Canadian company built http://t.co/SrMHZ3TbML http://t.co/48vuyQ7liH No doubt working with Canadian sleeper agent Ted Cruz 2 sabotage system
— billmon (@billmon1) October 10, 2013
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Actually, it’s a pretty informative WaPo article, allowing for Tim Lee’s ingrained pessimism:
… The primary Obamacare exchange contract went to the CGI Group, a Canadian consulting company that has also played a role in administering Canada’s single-payer health care system. CGI has been awarded at least $88 million by CMS to build the federal exchange and provide related technical support.
CMS provided another $55 million to Quality Software Services, a Maryland-based health care IT company, to build the data hub, software that serves as an intermediary between all those federal agencies and the Obamacare exchanges.
Several other federal contractors have also been awarded multi-million dollar contracts to assist with various aspects of building and operating the exchanges. A June report by the Government Accountability Office found that CMS had already committed to spend $394 million on the system…
Broadly speaking, the sites have suffered from two types of problems. In the first few days, the system was simply overwhelmed with traffic. Last week was probably one of the highest-traffic weeks the site will ever experience, and websites often discover unexpected problems during their first big traffic spikes. Early users of Twitter remember the “fail whales” that popped up regularly on the site as Twitter struggled to accommodate surging demand.
That initial traffic rush is now over and the Obama administration says it’s buying more servers to cope with future traffic spikes. So in the long run, dealing with traffic volumes shouldn’t be a serious problem…
The more fundamental problem is that the system is operating on a tight deadline and a limited budget—at least by the standards of federal agencies. Three years and hundreds of millions of dollars might seem generous, but federal agencies have wasted a lot more money with a lot less to show for it in the past…
Yatsuno
I should have known Harper would try to fuck this up for us. He can’t kill single-payer in Canada, but by gum he can keep it from spreading to the US!
billgerat
Time’s have changed
Our kids are getting worse
They won’t obey their parents
They just want to fart and curse
Should we blame the government?
Or blame society?
Or should we blame the images on TV?
No, blame Canada, blame Canada
With all their beady little eyes
And flappin’ heads so full of lies
Blame Canada, blame Canada
We need to form a full assault
It’s Canada’s fault
Don’t blame me for my son Stan
He saw the darn cartoon
And now he’s off to join the Klan
And my boy Eric once
Had my picture on his shelf
But now when I see him he tells me to fuck myself
Well, blame Canada, blame Canada
It seems that everything’s gone wrong
Since Canada came along
Blame Canada, blame Canada
There not even a real country anyway
My son could’ve been a doctor or a lawyer it’s true
Instead he burned up like a piggy on a barbecue
Should we blame the matches?
Should we blame the fire?
Or the doctors who allowed him to expire?
Heck no
Blame Canada, blame Canada
With all their hockey hubbabaloo
And that bitch Anne Murray too
Blame Canada, shame on Canada
The smut we must stop, the trash we must smash
Laughter and fun must all be undone
We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before someone thinks of blaming us
The Tragically Flip
I’d say it sounds like having to access so many databases, many of them state level is the most likely culprit.
Makes sense to me – the Federal exchange is largely serving right wing states that are not willing participants in this. Will their legislatures fund IT capacity increases or software upgrades to their databases to handle the load? Nope.
I bet the tangle of different connectors to the myriad of database systems is a nightmare.
David M
There’s a couple reasons for optimism. From what I understand, several state exchanges are almost completely functional. It also appears those state exchanges use a different front end systems than healthcare.gov, but have to use the same backend systems to verify the information along the way.
Meaning if the Washington State exchange can interact with all the various backend systems and get people signed up, then the federal exchange should be able to as well (after some fixes).
Obviously I’ve made it sound easy, and they do have a timeline, but the system is probably almost there.
Another Holocene Human
Shopping with login-only instead of letting you just estimate your subsidy to browse before you buy is a really stupid mistake although I could see how butt-covering bureaucrats might come to the conclusion that it’s a wonderful idea.
Otherwise, as the OP said, they did pretty well for a government IT contract. I … have some personal knowledge of this from the 1990s. It was … bad. Real bad.
I’m talking feds, here. From what I’ve seen in lower levels of government IT seems to have finally transitioned from utter highway robbery to still some bad vendors but much higher professionalism and efficiency within the walls, also a lot of bad stuff happening within academic IT depts, trying to wring out the same ‘efficiency’ but forgetting what all those different depts do (cause the top dogs don’t actually, in fact, care). I have to say it’s much less grim out there for local govs than it was in the 1990s. I dunno what it’s like from an employee’s point of view but I darn well hope those shitweasels can’t avoid doing work all day and still get paid ridiculous “professional” wages and I hope these days they’re firing or just not hiring people who try to fake some fake ass credentials to get in the door. But I wouldn’t know, honestly.
Funny how all the white males I ever knew with some computer skills got high-paying low demand IT jobs while the non white males (either female or black or both) were stuck working low wage cable call center bullshit or underpaid thankless consulting gigs or just got looked over repeatedly while they struggled in an unrelated field … just kinda funny … ya know.
