Obamacare website overhaul or?

[Trajan]

There is issues with the federal exchange(s), we know this, this is not a thread intended to explain the whys or where fores or to trash it, just thought I would share some examples I found ( and this is far from the only ones) where in the government, even with more $$ and infinitely more time ( with a longer implementation time-line) , in a closed environment, tries to manage the creation or overhaul of systems that, well, encompass so much on so many different fronts.

I’ll let the source spell it out, there are 2 examples...the Air Force failure is particularly troublesome as a I think a case can be made they are the most quantitatively .....sophisticated(?) branch managing more complicated systems in number etc....


Is this were we are heading? Time will tell…




The Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System was an enterprise program of the Business Transformation Agency's Defense Business Systems Acquisition Executive, within the United States Department of Defense (DoD). As the largest enterprise resource planning program ever implemented for human resources, DIMHRS (pronounced dime-ers) was to subsume or replace over 90 legacy systems. The first phase of DIMHRS was expected to roll out first to the U.S. Army in 2009 and bring all payroll and personnel functions for the Army into one integrated web-based system. The U.S. Air Force, United States Navy and the Marines were expected to roll out in that order after the Army had implemented it. After numerous delays, technical problems, and other issues, in February 2010, the DoD cancelled the program, after 10 years and $850 million.

Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and..

Billion-Dollar Flop: Air Force Stumbles on Software Plan
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: December 8, 2012

IN policy circles, problems that are mind-bogglingly difficult or impossible to solve, like global warming, are formally termed “wicked.”

For the United States Air Force, installing a new software system has certainly proved to be a wicked problem. Last month, it canceled a six-year-old modernization effort that had eaten up more than $1 billion. When the Air Force realized that it would cost another $1 billion just to achieve one-quarter of the capabilities originally planned — and that even then the system would not be fully ready before 2020 — it decided to decamp.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/t...ver-software-modernization-project.html?_r=1&

 

[HenryBHough]

Bad mistake outsourcing the coding to Canada.

Everybody KNOWS that there is better software available for much less cost in India.

Even Kenya is developing some damn good coders. Possibly because they export their worst?

 

[Rozman]

According to the Obama regime 48 million Americans were without insurance.
Many disagreed with that figure...
Anyway let's say that number is true...
They should have been prepared for a lot of traffic to the website...

Their argument for it crashing is that so many people tried to access it....

HUH!

They say there were millions out there that needed to access it.
They had years to get it ready.
And it crashed because so many went to it....

And the left says we should put all our faith in big government for our existence.

 

[Trajan]

an article that appears to encompass the whole enchilada...to wit, starting again or......



Obamacare Needs a Drop-Dead Date
By Megan McArdle Oct 14, 2013 1:53 PM PT

snip-

-- The administration delayed writing major rules until after the 2012 election, because it didn’t want to give Republicans any ammunition for their campaign. (This actually was noted at the time: http://www.nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/obama-administration-sits-on-key-regulations-20121101 “When it comes to health care, delaying regulations could help the president politically by avoiding discussion of the controversial health reform law. But that makes life difficult for states and industries that need to prepare for the coming changes,” wrote the National Journal. But most of us didn’t understand just how badly this was affecting implementation.)

-- Despite evidence to the contrary, the administration kept insisting that everything was absolutely on track to launch Oct. 1.

-- The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services inexplicably decided to take on the role of central project manager itself, assuming responsibility for integrating all the various software pieces they’d subcontracted, rather than assigning that role to a lead contractor. CMS is not known to maintain a pool of crack programming talent with extensive project management experience that can be deployed to this sort of task.

-- Henry Chao, the Health and Human Services Department's digital architect of the insurance marketplace, seems to have been sounding the alarm bells internally. (He certainly was externally; he famously told a group of insurers in March that “I’m pretty nervous -- I don’t know about you. … Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.&#8221 Chao was worried that the systems wouldn’t work, a concern to which higher-ups apparently responded by basically telling him in effect that, according to the Times piece, “failure was not an option.”

snip-

If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare -- and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market. The reason that the exchanges were so important was that they were needed to attract young, healthy people into the insurance system. The worry was that if insurance is hard to buy -- if you have to do your own comparison shopping and then call the insurance company, and fax in some paperwork and two years of tax returns -- that the young and the healthy simply won’t do it. Sick people and old people who were getting huge subsidies -- and maybe the ability to buy insurance on the private market for the first time in a long while -- would overcome any obstacles, because if you’re spending $15,000 a year on health care, it’s worth a lot of your time to make sure that you have insurance. But if your biggest annual health-care expense is contact lens solution, you may just decide to skip it and pay the fine.

The administration estimates that it needs 2.7 million young healthy people on the exchange, out of the 7 million total expected to apply in the first year. If the pool is too skewed -- if it’s mostly old and sick people on the exchanges -- then insurers will lose money, and next year, they’ll sharply increase premiums. The healthiest people will drop out, because insurance is no longer such a good deal for them. Rinse and repeat and you have effectively destroyed the market for individual insurance policies. It’s called the “death spiral,” and the exchanges, like the mandate, were designed to keep it from happening.

more at-

Obamacare Needs a Drop-Dead Date - Bloomberg