I experienced almost exactly the same thing.
I faked up the whole system, to show look-and-feel and how it would flow, for a demo for the users. The managers assumed that meant the system was ready for UAT, and dumped a whole shitload of new requirements on us, and refused to sign off until my manager agreed with them.
That implementation bombed too, but by that time I was working for another company.
Regards,
Shodan
Sam: Can you elaborate on why you think the site is still “completely broken”?
Elvis: Assuming you meant the “web site” and not the exchanges (we’re talking about the web site here), in what way was the federal one “sabotaged”? The web site is just one way to access the exchanges. It’s arguably the best way, but not the only way. It’s not at all clear what you are considering to be “sabotage”.
Healthcare.gov site crashes Monday
Some parts were working, some crashed. The developers also say they’ve ‘improved’ the problems of the site reporting incorrect data to insurance companies, but not fixed them. In the meantime, I haven’t heard if the real time quote system is up or whether they’re still relying on static files with insurance pricing in them.
PC World: healthcare.gov experiences more problems
That’s an interesting statement, because I don’t think there’s anywhere near 17,000 registrations per hour happening. This is either the result of an internal load test, or it includes all the state exchanges, or she’s fudging what “17,000 registrants per hour” means. Notice she didn’t say they’re actually processing 17,000 registrations per hour. It could simply mean that 17,000 people per hour can get on the site and browse it.
On the weekend several news organizations were trying to register live on TV, and couldn’t do it.
Also, the administration granted itself a waiver to open the site to the public before doing any kind of security audit, and while knowing there were specific security concerns still unaddressed.
As far as I know, that testing still has not been done.
I imagine that security hole may be fixed now that it’s been made public, but without a full security audit, the system remains a high risk.
Admittedly, there is a web site that stays up most of the time. Some people have managed to enroll through it, albeit with ‘occasional errors’. So perhaps I shouldn’t have said ‘completely broken’. I don’t want to get into another terminology war like the one over whether it’s a ‘failed’ launch. But by the standards I work under, we would consider it to be broken.
In fact, we would have shut it down completely if we found out it had been opened without a proper security audit, and only re-opened it once we were satisfied that it passed our security tests. After all, this is a system that connects to many federal databases containing sensitive information and personal data.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to know exactly what the status is, because the Most Transparent Administration in History refuses to release any specific data.
Another update from The Washington Post:
If they’ve fixed 6-in-10 bugs, that means they’ve gotten a lot of low-hanging fruit, but probably haven’t tackled the most difficult bugs to fix. That’s what you do when you’re under pressure to show ‘results’ - you triage the bugs and figure out which ones you can fix fast and which ones are going to be a real bugger, and you fix the fast ones first.
It’s hard to know exactly where they are with this because this administration continually lies about it, and when they get caught in a lie they cover it with another one. First they claimed thousands of enrollments, but that turned out to be through state exchanges and was mostly Medicaid enrollments. Then they claimed that the site could handle thousands of ‘registrants’ per hour, but that turned out to be just hits on the web site and not actual registrations. Then when caught on that one, they trotted out another number for enrollments, but that turned out to be just the number of people who had put something in their ‘shopping cart’ - not people who had actually submitted plans for purchase.
At this point, Obama is still claiming that he’s totally confident that the system will be fully operational for the ‘vast majority’ of users by Nov 30. If it turns out that it’s not even close, then he’s either so incompetent that even after having his nose rubbed in the failure of his administration to shepherd this project he’s still not up to speed on what’s going on, or… he’s lying.
So how about a backup plan? Obama tried to minimize the severity of the web site failure by saying that people can always sign up through the 1-800 number he pitched. So surely that process is working, right?
Also, my understanding is that this is becoming a security nightmare, because the call center people have to enter the data in the same broken computer system which doesn’t work, so applications are being filed until they can be processed, and the filing system is completely insecure.
In the end, my prediction is (and was) that the burden is going to be dumped on the insurance companies. But that’s not going so well either:
This is a huge problem all around, because people who are not signed up by Dec 15 will face fines. Even if the exchange works at half capacity by Nov 30, there’s no way it could process enough volume to handle everyone who needs to be signed up in two weeks. So it looks to me to be inevitable that the individual mandate is going to have to be delayed, and that means all those healthy people won’t be buying insurance. That’s going to turn the economics of Obamacare upside down. Insurance companies will respond by raising their rates, and the adverse-selection death spiral sets in.
