And I’m not going near it until the last minute, because I suspect it’s going to fuck up all the information I input. I’d advise you to do the same. Here’s Riverdaughter with her own observations:

Um, money is not the problem.  After all, the social security system, IRS and Medicare don’t have these problems.  Those of us who have seen modern IT initiatives at work in these modern times have a completely different take on this.  It’s a tale about private companies seeking big contracts, using a lot of money to wine and dine the purchasing managers, executives with big bonuses and lots and lots of subcontractors here and in India that have to do the grunt work.  As I wrote earlier this year when the first signs of unreadiness were posted:

The official line is that employers and their reporting systems are not ready yet.  Also not surprised.  The idiots in charge hired Accenture to run their technology.  The hiring managers should have come to former Pharma people for a performance evaluation of Accenture first but you know, workers are never asked to critique decisions like whether hiring Accenture to design information systems was a good idea.

Here’s how it works.  Accenture breezes into a company with their sharp suits and flashy presentations and completely bamboozles the management with promises of slick vaporware. Then they subcontract out to a couple of companies, who subcontract to India.  The Indian subcontractors do the best they can with limited information and the template code into which every business model must fit.  That gets passed back to the poor guy stateside who has to debug and rewrite everything.  The final result is, well, never final.  I’ve never known an Accenture job that actually completed on time, under budget and with all the bells and whistles that were initially promised.  The Pharma landscape is littered with systems that don’t work very well but have pushed aside the in-house programs they outbid to replace.  Meanwhile, the Accenture guys just move to another company.  Commence the parties and golf outings!

And why should we be surprised?  This health care policy was all about campaigning and the worst kind of politics.  It was not about well crafted public policy. It was about letting the private sector make a profit off of healthcare for the uninsured and those of us already paying astronomical rates for individual policies.  In fact, almost from the start, the Obama administration made it perfectly clear that the dirty f^&*ing hippies could be safely ignored and no one had to pay attention to public options or single payer.  They were not invited to the meetings where “everything is on the table” because the Obama crew and their law and biz school pedigrees already knew what was best for Obama.  Best for us?  What did that matter? Highjacking those Democratic activists who thought so highly of their intellectual capabilities was incredibly easy and after that, they didn’t need to answer to anyone.

Vaporware isn’t specific to Accenture, as anyone who’s worked in IT can tell you. But this description is how it usually goes. (I used to have to deal with the customers who were furious over their shitty systems.)

And I’m still not convinced Obama could have sold Medicare for all in this political cesspool. What I do know is that he didn’t even try. Integrating everyone into the Medicare system would have been a lot easier (after all, how do you attack such a popular program?), and would have given Republican many fewer moving targets.

All those people who mansplained to me why it was important to choose Obama because of the “executive ability” he displayed running his campaign (you know, the one David Plouffe and Axelrod actually ran?) can step up now and explain to me how Mr. Executive Ability bungled this one. They would have been better off turning it over to telemarketers.