflate Medicaid with the ACA
And you seem to be denying that Medicaid is part and parcel of ACA and where those who can't afford the higher costs of ACA insurers end up.
The issues you pretend to understand around Medicaid do not have any relevance to how the VA hospitals are run
They are both ran by government bureaucracies. Government bureaucracies are infamous for waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption. They are no exception and neither is the ACA.
Trying to suggest that the VA hospitals are a model for how the ACA will work suggests you are not honest.
Trying to suggest I am not honest because I see and recognize universal patterns of bad behaviors and poor results from government programs suggests you are defending a political partisan ideology rath
*COUGH* (Score:2)
Mine says, "Lifewise"
It also says, "Essential Silver 2500 HSA" which defines it as one selected from the website. The network name probably identifies it also. Not to mention the 4 other id numbers on the card.
Not sure why a doctor would care as they seem to be rather normal insurance plans but they could tell if they wish.
Medicare/Medicaid are a whole other story. Often patients don't have the copay and that is profit for many procedures/items due to low payments on SOME things. (and some are still overpai
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Part of the problem is because of how contracts are awarded. A business is allowed to use their brains and not go with the low bidder because they obviously don't understand the job or have a history of being a pain to work with. The government is not allowed to do this. They have to write a perfect requirements document and put out an open request for bids. If anything in the requirements document is not perfect the contractor is legally allowed to mess it up on purpose and charge for fixing it. This type
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Non technical people are not competent to commission technical work from technical people.
If you (as a government or large company) don't have your own technical people on staff to oversee the process and comprehend or write the specs, you're doomed. The contractors know well how to milk a cash cow, simply by adhering to the specs written by people who don't understand how to write specs.
This is a part of why the government created Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). DOE created them during WWII because they saw a need for an organization that had more flexibility than the government (they're all privately operated) but would act as an expert exclusively on behalf of the gov't. They get their money entirely from a single agency and most do a combination of direct work ("we'll do it in house") to main expertise and procurement ("we'll spread it around"), recognizing
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It depends on what you mean by "specs". Ideally the organization commissioning the work has subject matter experts who know what they want, but don't try to dictate how to do it. They should have enough technical people on staff or on contract to review the proposed implementation.
The real problems start when either non-technical people try to do the technical design, or technical people try to guess what the application should do. In the case of healthcare.gov, nobody really know what they wanted. CMS had
It was the politicians more than CMS ... (Score:2)
Note however there is one very important point missed in all the rhetoric... That of changing specification coupled with muddied/stratified change management. This issue sits squarely on CMSs shoulders and is absolute poison to any IT project of any significance...
It was the politicians more than CMS. Not that CMS didn't have its share of problem generation but folks in the administration doing political recalculations on what the user interface and functionality should be like probably made this problem far worse than your normal federal project.
Wasn't there some last minute change ordered by the administration not to show the unsubsidized policy price, so now the site had to integrate with various other agencies and exchange a lot of personal information to calc
in other words (Score:5, Interesting)
also, water is wet
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it was a giant clusterfuck...also, water is wet
Yep. True of any big undertaking when contractors are involved (whether it's government or a large corporation hiring the contractors for a big project). How about this: ... when key technical requirements were unknown... ... but took
-The defense department undertook the development of F-35 and its related systems without effective planning or oversight practices...
-[The task] was a complex effort with compressed time frames. To be expedient, DoD issued task orders
-DoD identified major performance issues
Re:in other words (Score:5, Interesting)
after the shutdown the site launched, and as expected obama changed his mind and delayed implementation anyway
so the reason for the shutdown was that the democrats did not want a delay and wouldnt budge. then when the site launches and makes them look bad, the implement the delay anyway... yet they still blame congress for the shutdown. and based on your comment it seems some americans are still dumb enough to believe it
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obama and the senate dems said too bad we are going to implement it there will be no delay, and thats the end of that.
so in the end the government shut down, obama went out of his way to make it as hard as possible (closing open air memorials like the WW2 memorial for example) and when the government opened back up, the website launched and what does obama do? the exac
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Sorry, the 'pubs have tried to kill Obamacare dozens of times. When faced with a relentless enemy one has to put up a relentless defense. Yeah, the 'pubs were right; anyone with an IT background would have known the same. But delay was also a political move, defended by another political move.
So, yeah, sucks, but any big IT project has major problems. It had to be rolled out everywhere at once else there would be charges of political favoritism.
