Obamacare "Tech Surge"

Great Debates
341

No wonder. As a wise man once said, “But let’s not pretend the polls right now say something they don’t.” Do we then agree that they indeed don’t say what you have claimed they say? :dubious:

What is the debate topic, then? Is it “Was it fumbled or not?” Or “Who was responsible for it being fumbled”? You’re certainly not expressing interest in “Can it be fixed, and how should it be done?”, but only along the lines of “How foolish are the people who ever thought this could work?” and “How could anyone think Obamacare is a good idea, based on this fumble?”, and “Doesn’t this show the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans, and therefore I win?”. To be fair, you’re not alone.

So, if what you want to debate isn’t among those items, then what is? If you’re not interested in debating, then simple bashing belongs in the Pit.

342

I agree that this topic is a hijack.

Emphasis added. Please quote any of my posts that say any of those things?

See, now you’re being funny again. Happy Thanksgiving.

343

Good for you, John, glad to have that cleared up. I’ll do my fair share.

Goddamn, but Obama fucked up! Shit, he doesn’t know binary from bipolar, should not have listened to this trusted adviser, should have listened to the other trusted adviser! Boy, what an asshole, what a maroon, what a bassoon. Buffoon. Whatever.

Now, let’s get to work.

(I hope you can understand how your stance was open to misinterpretation, as giving aid and comfort to the Forces of Darkness. But that’s all cleared up now. And your “turkey” joke was a knee-slapper! Whooo, doggies, Dennis Miller better watch his back! )

344

But not that you are factually wrong about what you have so dismissively told us is fact. Got it. :rolleyes:

That’s the point. You haven’t. I was offering you some debate topics, in the hope that you’d clarify that you’re actually doing more than simple Obama-bashing here. You choose none of them. There aren’t many alternative interpretations available.

345

You do this a lot, I’ve noticed. Ask for a cite, get one upon request, and then provide a response that implies the other guy was reluctant to support his position or drug his feet in providing a cite. “That wasn’t so hard, now was it?” Um, no, it wasn’t.

What should be done? Seriously, there’s nothing else to be done except what I presume they’re doing: finally getting competent people in to fix the horrendous mess they created.

346

Yes, Elvis. I’m engaging in simple Obama bashing. I hate the guy, mainly because he’s black, but also because he’s a muslim.

347

Rest assured, I will give your criticism of my style and approach all the consideration it is due.

You give the impression of one who is in the “tear it up, and burn it down” caucus. Glad to hear that isn’t so. The rest is largely irrelevant, our people get the help they need, how it happened is trivia.

348

Rest assured, my consideration of your responses will be equally assiduous.

I am indeed in the camp of those who believe this is an awful piece of legislation that will likely have multiple terrible unintended consequences. That said, the president is constitutionally obligated to install duly ratified law. I obstinately insist that he ought to do so competently. If he’s going to fulfill his constitutional duties, I’d rather he did it in a manner that doesn’t lead to cancer patients (those who now have cancelled individual insurance) being uninsured come January, chaos in the insurance markets by granting a “do-over” six weeks before 3 years of planning by the insurers was to go into effect, financial markets reacting to all the uncertainty, etc.

If he can’t fix this–and I would bet it ultimately gets fixed–ACA will die a quick death as Dems scramble from it in a political panic. If that occurs, I won’t mourn that outcome. But in the meantime, the president ought to try, as a refreshing departure from the previous ACA strategy, managing this as if his head weren’t up his ass.

349

Obama is a policy wonk, not a computer geek. It boils down to he picked the wrong adviser to listen to. Big hairy ass deal. Long as our people get the help they need, I could care less what you think about him, got a nickel says he feels pretty much the same.

As for the politics, well, if this thing is fixable at all, a metric buttload of people are going to be helped. Millions. Republicans have pissed off latinos, blacks, women, the poor. Add to that however many millions who aren’t going to vote for anybody who says they will take this away.

Maybe that spells doom for the Dems but I wouldn’t bet on it.

350

Yeah, he probably doesn’t care what Stratocaster thinks of him. It’s the other 10M or so who approved of him 2 months ago but who don’t now that he’s worried about. You can point in the other direction and say “nothing to see here folks”, but that doesn’t seem to be very persuasive to a lot of folks.

351

He does too care what I think about him. Remember, I’m one of the cool kids.

352

Yeah, right, you sit with AV Club at lunch. Who you kidding?