In the meantime, what happens to all those people who had their insurance canceled and who can’t sign up for new insurance because the system is broken? What if they get sick in the interim? Who’s paying the bills?
It doesn’t say they’ve fixed 6-in-10 bugs. It says they’ve fixed “only about six of every 10 of the defects it has addressed so far”.
They’ve addressed some unspecified percentage of the defects, and of that subset they’ve fixed 6 in 10.
None of the policies were cancelled immediately; the law requires 90 days notice before cancellation. Obamacare doesn’t kick-in until January 1st, so the “meantime” doesn’t start until then. So, to answer your question, probably nothing.
Assuming that all these people who had their insurance canceled can find replacement policies by Jan. 1. And if they can’t? If there are still so many ‘glitches’ that the feds can’t process all the applications, and insurance companies can’t get the federal information they need to process the applications? What then? That’s only a month and a half from now, you know. And you can generally take a week or two out of the schedule for the Christmas vacation down time.
Are you really confident that millions of people are going to be able to get signed up with new policies in that time? And what happens if they don’t?
If the users’ experience on the healthcare.gov is going to be like mine on my state website, they’re doomed.
I lost my health care plan thru work, since it was non-compliant with ACA. Cheapest coverage I can locate is roughly triple the cost, and a deductible of $3,900. I do my search, pick the plan I want, create my account, and go to apply (I have to complete the process before this Friday, and I lost Monday because the website I used is down for Veteran’s Day).
It tells me I am not eligible for financial assistance (not at all to my surprise), but requests that I fill out an application anyway. Which I do, digging out my tax returns for last year for myself and my daughter. Then I go to apply, and it won’t let me.
It says I have an application pending with a status of Disposed. I click on My Account, and see my application - with a status of Approved, and the date it was approved is six hours in the future. I click Back, and the browser crashes. I go back in, sign up, and start searching for the plan I want. It will not include my daughter in the coverage. I go to update my account and include her. The browser crashes again. I go back in, sign in again, and it refuses to let me proceed because of the application I don’t want being Disposed/Approved some time this evening. So I call the help line number. After twenty minutes on hold, it hangs up on me. I call back. An hour and a half later, I talk with Mubarrak, who says he will withdraw the fake application sometime before the end of the week.
So my prospects are to go without insurance and be fined, or try to get it and be fined because the website doesn’t work. And go without insurance.
Obama has handed over control of my health insurance to the DMV.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, unless they are shills for Fox News.
They will join the rest of the uninsured who are sick of leaving their healthcare to for-profit insurance companies. Perhaps a little more pressure on Republicans is just what is needed to break the logjam.
Hate to quote my own post, but I’ll do it anyway (10/8/13):
If you think that’s going to be a worse situation than dealing with an American insurance company under the pre-Obamacare regime, that only shows you’ve never dealt with an American insurance company.
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how badly those Canadian web developers fucked up. 
The deadline gets extended while the bugs are fixed. That’s the sort of thing that gets done by people interested in making a system work, not fail.
Actually, they’re still dealing with American insurance companies. That hasn’t changed.
Integration was handled by the U.S. government. The schedule was set by the U.S. government. The cancellation of testing and security analysis came from the Obama administration. The constant requirements changes came from the Obama administration. The refusal to share key technical documents until after the election was a political decision by the Obama administration. The appointment of seriously unqualified people to the top management positions of the program were decisions of the Obama administration. The architecture of the law that complicated the design of the exchanges was the fault of Democrats in Congress.
Projects like this don’t go into the weeds because lower level programmers screw up. They go into the weeds because the project team is incompetent, or because the problem is too complex for the timeframe specified.
That fixes the problem of fining people for not buying insurance, all right. And that sinks Obamacare because it absolutely relies on lots of young healthy people to sign up to subsidize the older, less healthy people. Without those healthy people and their positive cash flow, the insurance companies will be forced to raise their rates, and that will act as an added incentive for the healthy to stay out of the program. Obamacare then devolves into an incredibly expensive high risk insurance pool and not much else.
In the meantime, the problem it was supposed to fix, which was providing health insurance for people who don’t have it, will become worse because of rate inflation and adverse selection. It will become much more worse as 2015 approaches and the same song-and-dance occurs when the employer mandate kicks in, except this time with everyone’s employer-provided health insurance. All those new part-time workers are joining the ranks of the uninsured, and if rates go too high employers will choose to drop coverage for their workforces and pay the penalties.