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that makes the dems look EVEN worse in my mind when you put it that way.
"sorry folks, we know the website is broken, but we are going to force you to use it so we can save face with the other side"
thats cowardice
Re:in other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Pull your head out of your ass. Seriously. You've got the president going on record of saying he is not going to negotiate and actually claiming he's going to use executive order to bypass the limitations of power spelled out in the constitution during the state of the union, and you've got congress throwing up road blocks to do everything to basically try to stop Obama. I'm going to throw a shocker at you. You might want to sit down for this. I'm a conservative, and I'm happy with congress. The dems in the first two years when they had full control shot out of control. They did whatever they want with the justification of "well, we're the majority, we can do what we want". I'm sorry, that's not how the world works. If you had a 90% majority, then yes, but you don't. You have a 51% or 52% majority. When that's your majority, you need to consider what the other side wants, you don't get your way all the time.
What the dems pulled in the first two years of Obamas presidency set the stage for what's happening now. I voted in people to put the brakes on you guys, and they're doing exactly what I wanted them to. How about this, how about you sit back and say "hey, conservatives, okay, we need to live in this world together, how about we sit down and try to find a solution we can both tolerate". And please note that tolerate doesn't mean like. Remember, we have both parties right now refusing to negotiate. It's not one side or the other. The presidents own words can be quoted to attest to this.
And also note, I'm not claiming conservatives are blameless here either. But you just threw out a load of tripe putting all blame on one side, when both sides stink so bad they should all be thrown in the garbage.
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It boils down to one simple question that you have to get consensus on before you can move forward: Is healthcare a basic human right? I specifically left out words like "affordable" and "quality" because they dilute the conversation. It is simple, if I am sick am I entitled to get better? I w
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It boils down to one simple question that you have to get consensus on before you can move forward: Is healthcare a basic human right? I specifically left out words like "affordable" and "quality" because they dilute the conversation. It is simple, if I am sick am I entitled to get better? I would love to hear somebody answer "no" to that question, and offer a reasonable justification without using any terms related to affordability, money, insurance companies, or quality of care.
I'll answer "no" to that question, without using any of the gotcha phrases you are hoping for. I will do so with a thought experiment I entertain myself with when I'm bored. I use variations for different situations, so I'll make one for your 'right to healthcare' scenario.
If you have a small population of people, say 500, and the rest of humanity disappears, what 'rights' do they have? Does one person have the right to live in peace, without one of the other 499 attacking him/her? There is no such right in
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Oh, you can't go there. The obamabots will get you for sure.
It's sad that they simply don't care that the person elected to uphold the Constitution has said that he doesn't believe in it, and has acted consistently to prove he doesn't believe in it. He actually doesn't believe in the document that created the office that he fills.
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Hypotheticals may be for kids, but your response is for mental patients.
Is it wrong for a person to be bound by his or her own word? When do they get to break or bend it?
When the rest of humanity disappears for no known reason.
Or do you expect the 500 people to still pay their taxes and obey all traffic laws as well as oaths given to professional associations that no longer exist?
If doctors all swore an oath to provide medical care, why are they insisting people pay them for that care? Your assertion is they must provide the care whether they get paid or not. Have you just solved the problem of health c
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Your whole argument is based on a doctor who took an oath. What about someone who has medical knowledge, but never took an oath and became a practicing doctor? Would he or she still be bound by your beliefs in what doctors should do, or could be forced to do? That is a very weak linchpin to base a human right around.
As for whether or not I should use a hypothetical situation to prove my point, isn't that a common way of teaching in college classes? Not simply saying a rote answer, but making people think t
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Sir, I said good day.
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So you've provided yourself with $500,000 for a liver/heart transplant or for a lifetime of $300/month drugs that may be required for your continued living? The non-obama-care insurance isn't providing an answer: They limit medical care to $200,000, which eliminates all complex surgery.
So, your assertion is that before obamacare, no complex surgeries were ever done? Or only the rich 1% were able to have transplants? Really?
This is the biggest problem with trying to discuss something substantive. Idiots throw out comments like yours, thinking they made a valid point. When a little reasoning quickly shows they are moronic statements with no connection to reality.
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So when you said:
The non-obama-care insurance isn't providing an answer: They limit medical care to $200,000, which eliminates all complex surgery.
what you meant was that some people had insurance that only provided the amount of coverage they were willing to pay for.