353

Not running, John. Whoever else it may be, you can bet they’d have his blessing if they need to make some space between them. The Pubbies are pretty much stuck with running against Obamacare, she will have the option of saying “Yeah, needs some work, we can get all bi-partisan about it just as soon as I pick out new drapes for the Oval Office.” And let the Pubbies try to convince people who are afraid of losing what they never had before to trust them.

Now, it should be noted that a lot of the people who would benefit most are people inclined to vote Dem anyway. But the prospect of the Forces of Darkness yanking their security away? Kind of a “get out the vote” motivator, wouldn’t you think?

Course, you may have a point, Obama had to rustle up a peace scare to distract attention, so maybe he is worried…

354

All the Dems in the House and 1/3 of the Senate are running. He needs them if he’s going to get anything done in his 2nd term. The Dems went from 8 pts up to 3 pts down in the last 2 months. Mostly because of Obamacare. He’s lucky it’s still early, and the Pubs have plenty of time to fuck up their own situation. But it’s better to be up than down.

355

Fascinating read in the NYT.

Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Site, and Obama

356

And this just in, there are serious problems with the web site.

357

Good article. Thanks for posting that. It really gives a better picture of how the response to the website failures was handled by the White House and the engineers. I did think it was pretty funny that the “Tech Surge” was just getting 6 more guys to help out.

It sounds like the front-end user experience is much better and is the primary focus that will be fixed first. What will be important in the months to come is whether the back end data and enrollment information has maintained integrity and the information the insurers receive from the website enrollments is correct. If individuals get signed up with different plans than they tried to choose on the website, or their subsidy is not the same as the website stated, it is going to be a nightmare for everybody to try to sort out. Hopefully, by the close of enrollments in March, the amount of signups will be close to the OMB’s projections of 7 million total and 2.7 million of those being under the age of 34 as well since if the total numbers or the amount of young people signed up are significantly less than those figures, it will likely lead to increased insurance costs for the following year.

358

Yep, that’s the key. The web site itself is just a tool, but the tool has to be there in order to get the enrollment needed to fund this thing. If the funding doesn’t work out, that’s a structural problem for the policy, and not something a “tech surge” can fix.

359

Those kinds of problems can, and will, be blamed on the insurance companies.

The user interface is the one part undeniably tied to the administration.

360

After reading that article, I would be even more worried about healthcare.gov. It appears that they have focused on fixing the front end scalability, while ignoring the back-end problems. That again appears to be a political decision, not one based on engineering concerns. As usual.

This is a really bad idea. The slow performance of the front end has actually been a godsend, because the back end has been generating errors that the insurance companies have been forced to deal with manually. They can do that when only hundreds of people here and there are registering. But if they throttle up the front end without fixing the back end, there’s going to be hundreds of thousands of incorrect registrations - all of which are going to have to be corrected by someone by contacting the insuree and getting the proper info. That can be done by the hundreds or thousands, but not by the hundreds of thousands.

Also, anyone with experience with systems like this will tell you that the most devilish gremlins lurk in the back end, and the worst of those are the ones that appear under load. That’s when you start getting into thread contention problems, race hazards, failed transactions, memory leak failures, and that sort of thing. These are the problems that happen sporadically and mysteriously - the system is working perfectly, then suddenly it crashes and you have no idea why. If you take the system down for testing, the problem goes away. Bring it back, and it fails randomly again.

The last thing you want to do is fix bugs like that in a live system, because the way you need to attack them is often to set up runs of dummy data at high load, and hit the servers in predictable ways so you can retrace exactly what happened. But these guys decided to try to fix the system while leaving it running - another decision forced by politics and not engineering. And because the front end problems have throttled the entire system, they haven’t even tested the back-end code under a proper load.

In the real world outside of government, you would typically build the back end completely separately from the front end, and build test frameworks that could simulate any kind of load you needed so you can test the back end to failure. You need to build the system in debug mode so you have documented stack traces, breakpoints on memory or events, source debugging, and can trap more exceptions and report them. But you don’t run debug code on a production server. For one thing, it creates security leaks. It’s also slower and can mask other problems. So these guys are either going to be trying to debug the back end without access to proper debugging tools, or they’re going to be using debug builds on a production server.

This thing is a clown show from top to bottom. I’ll bet when the engineers were told that they would not be allowed to take the system down to do proper fixes they walked out of that meeting shaking in anger - or crying.