That bombshell will hit right during the next election season. So good luck.
So the .gov was unwilling to delay the rollout of a website they KNEW did not work, yet we are to believe they will extend a deadline that they KNOW will not be met?
I’d call that wishful thinking.
Thinking the entire system will fail forever because of some teething pains, and that will somehow bring about the Great Conservative Triumph Over the Evil Socialist Obamacare is *real *wishful thinking. Pretending that the fuckups by the software contractors are the fault of Big Bad Government Itself is just laughable.
Those who want this thing to work will find ways to make it work, and they aren’t even hard to figure out. People are funny like that, I know. Those of you who *want *it to fail, for reasons it would do you well to acknowledge, even if only to yourselves, will find ways to make every issue look insurmountable to yourselves. The last couple of posts are examples.
Yes, if Obama hadn’t settled for the conservative Heritage Foundation / Mitt Romney approach and instead gone for the Rest of the Civilized World approach, where such problems mysteriously don’t happen even though they’re government-run too, was a strategic blunder - but we’re still better off for it.
Although contractors and vendors can screw up, and none of us know for sure whether the CGI code that was delivered was any good or not, but that doesn’t change the actions or responsibility of the gov to manage the project.
Choosing to go live when the system wasn’t completed or tested is the one thing we can say for sure was a screw up and that is owned by the gov not the contractors.
As was reported in an earlier cite, if the feds were changing requirements 6 months prior to launch, they are just as responsible as the developers in this mess. The Feds also chose the vendor and owned ultimate responsibility for successful delivery as project sponsors. To think they do not at least share responsibility in this is laughable. I’m not sure if you were directing this at me specifically, but I don’t plan on healthcare.gov being a train-wreck forever.
Again, not sure if this was directed specifically to me, but no shit. Of course it can be fixed. I never said otherwise.
Got a cite for that?
Not really looking for a cite, but your broad brush painted me incorrectly. I have been monitoring this healthcare.gov launch from the perspective of 20+ years experience in software development and project management. The amount of BS that is coming from the Feds as well as their staunch defenders has been nauseating.
I don’t want the site to fail. I think people having insurance is a good thing. The path that they (Feds and the developers) took to get here, as well as the choices made post go live have been misstep after misstep. It doesn’t have to be this hard.
Then how do you explain Oregon, whose independent exchange hasn’t yet signed up a single person?
See comments above, Flyer.
Nobody said they do not share responsibility. The primary responsibility for fucking up obviously belongs with the people who were allegedly expert enough (including by their own claims when bidding the job), and well-paid enough, not to fuck up, though. Your need to blame Obama for it (despite couching the Republicans’ role under your term “the Feds” - cute, that) does not change that fact.
If you seriously want a *cite *for our being better off for having something like UHC than not, then you haven’t been paying enough attention to the world outside for the last few years for one to convince you.
I don’t recall ever blaming Obama for any of this. Please feel free to point to where I did. The Republicans aren’t managing this project however, the Federal government is. (Sorry if that is too cute of a concept for you) That includes Sebelius and to a limited degree Obama himself only in a role as a super executive sponsor or something. Maybe you have no fucking clue how a major software deployment is supposed to work. But you don’t stick a bunch of coders in a dark room and tell them to make something and blame them if it doesn’t work out of the box. It takes a significant effort by the sponsors of the project (Feds) to communicate what they want. When requirements keeps changing like the government loves to do, it fucks up everything. A wise project management staff (which should include the folks actually paying for the project) will realize this and push back on deployment and adjust any other dates such as enrollment deadlines for example.
What happened here however is that those running this project (not just the hired help) allowed the product to go live and then acted like children pointing fingers when it comes to assigning blame. They have proceeded to give meaningless updates and new dates for when we as customers can expect the site to be fully functional. The problem is, this latest end of November date is going to come and go and the site still will not be made whole because requirements ARE STILL CHANGING. Based upon updates to the healthcare.gov site they are adding functionality to the site while still trying to fix the initial list of identified bugs.
Unlike others in this thread, I can admit that not every project that I have managed, completed on time and under budget. What I see the government doing right now is what every project sponsor does when they screw up, damage control. I wish I had such fervent supporters behind me the last time I delivered a project with less than expected results.