NotMax
Blame would be appropriate if it were unfixable. As many, many others have rightfully stated, rollout glitches are the norm, in this case magnified by both the sheer volume of users and the magnifying lens of the media, that the number of states refusing to set up exchanges and punting it back to the feds exceeded predictions, etc.
Mentioned it previously, but a look back at the rollout of so-called Romneycare was hardly a smooth road.
The proof will be in the numbers enrolled by the end period come March 31, not in the number of visitors.
Another Holocene Human
@The Tragically Flip: Yeah, it seems like Florida implemented some actually pretty good healthcare regulation lite stuff to supposedly aid small businesses but threw a hissy fit over PPACA from the dreaded Federales, it’s not about the substance, it’s about who’s doing it.
I weep for humanity; coworker of mine was bitching about all the checks being stopped because of government shutdown (his daughter and wife are disabled) and the risk of default but then turned around and said the GOP had a point about ACA because it gives “Obama all the power” and will “attack your 2nd amendment rights”. I asked him to explain but he changed the subject.
NotMax
Y’know, haven’t really seen anything about how ACA affects and is being implemented in territories and commonwealths such as Guam and American Samoa, for example.
{Yes, could look it up, but perhaps someone here has info more readily available.)
mdblanche
@billgerat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOR38552MJA
Villago Delenda Est
The Obamacare rollout is a failure in the same sense that IOS rollouts are failures, and WoW expansions are failures.
Interestingly, its not a failure in the sense that Rmoney’s ORCA was a failure. A spectacular one.
Joseph Nobles
In hindsight, it would have been nice to have let people sign up for accounts before October 1. That could have started on July 1. Well, make it August 1 and let the sign up glitches be part of the August silly season. Then demand could have been more accurately judged and the plans released on October 1.
Hindsight is always infallible, though.
amk
@Villago Delenda Est: Yup, lot of undue bellyaching from the bj fp’ers. Get over it.
Randy P
I have a question about people’s experience with healthcare.gov (which I have to use because I live in PA under friggin Corbett). I goofed, accidentally entered my wife twice. Can’t go forward (error message), can’t go back (no back button), can’t delete the application and start over.
So I called the hotline and they told me there’s an edit button to go back and fix info. Aha, I said, maybe it just doesn’t like Firefox. Try Explorer, he said. So I did. And Safari. Still no luck.
Did you have the ability to go backward in the application process? In what software environment?
Randy P
@Randy P: I’m on a Mac Air. Firefox and Safari are running on OS/X. Explorer is on Windows 7 on a PC emulator called Parallels on the Mac. If that’s acting different than native PC code it would be the first time.
raven
@Randy P: chrome?
nemesis
Last night I made the critical error of clicking through a few nightly news channels. One after the other were highlighting guess what? All the errors and problems with on-line Obamacare. Its as if the media collectively decided they had been too tough on the anti-Obamacare crowd and was throwing them a bone. Andrea Mitchell specifically was rancid, saying some private comany “bailed out” the WH’s Obamacare effort. CNN has obviously paid shills taking big dumps on Obamacare. Ugh.
C.V. Danes
There’s always going to be startup issues with a site this large. By my experience with government projects, this one was phenomenally successful.
Anybodybuther2016
@amk: The useless leftist are doing what they always do, consigning the latest bullshit coming out of the reich wing echo chamber. Instead of the left throwing the fucking lie that everybody hates obamacare in the face of the scum on the right and the rats in the media by the fact that so many people wanted obamacare that they crashed the server, we get this whining from them about a fucking website that people still have six fucking months to go to and sign up. Jackasses.
JohnK
@Randy P: I had to go back half a dozen times and edit my information on the Washington State site. The next and back buttons where on the bottom of the page. On my 54-inch display, they can disappear if the zoom level is too high. I use Chrome and all of the questions were fully editable.
dopey-o
@Another Holocene Human:
I wondered about all the complications from being required to set up and account first. IMHO, allowing browsers to specify county and income range could have given them a ballpark estimate of the costs (Platinum $500-$700 / month, Gold $400 – $550 / month …..). I wonder if a large proportion of the users in the first week wanted one and only one answer: How much is this going to cost me?
The fact is, conflating massive public curiousity with complex computing was a recipe for disaster. We can try to wave our hands and say it’s because the ACA is so popular that it crashed! But the truth is, someone up the food chain wanted all the metrics on enrollment from Day 1, and that massively complicated the task. Postponing the database connections would have given the developers a huge Clue-by-Four ¬ ® that public interest was orders of magnitude greater than anticipated.
I saw where Einstein was talking on the Internets yesterday and said “Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” WTF did he know anyway?
Has Soonergrunt weighed in on this?
LAC
@Anybodybuther2016: I am co-signing on this. There are a number of stories out there about folks finding out about what they are saving. Instead in the followup of mistermix’s usual glass is half empty posts, we get this: “I just planted my fall crops and gosh let me link to a negative article about the start up of the ACA. Single payer and sparkle pony – pout…”
Tmiller
@Anybodybuther2016: I agree. It’s all about framing. The media doesn’t notice or report that the ACA is overwhelmingly popular (Hint: all those peeps aren’t showing up for free ice cream), as illustrated by the VOLUME OF TRAFFIC on the website. Yeah. Thanks librl media. Heck of a job! Ass Hats for everyone!!!!