I don't see how that makes the point you are trying to make. People had choices on what they wanted for insurance. Many people specifically chose jobs based on insurance coverage, willing to take a lower paying job that had higher insurance coverage. The $200,000 amount is something you pulled out of thin air, because there was no such ceiling across the board, either at
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I believe you and I have the right to provide for ourselves. I don't believe we have the right to force others to provide for us.
I'm not a big believer in rights, per se. But I don't really have a problem with socialized medicine either.
Thank you for the reply.
I've said before that I would not oppose basic health care being taken care of by a national health system. Areas like car accident victims, broken bones, heart attacks, allergic reactions. Routine ER situations. But if I am to support that system with my tax dollars, the people who use it have to do their part to try to live healthy lives. Drug addicts and alcoholics get treatment then go into rehab, overweight people are put on a healthy diet and exercise regimen, and so on. But si
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I don't get it. How would that violate rights? When society assumes an ob
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I'd really like to hear a justification for thinking you are entitled to healthcare. I've heard ample people throw out that claim, but none of them have ever made a compelling argument as to why it is a basic human right.
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I'm so glad (Score:2)
Re:I'm so glad (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't work for a company that made the mistake of getting involved in that nightmare.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of companies are doing just fine out of it - paid to deliver the wrong thing then paid to deliver what the government should have specified in the first place.
Re:I'm so glad (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually relatively common for custom software to experience feature and scope creep. The source of creep is split between design by committee and leadership changes. When new leadership comes in, the vision almost always changes, and when new stakeholders are added, they pollute the water with their own special interests.
It's arguably the role of developers (or at least business analysts) to push back against ridiculous requirements, and some do, but they're not properly incentivized, since they work for the contractor. BAs should be working for the government, not the contractors. Ideally, one person with software development design and management experience and a clear vision should be in charge of the project. Unfortunately, it's almost always someone with more generalized management experience who doesn't know the difference between HTML and CSS, and comes up with new "great ideas" on the fly.
At any rate, the problem isn't limited to government software -- I've seen the same thing in commercial business software, especially "customizable" software. I'm looking at you, mortgage and scientific industries. We get a little more upset because we fund government software through taxes -- we feel like it's our money -- but we honestly fund almost all poorly designed software, even if it's rolled into our mortgages. It's just less transparent.
Out of Character for Government? (Score:2, Insightful)
who are working round the clock to skim money from a project,
are still unable to run up costs like a government project gone off the rails.
Re: Out of Character for Government? (Score:2)
CYA (Score:2)
Somebody had to take the fall, and I guess they found the one group who didn't do the proper amount of CYA. Actually enumerating the failures and irresponsiblities of the various parties involved from the politicians down to the subcontractors... would have been too much work.
I guess they will just fire 1-2 guys and move the rest to other projects like "Heathcare.gov support" and file this report some where the sun never shines.
Let's be absolutely clear (Score:5, Insightful)
The key takeaway from the report is that nobody will be personally held to blame for the incompetence (at best; corruption and nepotism at worst) of the process and end result.
No punishments or consequences, all around!
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No punishments or consequences, all around!
No government worker will be fired, but don't worry, three hundred million people will be collectively punished for it as that billion dollars gets added to the debt and all their cost-of-goods prices go up.
Sadly, that feedback loop never seems to get closed. Results don't matter - as long as there are promises and intentions, that's good enough for most.
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The House refused to provide funding for implementation.
...besides the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on it?
better summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I'm pretty sure we was saying "don't hire somebody who's a friend and instead hire somebody who's competent", but hey, why let the meaning go through when that meaning would stop you from bringing up a president that hasn't been in office for what, almost 6 years now?
Why dont we (Score:3)
Re:Why dont we (Score:5, Insightful)
Because 10% of a working system can't be measured. Even a 100% completed to spec system is worthless until it has actually been used for a while... when it will prove to need about 100% more work.
Most software projects fail, unlike construction, etc... engineering can't be applied.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's pretty much how government contracts work.
It fails because:
1) The customer will change their requirements mid-stream, screwing everything up
2) Even if they don't, in some cases it's discovered once everything is complete that the system which meets all of the customer's requirements is utterly fucking useless in the real world. I believe this was a major role in healthcare.gov's failures - many of its issues were discovered post-launch
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Did you expect anything else? (Score:2, Insightful)
America hired a man to run the country who never even managed a McDonalds.
Why would they vet their contractors (or contracts) any better?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I've got karma to burn and this AC got modded up to +2 insightful, so look, the argument that the current President and VP have never run/managed "anything" and so are unsuitable for the positions would be valid EXCEPT that the previous President and VP had vast private sector and government managerial experience (or at least they were sold to us that way) and they screwed up running the country at least as badly as the current administration. So, from observation of the actual, real world experience
Re: (Score:2)
Million Dollar... (Score:2)
http://www.milliondollarhomepa... [milliondol...mepage.com]
How many millions.... (Score:2)
How many millions did this investigation and report cost?
Repeat! (Score:2)
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, we want to complain about a website that cost a Billion? This is the United States Government, full of waste, fraud, no-bid contracts, and shit spread out out over every state so that ever senator and congressman has his slice of the taxpayer slush fund.
Witness the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft nobody needs, trying to fill too many roles, and was supposed to save our armed services money by having one plane replace many planes.
Except it's billions over budget, still doesn't work (and might never work), and is expected to cost more than a Trillion dollars before all is said and done.
Meanwhile the aircraft is being usurped by drones, which are cheaper, easier to deploy, and may fill all the roles we'd ever need this crazy ass jet for. And we're trying so hard to make it stealthy, meanwhile as pointed out in a slashot article a few weeks back, long wave radar will find the plane just fine.
And yet the Pentagon continues to shovel more money into the project because -- guess what, there's no "plan B". This is the people we depend upon to strategize for us in times of war, and they have absolutley no fall-back plan. Brilliant.
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...Witness the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft nobody needs, trying to fill too many roles, and was supposed to save our armed services money by having one plane replace many planes...
I'm not defending the F-35 (I'm a huge A-10 fan, and 2 F-35s would fund the whole A-10 fleet), but your comment here is self-contradictory. Either we don't need it, OR it's trying to fill too many missions (that do need to be done.)
I think it's the latter, and that's not just requirements creep, but a different phenomenon that is something like "requirements conbinatorics", where too many requirements get loaded onto a system (health care or weapon) and the result is either (a) not buildable as a violation
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Witness the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft nobody needs
Don't play the game, man. Here's who needs it:
* Politicians, for pork
* Defense contractors, for "Sweet Jesus we're rolling in dough" money
* Lobbyists, for a slice of the dough.
* The Federal Reserve, the monopoly private bank that makes interest on the debt
* Wall Street bankers, who take a commission on the new debt created.
If you look at this as corruption instead of a mysterious boondoggle, it makes perfect sense.
There's absolutely zero chance
useless website (Score:2)
The worst part is there is no reason why the Obamacare websites even need to exist.
Obama could have just told everyone to buy their insurance on einsurance.com and to get the subsidies when they filed their 1040.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED... (Score:2)
I can't be the only one shocked, SHOCKED to discover, the government is inefficient and wastes money. I mean, after the staggering success of everything else it operates — things like US Postal Service [businessinsider.com] or Amtrak [washingtonpost.com] — it is certainly most disappointing to encounter a government program, that fails to live-up to our high expectations.
Nay, this may even chill our collective enthusiasm for making food and shelter a government's responsibility too — you can't be healthy without nutrition and a ro
Timeline of events (Score:2)
It would be nice if someone has a compiled timeline of events starting with extremely uncoordinated writing and passing of the law, to the point where technical specs were released to the contractor, when the actually flow of information and final HHS rules were announced, up through go live and the fixes being implemented after go live.
From what I've read/heard there was little to no work being done from 2010 when the bill was signed into law up through 2012. The administration purposely withheld informat
Re:what's the difference (Score:5, Insightful)
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You spend a billion on lorem ipsum? Don't hire you (Score:3)
> almost every large project during my 30 year IT career had the same issues and reasons for failing
They spent a billion dollars to post lorem ipsum https://www.healthcare.gov/med... [healthcare.gov]
If almost every large project you're involved with is similar, we've learned one thing: Don't hire Chadster!
Many people fail. $billion should hire competence (Score:2)
Sure, many people make the same mistakes. I'd hope that for a BILLION dollars, you could hire a couple of project managers who are actually competent. Plenty of companies have incompetent people, but plenty have lots of competent people who successfully complete projects - Google, eBay, Facebook, and a thousand other companies are competent at large scale IT projects.
If, like most projects, your budget is around $100K, you might end up with some typical incompetents in key positions. For a billion bucks,
Re: (Score:2)
It will be. Look ahead to 2016. Who are the front runners? Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney.